Kartra

Kartra is an all-in-one online marketing platform to sell both digital and physical products.

The platform is popular among advanced course creators but also be a good fit for other types of online businesses.

Kartra has thousands of active users around the world and a wide community of expert and service providers.

It's part of the Genesis Digital group that is behind other software like EverWebinar and WebinarJam.

The platform has been featured on NBC, ABC, Inc 5000, CBS and Fox.

The better question is: what can you not do with Kartra?

As an all-in-one platform, Kartra is really standing with its comprehensive list of features to truly help users have everything they need in one place.

Hold on to your hats before reading the list of features the platform offers:

And that's just the summary of features!

It's unlikely that you'll lack functionalities for whatever you want to do with your online courses or membership!

That's why we've ranked Kartra #1 for Advanced course creators.

Ok, let's zoom in on a few key points and features:

Page Builder

The page builder is loaded with a lot of templates and preset.

These are categorized depending on what kind of pages you're wanting to build and the templates are optimized accordingluy:

You definitely won't have to start a page of any kind from scratch again! It is all very well designed and conversion-optimized.

Once within the page builder itself, you'll have access to a range of preset sections of any kind.

Again, it’s super useful to get a page up and running in no time, without spending hours wondering what design to use or needing to buy third-party templates.

Plus, the block building inside each section (you know: text, image, video, button, form) has everything you need.

Although I wouldn't call the page builder the most advanced out there, it's a nice balance between customization and not wasting too much time toying with endless settings!

Finally, you can save sections as favorites and use them again for another page, which is a course creator’s dream.

Funnel building 

In Kartra, you can have advanced upsells and downsells capabilities as well as A/B testing, which will make happy all the hardcore marketers and data junkies.

The way this is created is a thorough product setup where you'll choose anything from what cart type you want (popup, embed, self-hosted).

Once you've created your main product, you can then add as many upsell and downsell as you want, which will appear right after the checkout of the main product.

This is a great way to improve your average basket value!

Setting up a product in Kartra also means having great flexibility on how you're going to deliver that product. It can be a course, a physical product, or a downloadable.

This is why Kartra is a favorite for course creators but also any kind of online business.

Overall, the product set up in Kartra is possibly the most thorough and flexible I've seen of any platform.

Course hosting

If you are a course creator and would like to host your program directly on the platform, Kartra has a course builder.

Video hosting is supported, depending on which plan you're on.

However there is no back-end management of your curriculum...

You'll design everything through the front-end with the drag & drop builder:

There's little you can do to change the layout itself, and you can only rearrange the different blocks you want.

That is a big drawback of Kartra compared to Kajabi or other course hosting platforms that allow for better design.

That can be a deal-breaker for some course creators. It also explains why some creators couple Kartra with other tools, yet this defeats the purpose of having an all-in-one.

That being said, and as video is a big part of most online course content, Kartra has one other trick up their sleeves.

The Kartra Video tool will enable you to better control and monitor how your video looks and how people watch it.

On top of all of these design controls and the ability to watermark your videos (to unauthorised used), you can also see progress data.

This enables you among other things to an an optin in the middle of your video and enforce people to leave their info to keep watching.

You can also tag people based on how much of the video they've watched!

It's not hard to piece this feature together with other things Kartra offers and build evergreen/automation webinar funnel for example.

Emails & Automations:

To say you have a lot of capabilities with the automation in Kartra would be a huge understatement.

You can do everything from the basics of lists, tagging, sequence to the more advanced features like page view, video played, video complete, course progress, and affiliate behaviours. 

You can also design your emails using a drag and drop block builder:

But, something that particularly stands out is the visual sequence builder, which you would normally only expect from a big email marketing tool like ActiveCampaign, or Mailerlite.

In short, Kartra is comparable to full-blown email software like ConverKit or Active Campaign.

CRM & Leads system

On top of that, Kartra has a full-fledged CRM system, which almost no other platform like it has.

You can create a native Helpdesk where you'll be able to provide extensive support, including a ticket system, live chat, and canned responses. 

On the CRM/marketing side, you can also assign points to leads based on certain actions. This means that you can rank leads on the criteria of your choice, like a hot buyer, content engager, or active community member.

The possibilities are endless!

So, if you're looking to go granular with your customer experience and marketing, then you'll be pleased with Kartra.

Calendar

The last feature to highlight is the native calendar you can build in Kartra, which means you can use just this platform regardless of your digital business.

With different modes built-in, you'll find the kind of regular or punctual events, classes, or calls you want to schedule.

The built-in calendar is a big upside for Kartra as most online courses and membership owners will use an external calendar such as Calendly or Acuity that you wouldn’t need with Kartra.

Let's end by mentioning the only feature you won't find on Kartra, a Blog. You can create individual pages and insert blog content there, but it won't be the content management system you are used to in WordPress or Kajabi, with all the SEO power that entails.

User experience may be the only weakness of Kartra.

I mean, let's be fair. Kartra has so many awesome features and advanced capabilities, which will make a lot of people happy.

But, it also doesn’t appeal to a customer base that just wants simplicity.

That is fine, but it does take quite a while for someone to wrap their head around all the options and things you can do with the platform.

The backend is somewhat clustered, which may deter users from spending time there. 

Because of all its settings and capabilities, it takes a while to set up almost anything Kartra.

To be fair, Kartra has made huge progress and has a very intuitive setup flow for all the tools it offers.

On the end-user side, you have quite a lot of capabilities to influence the user journey.

The only thing that won't be impressive is perhaps the actual inside-the-course layout and delivery.

Kartra offers 4 pricing plans and a $1 for 30 days trial period.

The good news is that most features the platform offers are available on the Starter plan:

The main thing that would make you move away from the Starter plan would be the limit of Emails and Leads.

The Silver plan will give you everything unlimited, apart from the Leads number, but most online businesses won't need much more than that.

You can then upgrade based on your business size from there.

With such an advanced tool, good support is critical.

Kartra does have a large, intuitive set of tutorials that allow you to answer almost any questions you may have in Kartranaut.

But you also have access to a ticketing system or live support to help you solve problems quickly.

You also have access to a Facebook community!

Kartra has united a large community (over 20k+ people) of users and fellow online business owners.

The group is very active and well-moderated.

Finally, Kartra hosts two weekly Q&A live sessions where you can get any questions about the platform, its best practices, or marketing answered!