Kartra Review

Detailed Reviews

What are some of the goals that businesses have these days? Most of the time, it is to make more sales and generate more revenue.

However, it is usually the end goal, and there are a lot of supposedly auxiliary goals that one needs to achieve before being able to reach the final objective of making more money.

It can be to gather the right leads, to provide better customer support, to curate better user experience, to publish better quality of content on the web pages, and much more.

Your business might be trying to achieve excellence in one or multiple subjects listed above, and you might be on a lookout for a tool or software that can help you take care of it.

There are plenty of awesome tools in the market, and they excel in individual departments such as email automation, landing page building, help desk management, and so on. But everyone can't afford an array of specialized tools and this is why Kartra can be your one stop solution.

Pros

• One-stop solution for most of your campaign needs.
• Creates all kinds of pages for a website or a campaign.
• The email section comes with all kinds of automation and features.
• Helpdesk helps create a knowledge base and manage query tickets.
• Detailed analytics for all the tools on the platform.
• Provides split testing where necessary.

Cons

• Lacks professional email templates.

Introduction

Kartra is one of the very few tools that is trying to bridge the gap between the needs and availability of resources that businesses have. There are two immediate advantages of having a one-stop solution, such as Kartra working for your business.

The first one will be that you don’t need to go through the hassle of integrating all the different apps and tools that are often not so compatible. And the second advantage would be that you will find it easier to manage the different ends of the business since everything runs down to the same database.

But it’s one thing to propose a solution such as this one, and an entirely different thing to come up with a solution that stands true to all of the promises. This whole review is going to be about finding if the Kartra is delivering according to its claims.

We will go through all the suites within the platform and analyze their effectiveness and ease of use. It will be interesting to see if Kartra is good enough to replace the table-toppers in the respective niches. Or if it will be a good bargain to use it since money is always a big influencer of all the decisions made by businesses.

By the end of this review, you will have a much better idea of the capabilities of Kartra, and it will help you make a better decision as to if you should invest in this set of tools or not.

Pages

So there is a lot to discuss about Kartra, but we don’t want to bore you out only with the information of all the tools that Kartra has. We are going to go through a select few of them, the ones which are usually desirable by businesses. A thorough analysis of these tools will give you a better idea of the state of the rest of the things on the platform.

A web page is usually the first point of interaction between the business and the potential customer. It can be a landing page, products page, a blog page, or even the home page of the business website.

Since almost all the pages help in getting more business in one way or another, it is imperative that you publish the best pages possible. That means pages that are not just aesthetically pleasing but come with all the necessary functionalities, as well.

All kinds of pages

Kartra helps the user design and publish all kinds of pages. You can use it to create landing pages, squeeze pages, product pages, online forms, coming soon pages, and many more other kinds.

The page options seem enough to take care of everything that a website can possibly have. Let us have a quick run down through the process of page building on this platform.

They will provide you with all the different categories of pages, and you will find plenty of template options for each category on selecting them. If you like having a lot of options at your disposal, then Kartra won’t disappoint you.

If you like designing pages from scratch, then there is also an option for a blank canvas.

The page builder

Once you choose the appropriate category and template for the page, you will reach the builder. The builder is more like what we are used to seeing on website builders, with a few more options than the usual.

It is a drag-and-drop builder with tons of options for the elements that you can add on the web page. Once again, you will find categories of all the different elements, and you will have more options within a category after selecting it.

The same goes for content blocks. You get multiple options under features, call to action, opt-in forms, etc. We don’t think a person can ever feel the dearth of options on such a builder.

There are two modes of editing a page. The one is columns mode, and the other is components mode. Under the columns mode, the entire section gets highlighted over it, while you can select individual components working under the component mode.

Both modes can prove to be useful under different circumstances and offer a great deal of flexibility during editing.

Kartra also allows you to enable pops and notification bars on pages. It is needless to mention how these features can help you retain more visitors, gather more leads, and generate more revenue.

In the case of pop-ups, you can choose between landing pop-ups and exit pop-ups, depending on what the situation demands.

You can enable the helpdesk icons on the page, insert codes, insert tracking code, manage SEO settings, add redirects, and do much more on the pages you create. It seems that Kartra paid a great deal of attention to the details, and they don’t seem to have missed out on much.

We know that people are now viewing websites on mobile browsers more than the desktop, and you can’t ignore the kind of traffic coming from mobile browsers.

All the pages you create on Kartra are responsive. They provide the webpage previews in desktop, mobile, and tablet modes. It helps you make sure that all the elements of your pages are working well for all kinds of browsers.

Split testing

It is difficult to understand what users like. Preferences can vary widely from one person to another, and it is extremely difficult to get an idea of what the majority of people like.

Going by the hunch or intuition won’t be a great idea for such a case, and you would want something more reliable. Split testing has proven to be a concrete method of determining what the visitors prefer.

Split testing is often employed to find the best kind of email message, landing page, pop-up, etc. With Kartra, you can apply split testing for the web pages.

They allow you to test up to four variations of a page. You can introduce as many changes as you want in the variants, and you are also free to decide what will be the visibility percentage for each of the pages.

The thing to keep in mind here is that the split testing on Kartra translates into more than just split testing of pages. It can be for pop-ups, forms, and other elements that usually go on a webpage.

It is up to you how you make the most of the possibilities that come along with split testing on this platform.

Communications

Nurturing a relationship with customers and prospects is one of the most important tasks businesses need to take care of these days. It is critical that customers stay with them for longer, and newer prospects do not hesitate much to connect with the business.

Kartra helps you with managing contacts as well as communicating with them. The communications section on the platform is divided into three sections- leads, communications, and analytics.

Contact management

Let us begin with the leads. You must keep all your contacts organized, so you don’t find it difficult to send the right messages to appropriate contacts.

There are two ways you can have lists on Kartra. One way is to import the contacts from some other platform, and the other one is by using an opt-in form, which is in sync with your list.

Kartra has a section dedicated to forms where you can create beautiful forms with all the right fields. As the visitors register themselves using these forms, your list will automatically get updated with the new information.

When you import a list, you need to make sure that you can justify how you got hold of those contacts. It is not only required under anti-spam laws that you have a legitimate source of emails, but it also affects the deliverability of emails during the campaign, as well.

You can insert appropriate tags for the contacts for better sorting. When it comes to identifying which of the contacts are bringing you more business, then Kartra’s customer scoring can turn out to be of great help.

Make sure that you take that into account while trying to reward the more loyal customers.

Communications

You can send out emails as well as SMS text messages from this platform. There are also options to set up automation based on how the user interacts with the communication.

Let us have a quick look at the email communication section. There are three ways for you to send out emails to the contacts and lists. The first one is to broadcast the message to several clients, and the second way is to set up a sequence of emails and send it to users.

The third way of sending emails is to use automation so that an email is sent automatically when the user undertakes a specific action.

To broadcast an email, all you need to do is to specify the contacts who will get the email, create the email, and set up any action based on triggers if you want.

Kartra won’t provide you with multiple email templates as it happens in the case of most email automation tools. They allow you to create a simple plain text email and this one area with a dire need for improvement. A simple plain text email isn’t sufficient anymore.

You get scheduling options for the email, as well. Kartra allows you to set up actions depending on triggers such as if the recipient opens the email and if the recipient clicks on the email or not.

You can add tags or move the customer from one list to another based on the actions.

The email sequence section is almost an advanced version of the broadcast section. Here, you can line up a series of emails and set up conditions and triggers at every stage to send an email.

The tool allows you to set up conditions to decide which email will go out to the recipient. An email sequence is great for campaigns, and it provides you a lot of freedom as to what you can do with it.

The email automation section lets you reach out to the customer based on the action he/she takes. The emails need not necessarily be a part of any campaign. It can be there to acknowledge an action of the visitor or to send out notifications when needed.

Campaigns and Funnels

Businesses launch campaigns for plenty of reasons. It can be to generate more leads, promote an event, make more sales, launch a product, and so on.

Funnels are used within campaigns to take prospects through a journey in which you try to motivate them to take action, which is beneficial for both parties. You usually keep losing prospects at every stage of the funnel since not everyone is going to think along the same lines as you.

A campaign or funnel can consist of a variety of elements. You might have to use landing pages and opt-in forms, or there might be a need to send out automated emails, or there is often a need to take them to the sales page and provide a bump offer during the checkout.

As you already know, Kartra comes with all-round capabilities, and it can help you curate any kind of campaign you want. You can take care of all the different elements of a campaign in respective sections and integrate them as needed.

The sequences section on the platform allows you to design the campaign with all the right kind of communication material. You can have automation enriched with logic to create the best possible journey for the user.

Creating a campaign from scratch is no easy task. You need to spend a lot of time mapping the strategy, and then creating individual elements of a campaign is a task in itself.

The marketplace on Kartra lets you use pre-built campaigns from a lot of other marketers on the platform. You will find campaigns for all the needs and goals. And there will be free as well as paid ones.

If you are good at designing campaigns or have created a campaign that had a tremendous amount of success, then you can list it out on the Kartra marketplace and possibly make some money out of it.

Creating a comprehensive campaign is one of the most obvious things that one should be doing on such a platform.

Helpdesks

One of the keys to a successful business is excellent customer support. It not only helps you retain the customers that you already have but also allows you to bring in more by educating and providing the prospects with the appropriate information.

There is a lot that goes into providing the right kind of customer support. Some users don’t prefer interacting with support representatives and like to use customer self-service portals such as knowledge base sections.

Then some customers have queries that need personal attention, and you need to have an efficient query ticketing system in place to take care of them.

Kartra allows users to host a Helpdesk either on Kartra or on the user’s domain. The Helpdesk contains a suite of avenues that can assist users.

Let’s go through the primary elements of Kartra’s Helpdesk solution.

Knowledge base

Knowledge base is inarguably the best customer self-service module on can have on their platform. It provides visitors with all the information and freedom they want.

There isn’t a specific guideline or template for how one should go about designing a knowledge base section, and there are multiple ways you can do it.

You can layout all the information about your products, services, policies, etc. in the wiki section provided by them. Usually, a wiki is supported by the community, but we guess there is no point in diving into the literal meaning of terms here.

Inside the wiki section, you can create all the categories and lists that you want. You get all the freedom as to how you want to distribute the information among different sections of the portal.

Our advice would be to make sure that you curate the content in such a way that it is easy enough for the visitor to locate the information or the appropriate article.

The platform gives you the freedom to publish the same support article under different categories if needed. You can branch out the content the way you want. It can go wide and discuss every single detail individually, or you can serve information for a cluster of topics in a single article.

The wiki section on Kartra is a great opportunity for all the users to publish comprehensive and helpful literature about their business so that customers and prospects don’t need to look too far for information they desire to get.

Query tickets

There will be times when the customer self service option won’t be enough. Customers can have issues that demand more attention to the issue. In such a case, you would want to provide customers with a way of being able to reach out to you.

Query ticket is among the most common ways that customers use to reach out to a business. It might not be the fastest or the most dynamic way of assisting, but it gets the job done most of the time.

Kartra lets you create departments while setting up the Helpdesk. You can create as many departments as you want to make it easier to handle tickets for your support team.

When a customer fills in a query ticket, she can choose one of the departments listed by you to provide a crude sense of the domain of the issue. Based on the department chosen by the customer, you can direct the ticket to the appropriate representative to take care of it.

There are often some questions that one needs to answer again and again while dealing with customers. The process of providing the same response again and again not only takes an awful lot of time but also drains out the support rep.

The platform allows you to have canned responses to deal with the issue. It will help your team members save both time and effort. You can also have the introductory texts set in place to greet the customers when they initiate a query.

Customer profiles 

Kartra deals with so many subjects of a business that it only makes sense to make use of it in everything you do on the platform.

It is highly likely that no other helpdesk platform would create as detailed and accurate customer profile as Kartra. It will be the case if you are relying on this platform for most of your operations.

Since everything is already integrated, you will have all the knowledge of how the customer has previously interacted with the systems, and what is the current state of things.

The comprehensive profile would help you better understand the issue, causing distress and provide better assistance to the customer.

You can also add tags to the customer profile from within the helpdesk module, and it will stay with the profile irrespective of how you move the contact from one list to another.

Analytics

When you are handling so many operations on a single platform, it is obvious that you will need numbers to help you out. It is only then you will be able to get a sense of how things are going across the suites.

Kartra provides the user with an analytics section in all the modules that need it. For the products section, you will get graphs for all the sales you made, the sales through affiliates, transactions, cancelations, etc.

You can vary the timeline to go deeper into the stats or to get a sense of trends for a longer duration.

In the communications section, you will get stats for the number of contacts you have, the number of subscriptions and unsubscriptions, revenue generated from the leads, and so on. In the case of the broadcast section, you will get to see the number of emails you have sent, the number of clicks, revenue generated, and so on.

Even the helpdesk section would provide you stats such as the time when customers are seeking the most help, the number of tickets in the pipeline, the number of tickets resolved, individual support rep stat.

All the analytics section on the platform present data in such a way that it is easy for the user to interpret it and understand the trends. You can vary the timelines on all of them and watch how individual elements, as well as groups of them, vary along with time.

There is also the option to switch between line and bar graphs.

Kartra’s analytics sections provide everything necessary to analyze progress and project trends. They also did a great job by providing an analytics section for individual suites, rather than trying to shove it all in a big jar of confusion.

Integrations

Even though Kartra is capable of handling so many things for you, there are still some needs that would make you look outside of it.

For instance, payment gateway integration is possibly the most important integration you would want to have on this platform. Apart from that, you would also want integrations such as Twilio to send out SMS text.

Well, those were the integrations that you need to be able to use Kartra efficiently. There are also some that are so good, or you are so used to them that you simply can’t function without them.

Kartra provides the user with integration options for both these kinds of apps. Even though they don’t have as many apps listed in the integration section we would’ve wanted, there is the hope that we’d be seeing more of them in the future.

The Zapier integration is the one we always try to find on every application since that alone can take care of thousands of integration. Thankfully, you will find the Zapier integration option on this platform.

Kartra takes care of most of the payment integrations, and then you will have to rely on the Zapier integration for most of the other ones.

Conclusion

It’s difficult to find tools that provide the user with as many options as Kartra does. There is almost nothing that you can’t do on this platform.

It starts with the product section that takes care of everything right from the product listing to discounts and coupons. They allow you to be as aggressive as you can be to sell the product.

You can design all kinds of web pages for all the needs that your business or campaign might have. And then you also get the option to have pop-ups and notification bars on them.

They allow you to set up email broadcasts, create email sequences, and also set up email automation. Apart from the dearth of great email templates, we found this section good-enough for most use cases.

Forms, memberships, calendars, and agency are some of the sections that make life easier on the platform. Their usefulness varies from one user to another.

Kartra did a good job with the help desk, as well. We weren’t expecting them to provide such a comprehensive solution to the customer support needs of the user. It comes with almost all the usual features of a customer support solution.

There is so much that you can do with Kartra that it is difficult to summarize it all in one small section.

The USP of the tool is that it ties together so many functionalities under an umbrella. Each suite is integrated with every other one on the platform soon as you start working. The additional input and integrability with other platforms gives you a better sense of control, and you are better able to manage things.

We should also not forget that just because a suite is available on Kartra, you won’t get all the capabilities that you find on the better apps in the same category. They still need to polish a lot of sections and make them better.

For someone who is looking to do it all on a single platform, Kartra is as good a deal as it can get. They avail a two-week trial at just $1, and the tool is worth trying once.