Kartra Review 2021 – 11 Things You Must Know Before Signing Up

So, you run or are thinking of running an online business and using this Kartra Review to decide if Kartra is the right tool for you.

Welcome to the club — and brace yourself: an estimated nine out of ten companies fail within their first five years.

To prevent that from happening, you need to make sure you learn as much as you can and have all the right tools before setting up your online presence.

Most people don’t know that Kartra consists of 11 different software tools.

In this Kartra review, I explain why you need ALL of them. (even if you don’t know it yet).

Lucky for you, I use Kartra myself will tell you everything you need to know about managing a successful online business, including why I decided to go with Kartra.

I believe it’s the ultimate all-in-one tool that will make sure you hit the ground running on launch day.

I even created a no-brainer offer to make sure you’ll use my affiliate link to sign-up with Kartra, but I don’t want to jump ahead before you read the full 2020 Kartra review.

Before we go any further, though, we need to get one thing straight. The entrepreneur’s learning curve is a steep one, and we pick up many of our most valuable lessons on the job.

Unfortunately, however, that means they come too late sometimes. With this in mind, allow me to spare you a lot of the pain that inevitably goes with the turf and let you in on a secret.

Why Most Online Businesses Fail

What do you think? Is it because the people in charge were not passionate enough?

Perhaps they didn’t put in the time and effort required?

Or they didn’t assemble the right team for the task?

While these are all legitimate reasons, when it comes to online businesses, it is two other factors that stand out:

Failing to Plan Ahead

First-time entrepreneurs often buy into the logical fallacy that by keeping it simple, they are playing it safe.

Why I agree to keep things simple you need to plan ahead.

You may be tempted to start with a rather small goal in mind, such as selling an ebook.

And, at first, that does sound irresistibly simple: all you need to do is pay for a website builder and launch a website.

However, once you do that, you will very quickly realize that in order to actually sell your product, you need to have a shopping cart for your marketing funnel. This will costs you dozens of hours learning how to set up WooCommerce with WordPress or about $500 – $1000 for software like ThriveCart or PayKickStart if you are not using GrooveSell.

But that’s not all.

To communicate with your clients, you’d also need to set up a professional email account.

And unless you want to type every single email manually, you need to pay for an email automation system like ActiveCampaign and a form builder like ThriveLeads.

Do you catch my drift already?

There are numerous aspects to building a successful online business.

And the most painful part is integrating all these services.

So unless you sit down and plan all of them ahead of launching your website, they are going to keep popping up one after the other — much like one of those Russian nesting dolls.

What would that leave you with?

Well, at best, you’d probably end up paying an extortionate amount of monthly subscription fees to various platforms or continue reading this Kartra review.

In the worst-case scenario, you might get too overwhelmed by it all, and your business could flop.

Why Non-Kartra Users Are Especially Likely to Fail

As I mentioned above, there is more to running an online business than just creating a website and establishing a web presence. What you need, above all else, is a well thought out marketing and sales strategy.

A basic website works much like a resume or CV: it contains a lot of important factual information about your products or services.

That is, of course, quite useful to your clients, and, depending on your business model, it might be all you need. A simple website could work quite well for a restaurant, for example. Customers might only want to check out the menu but would not be buying anything online.

However, you need a lot more for an online business. Your website should not only provide helpful information but also convert leads, make sales, and generate profit.

Kartra Review – Why It’s the Best Marketing Software to Build Your Online Business

How do you make all that happen with Kartra?

It’s rather simple, really: Each Kartra feature guides your customers step by step through your marketing funnel, from the moment they first engage with your squeeze page to finally placing an order for your digital product on your sales page and get access to the membership portal.

And that, is precisely what a great marketing campaign does.

Kartra’s marketing automation tools makes it easy for your website visitors a roadmap to follow, coupled with clear calls to action such as:

• Subscribing to a newsletter
• Opting in or out of specific services
• Returning to an abandoned cart
• Placing an order
• Checking out related products
• Giving customer feedback

In addition to guiding your customers, Kartra’s Done-For-You Marketing Campaigns can also help build your brand and grow your business.

What happens if you do not use a campaign like this and start from stratch?

Well, you risk having your potential customers getting lost and bored midway through paragraph ten of your “About Us” section.

Unfortunately, that’s the case with way too many websites out there. They cram up tons of information without any logical flow or interactive tools to guide the user. If you want to be successful, learn from those mistakes and don’t repeat them.

How Kartra Can Help Your Sales Skyrocket

So, now that you know what not to do, you may be wondering what it is that you should do instead.

Well, there are eleven tools that are a must for doing business online. Depending on your business model, you may not need all eleven, but I will still go over each of them in detail down below.

There are many platforms out there that provide these tools, usually in exchange for a monthly subscription fee.

What you don’t want to do, however, is get a mish-mash of services from a host of different providers. That’s not only costly but also an unnecessary hassle that you simply don’t need in your life.

Instead, I highly recommend that you sign up for Kartra. It’s an all-inclusive sales funnel builder and marketing platform that gives you immediate access to all eleven tools you need to set up and run a successful online business.

What I like most about Kartra is that these separate elements fit and complement each other to form a clear, logical structure, which essentially means that your entire marketing strategy is already mapped out for you.

Kartra Pricing

Best of all, the Kartra pricing plans among the most competitive on the market.

You can get a starter plan including all eleven tools and no “add-on” costs for as little as $79 per month!

And if you sign up with my affiliate link, you will also get my Kartra-Bonus and save even more money.

Overall, with the affordable Kartra cost for will save hundreds of dollars per month.

However, if you are still on the fence after all that, you should note that you don’t have to pay the full price right off the bat: sign up now, and you can give Kartra a try for just $1!

Even after your first payment Kartra also comes with a 30-day money-back guarantee.

Kartra Review: What Else Do You Get from Kartra?

If you sign up now, you will get a one-on-one consultation with one of Kartra’s experts. They will answer all your questions and guide you step by step to help you set up everything as quickly as possible.

But that’s not all. You also get to join two live Q&A calls with members of the Kartra team per week. They will address any concerns you might have and share tried-and-tested business tips.

Finally, your Kartra package also includes access to the Kartra Academy and Kartranaught training. These members-only platforms contain a wealth of information on how to run an entire business using Kartra, as well as master classes on topics ranging from boosting your conversions to shooting video sales letters and writing ad headlines.

Not convinced yet? In that case, go ahead and read through my comprehensive Kartra review below. I not only discuss all eleven Kartra tools in great detail but also explain why you need them — or most of them, anyway — if you want your business to thrive.

Review of Kartra’s 11 Indispensable Tools for Any Online Business

1.   Kartra Review – The Page Builder

While I did go on and on about how you need a lot more than a mere website, that doesn’t mean that you can go by without one. What’s more, it has to be beautiful as well as designed and tested to convert.  

As a minimum, your website needs to have the following:

• A home page
• Landing pages
• Product launch pages
• Coming-soon pages
• Thank you pages
• Squeeze pages
• Long sale pages
• Upsell and downsell pages
• Video sales letter pages
• Check out pages
• Error 404 pages

… and many more. So, unless you are a pro coder, that is where Kartra Pages comes in. Here are the features the best ones have in common.

Kartra’s Customizable Template Library

Even a half-decent page builder should have dozens of pre-designed templates that look both professional and aesthetically pleasing.

A great page builder should have hundreds. These should cover every type of web page out there, from home to checkout, and must be customizable so that you can quickly adapt them to fit your brand.

As I mentioned above, all templates should have been tested and optimized to boost conversion rates.

Interactive Page Enhancements

You want to be able to add various features and enhancements to your pages that help boost traffic and increase sales. Examples include:

• Countdown timers to stress scarcity
• Embedding Facebook or Disqus user comments
• Page gamification elements such as progress bars
• Exit pops that show up as visitors try to leave

Not too long ago, such page enhancements were only available to businesses with big budgets that could afford experienced coders. Fortunately, however, modern page builder tools have made that service much more accessible.

Optimization for Mobile Devices

Did you know that mobile devices are responsible for up to 70% of all web traffic? What’s more, mobile responsiveness affects web pages’ Google ranking. That’s why you want to optimize the look and performance of your website for both desktop and mobile.

Advanced Split Testing

Make sure to remember this one, as it will keep coming up throughout my Kartra review: data is king.

Building an online presence and a successful marketing campaign should not be approached like throwing a bowl of wet spaghetti at a wall and hoping that some will stick. You need to know exactly what works, what doesn’t, and why. 

The only way to do that is by collecting and analyzing data. That’s why you want a page builder that can split test alternative versions of every web page. Ideally, it should also automatically switch out to the best-performing page.

Kartra’s Heatmap Tool

In addition to split testing, your page builder should perform analytics that help you understand what is engaging your customers and what isn’t. You should be able to see things such as:

• Average scroll depths
• The average time visitors spend on a given page
• The percentage of visitors that stay on a page for more than 10 seconds

Ideally, your page builder tool should also allow you to add customizable features based on the visitors’ behavior. Personalized web experience can lead to up to 19% boost in sales on average.

Does all of the above sound to you like quite a handful? I don’t blame you. Luckily, Kartra can help with all of this. Instead of doing tons of research and comparing different providers, features, and price points, you can sign up for Kartra and use its web page builder tool that has everything you need and more.

2.   Review of Kartra’s Opt-In Form Builder

As an entrepreneur, it is crucial that you invest in capturing new leads and, eventually, converting them. This process is critical for the growth and future of your business, as you should never rely on your existing customer base alone.

Whether you use Facebook ads, Google ads, or lead magnets to attract leads, once they get to your web page, you need to find a way to enter their details into your database. The trick here is that they must give you their personal information — name, email, and the like — voluntarily. And guess what? There is no better way to do that than through a good old opt-in form.

Surprisingly, though, many businesses don’t even have opt-in forms on their websites. Others do, but still don’t get the results they want. Why is that? Well, because, for the most part, they use old, passive, and inefficient tactics that fail to engage the leads.

What to Do Instead

It’s not enough just to ask for users’ data. If you really want them to share it with you, you would have to capture their attention. That’s why you need a tool like the Kartra Form Builder that can create opt-in forms that are visually arresting and stand out from the crowd. Ideally, they should also promise something in return — a newsletter, promo code, or early-bird access to hot sales and discounts.

Kartra’s Form Builder is User-Friendly

Your opt-in form should be user-friendly, too. Visitors should be able to easily and quickly enter their details, and returning users should have their info auto-filled for them. It’s also a good idea to add your own custom fields that collect additional information pertinent to your business.

Your opt-in form builder needs to be able to not only do all of the above but also trigger specific actions depending on the form input. That means, for example, that each lead gets assigned a unique tag or is subscribed to a particular mailing list.

Last but not least, your form builder must support desktop, mobile, and tablet viewing. It also must be GDPR-compliant if you will be working with customers based in the EU.

The good news is that Kartra features an excellent opt-in form builder. Sign up today, and you will see a marked increase in your newsletter subscriptions in no time.

3.   Kartra Review – The Lead Management System

Now that you’ve captured your leads, you want to make sure that you hold on to them in the long term by implementing Kartra’s effective lead management system. If you don’t organize and follow up on your leads, you risk losing up to 70% of them — along with all the potential revenue they could have brought. Conversely, if you have a great lead management system in place, you will get:

• Increased conversion rates
• Higher purchases from the leads that place orders
• Lower customer acquisition costs

What that means, however, is that you need to do more than just collect and store a list of names and email addresses. You want a system that allows you to see at a glance how the leads interact with your business.

What products have they bought? Which newsletters do they subscribe to? What emails have they received, and how many of these did they actually open? Did they click on any links? Have they booked any appointments? Do they have open support tickets?

You want to have the answers to all those questions and more. The more detailed your lead management system is, the more data you will get. What’s more, you will be able to personalize your customer support and communications.

So, with this in mind, here are the key features of a great lead management tool.

Profile History

This one is perhaps the most important function of a lead management system. It should provide you with a complete overview of how your customers have interacted with you.

That includes email open and click-through rates as well as customer tags and lead scores. A great tool can also give you even more detailed information, such as whether someone visited a given page or watched a specific video on your website.

Advanced Lead Tagging

I mentioned that a complete profile history should include lead tags. What are these?

Well, tags are custom labels that your system assigns to your leads based on their behavior in order to group them into distinct categories such as VIPs, paid customers, free prospects, and cold leads.

You should be able to set up the system so that it assigns tags automatically and in response to highly specific prompts.

For instance, you may want to tag users who (1) visit your website and (2) opt-in, but (3) don’t purchase anything as “Lead Magnet Prospects.” This level of detail makes it possible to achieve very high levels of personalization in your marketing campaign.

Lead Scoring

Tagging leads merely allows you to segment your user demographics into subgroups. Lead scoring, however, goes even further than that by making it possible to know precisely who your best customers are. 

How does lead scoring work? For every action they take, each user is automatically given a certain number of points. They will get some points when they open an email and even more when they place an order.

You can use that data to further personalize your marketing strategy. For example, you may want to give rewards and incentives to your best customers.

With your Kartra subscription, you will get a highly effective lead management tool that includes all of the features mentioned above. That will give you the data and analytics you need to craft flawlessly personalized marketing campaigns.

4.   Kartra Mail – Almost Better Than ActiveCampaign

Whoever says that email is dying is dead wrong. In fact, email is absolutely critical to making sales. According to recent studies, 83% of customers indicate that email is their preferred method of communication with brands.

What’s more, McKinsey found that email is nearly 40 times more effective at attracting new customers than social media platforms such as Facebook or Twitter.

That means you should definitely incorporate emails in your marketing campaign. What that does not mean is that you can just get yourself a branded Gmail account and call it a day.

A traditional email account is only suitable for manual one-on-one communication with your customers.

So unless you are really into manually adding each contact to your list and then writing, rewriting, copy-pasting, and editing every single email you are ever going to send — you need to invest in an email automation tool like Kartra Mail.

Email automation tools are a true godsend for a number of reasons. They not only automate virtually 100% of your email communication but can also make your emails look beautiful and professional.

You can rest assured that all your emails will be consistent in terms of visuals and formatting. What’s more, a good automation tool comes with behavior-based personalization and automation options that help you adapt your message to leads based on their actions and preferences. 

Let’s look at the most important features of a good email automation tool in more detail.

Kartra’s Gorgeous Templates

Even experienced professionals can take hours to design an email so that it means business, so you might want to spare yourself the effort. Just as with web page builders, you need your email automation tool to come with a rich selection of expertly designed templates. These should also include all sorts of customizable components and add-ons such as content blocks, video thumbnails, countdown timers, testimonials, hero sections, etc.

Advanced Split Testing in Kartra Mail

Did you know that the average branded email has an open rate of only 25% or less? Don’t give in to despair, though — all that means is that the quality of your emails should be above average!

To make sure that your emails get read, you need to have killer subject lines. These have been proven to be the single most important factor when it comes to open rates. That’s why you want your automation tool to automatically split-test all subject lines in addition to the email content. After tracking and comparing the conversion rates, it should switch over to the versions that perform best.  

Personalization

I’ve already made the point that across-the-board personalization is the lifeblood of any successful online business. Studies show that merely adding a personal touch to a call to action can increase the click-through rate by up to 202%. Therefore, your email automation tool must allow you to personalize your messages by adding the recipient’s names, join date, and other details.  

Behavior-Based Automation

See my point about personalization above. You want your email automation tool to be able to switch on and off different automation options based on your customers’ behaviour which is call BAM in Kartra, a push button technology multiplies conversion rates and elevates customer retention without having to write a single line of code.

For instance, Kartra allows you to automatically tag users who click on a particular link or follow up on recipients who didn’t open a previous message. Your email tool should also automatically unsubscribe contacts that fail to open any of your emails in a given period of time, say 90 days.

Last but not least, you can adjust your desired automation settings once and then have the system do the rest of the work for you.

Kartra Sequences

In case you didn’t know, a “sequence” is a chain of related emails that all get sent out in response to a specific trigger.

A classic example is someone abandoning their cart mid-checkout. In that case, you may want to send them a “Come Back” message on day one.

If they do come back and make the purchase, the sequence ends. If they don’t, however, the sequence continues with an email containing a promo code on day two and another with customer testimonials on day three.

Once you set up these sequences, your email tool should do all the follow-up work for you on autopilot.

Email Analytics

You want to know precisely how every single one of your branded emails is performing at any given moment. Therefore, your email automation tool should be able to present you with a highly detailed breakdown of statistics such as:

• Open, click-through, and goal rates
• Number of people subscribing and unsubscribing
• Number of recipients flagging your messages as spam
• The best day and time do send out your emails
• Dollar per send out and dollar per recipient ratios

What I love about Kartra is that it brings you all of these features and more, allowing for nearly 100% email automation across the board.

5.   Kartra Review – The best Shopping Kart?

Have you ever wondered why Kartra is called Kartra?

Because originally my friend Mike Filsaime founded Deal Guardian together with Hector Yague who is still Kartra’s CTO, as a shopping cart because they this system into the most powerful all-in-one Marketing software available.

You probably already know that a shopping tool is a must if you are going to sell anything online. However, not all shopping tools are created equal. Here are some of the features the best ones like the Kartra Checkout Tool have.

Great Templates… Again

I don’t mean to sound repetitive, but professionally designed templates are just as essential for your eCommerce tool as for your emails and web pages.

A sloppily designed checkout page is likely to result in glitches and cart abandonments. You don’t want that.

What you do want is for your checkout system to have been designed, tested, and optimized for both desktop and mobile viewing.

Kartra Accepts Various Payment Methods

This one is painfully obvious, but it still bears repeating, as surprisingly many businesses ignore it. Your eCommerce tool should be able to handle payments from various sources, including PayPal, multiple credit and debit card providers, and more.

The easier it is for your customers to pay, the more sales you will make. Needless to say, you want to make sure that all payments go through a secure payment processor.

Flexible Price Points

Not everyone will be able to afford to pay the full price of your product or service upfront. However, they may be more than willing to pay in installments.

That’s why you want to provide your customers with multiple price points to choose from: lump-sum payment, installments, or recurring payments. Your eCommerce tool should come with all these payment options enabled. 

Trial Periods and Initial Payments

This one applies only if your business is subscription-based. The vast majority of your potential customers will always be on the fence about buying your product or service. Therefore, your eCommerce tool should be able to handle flexible “Try Before You Buy” options such as free trials, money-back guarantees, or $1 for the first 30 days.

Coupons and Promo Codes

Surveys show that up to two-thirds of consumers say that a coupon or promo code has persuaded them to purchase a product or service they were not initially 100% intent on buying. That’s good news for you. It also means that your eCommerce tool must be able to generate promo codes and coupons and automatically track their expiration date.

Tagging Cart Abandonments

Here’s some more trivia for you: up to 70% of online customers who do make it to checkout… bail. Perhaps they had misplaced their credit card or found out that it had expired. Maybe they got distracted by their kids or decided that they need more time to think it over. Whatever the reason, you want an eCommerce tool that tags people who abandon their carts and automatically follows up on them to close those sales.

Upsells, Downsells, Crossells, and Order Bumps

A great eCommerce tool should offer customers who are checking out last-minute add-ons or order bumps. It should also suggest alternative offers with higher value-for-money or better quality. In addition, visitors who are not ready to buy just yet should be automatically presented with cheaper or more basic entry-level products.

Automated Tax Calculation

Unless you want to do the math yourself, your eCommerce tool should have automated tax calculation enabled. That goes for both sales tax and VAT, as relevant. The system should calculate and add them to the final price breakdown at checkout. What’s more, the calculation should be adjusted depending on the customer’s jurisdiction.

Detailed Analytics

Once again, data is king, and you need all sorts of it. Your eCommerce tool should be able to provide you with detailed breakdowns on sales, returns, cancellations, rebills, and more. For a subscription-based business, you’d also want the average customer retention rates and your customer lifetime value.

You will find all of the features listed above in Kartra’s built-in eCommerce tool. It saves you a lot of time, effort, and money and can seriously help boost your conversion rates.

6.   Review – Kartra’s Done-For-You-Campaigns

At the beginning of my Kartra review, I briefly touched on the Kartra’s Done-For-You marketing campaigns.

Let’s do a quick recap: campaigns are designed to guide your customers step-by-step on a journey with a very concrete goal — making a sale.

What makes effective marketing campaigns? They come in all shapes and forms, from quick 5-day email promo campaigns to lead magnet campaigns or even a deadline funnel that redirect your users after an offer expires. The one thing all great sales funnels have in common, though, is a smooth, uninterrupted flow that is almost imperceptible to the untrained eye.    

The best way to ensure a great flow is to get a tool with a sequence builder. Much like email automation systems, campaign sequence builders perform a chain of predefined actions in response to trigger events. You want your sequence builder to follow your pre-set rules and run automatically 24/7. You should also have the option to connect your sequences to specific web pages and send out emails in response to actions visitors take on your landing page.

Even with a sequence builder, however, marketing campaigns are hard to design and take a lot of work. There is so much to think about, from the visual design to web page and email copy.

So unless you are professionally trained in these things, I highly recommend that you get yourself a tool that can build your marketing campaigns for you. Of course, you can also buy ready-to-use campaigns from campaign marketplaces, but these can be costly.

What’s great about this sales funnel builder is that it comes with its own marketing campaign and sequence builder. It can build a highly effective professional campaign at a fraction of the cost of what you’d typically pay at a campaign marketplace.

7.   Kartra’s Membership Platform

Now, obviously, this is only relevant to subscription or membership-based business models.

If you feel that Kartra’s Membership Portal does not apply to your case, feel free to jump ahead to the rest of my Kartra review.

However, I’d still recommend that you consider comparing Kartra vs Kajabi and more expensive platforms like Teachable and if you want to create information products and online courses, as a side stream of income.

Subscriptions and memberships are an excellent way to ensure that you receive predictable and regular transactions every month.

A smart and easy way to make your business subscription-based is to split your content into smaller chunks and issue one each month.

For example, instead of selling your entire ebook for a $30 lump sum, you can charge a $10 monthly membership and release the chapters one at a time over the course of 6 or 12 months.

To effectively manage your membership base, you need a membership builder tool. Here is what to look for in one.

For the Umpteenth Time: Templates

I bet you didn’t see this one coming. Your membership builder should come with a wide variety of customizable and pre-tested templates for you to choose from.

Drip Content Function

As I said, you want to spread out your content over a long period of time. Don’t make the mistake of giving it all away the moment a new member joins. A good membership builder allows you to release your digital content over time without having to create new one. This way, you get to control the speed with which people consume your content and make sure they retain their membership for as long as possible.

Support for Various Types of Files

Your membership platform needs to be able to host multiple file types. Whatever the original format of your digital content might be, you should also create text, audio, presentation, and video versions for your subscribers to choose from. Different people like to consume content in different ways, and you should do your best to cater to everyone’s preferences to maximize your sales.

Membership Tiers

You also want your membership platform builder to allow the option for multiple membership tiers. You can offer your customers different membership levels, such as gold, silver, or bronze, each with varying perks and price points. Lower-level memberships can help attract more customers. Eventually, some of them might even choose to upgrade to higher-priced membership options.

Progress Tracker

It’s a great idea to offer your members a built-in personal progress tracker to help them visualize their achievements and how much is still left. Progress trackers are a powerful tool to set your customer’s expectations, fight information overload, and encourage continued engagement.

Multi-Site Portals

Most membership-based businesses offer many different courses or types of content, each with their own separate membership.

That’s what you should be doing, too, as there is only so much you can achieve with a single-membership site. Think of ways you can split your content into separate courses, such as “30 Day Yoga for Abs Challenge” or “Introduction to Yoga for Complete Beginners.”

In addition to developing different courses, you also want to house them on separate membership sites that can be accessed via a centralized dashboard or portal. To do that, you want a platform builder that has that feature built-in.

Why is it a good idea to have a multi-site portal? The main benefit is that the members of one course would be more tempted to enroll in some of the other courses too. In addition, every user can use the same login credentials to access all courses they have signed up for.

Hassle-Free Member Management

Hosting and running a members’ platform can be quite the task, so you want to make it as simple as humanly possible. That’s why you should look for a platform builder that makes moderating and responding to comments easy. It should also allow you to see the status of your members at a glance and to manually revoke or grant access.

Detailed Analytics

Finally, you want a membership builder that automatically generates as much data about your members as possible. You want to be able to easily check things such as:

• Subscription and cancellation rates
• Average member content progress
• Average retention time
• How long it takes members to complete a course on average

Having all that data will help you make adequate and useful changes to your material as needed and, ultimately, make more sales and boost your profits.

Rather conveniently, this marketing plattform also comes with a membership platform builder that can do all of the above and more.

8.   Kartra Video Hosting

Whatever you do, make sure that you add videos to your landing pages. That has been shown to increase conversion rates by up to 80%.

Video marketing is huge. However, for it to have any effect, you want to do it professionally. Don’t just create a YouTube channel. Don’t use a free video hosting service, either: most of these will embed their own branding all over your video, which will only distract and confuse your viewers.

You should also bear in mind that most free video hosting services were made for amateur content creation. As they don’t target businesses, they don’t feature essential marketing tools such as call-to-action buttons or behavior-based automation.

That’s why I highly recommend that you opt for Kartra’s professional video-hosting tool that was specially developed for marketing purposes.  

Here are some of the telltale features of a great video hosting tool — in addition to, of course, minimizing glitches and loading times.

Customizable Player

You want your player to come with options such as:

• Mute on start
• Autoplay on load
• Social media share buttons
• Hide the video control bar
• Show an overlay title

… and a lot more. You should also be able to change up the player’s look by adding your watermark and other branded elements.

Playlist Creation

The chances are that you will make more than one video per topic. In fact, you should do so, as people’s attention spans can be rather short, and the last thing you want is to bore them with videos that are too long. Viewers would simply click out of them. 

This is where playlists come in handy. You can use them to systematize your entire video course material. In any case, however, make sure to keep your videos well organized and easy to navigate.

Lead Tagging

Unless your video hosting tool has lead tagging capabilities, you will lose customers each time they stop watching your video.

To prevent that from happening, good video hosting tools automatically tag people based on how long they watch your content. And if someone clicks out early, your system can send them a “Here is what you missed” email. This way, you get a second chance to close that sale.

Timed Calls-to-Action

What are timed calls-to-action? Well, to put it simply, these are call-to-action buttons that allow viewers to take certain actions at specific times during the video. For instance, they can click on a “Subscribe” button that appears while you talk about your weekly newsletter. Or they could click on a “Buy Now” button that pops up as soon as you mention an exciting new offer.

Call-to-action buttons are great for encouraging viewer engagement and increasing your sales. That’s why you want a video hosting tool that allows you to easily embed such buttons in your videos. You may also want to insert captions, image banners, or social unlock buttons.

Analytics

Like with any other aspect of your online business, you want to know which videos work and which don’t. Your video hosting tool should have advanced analytics options that tell you the average video viewing times, how many viewers played or completed a video, or how many people clicked on your timed calls-to-action.

9.   Kartra Helpdesk

Attracting new customers is great, but keeping them in the long term is even better. Why? Because new customer acquisition is, on average, 5 to 25 times more expensive than retaining the existing ones.

With this in mind, save all that money you spend on advertising and pour it into building an excellent customer support service. That should keep your customers happy and loyal.

However, don’t repeat the mistake that many small businesses make by using their regular email for customer support inquiries. This way you’d only end up with literally thousands of emails in your inbox. Needless to say, don’t manually type out the answers to every single inquiry. 

Instead, for your customer support, you want to use a professional helpdesk tool like the one that comes with your Kartra subscription. It will automate and streamline your communication with customers, keeping them happy and satisfied in the long run.

Here’s what else you can expect from a good helpdesk tool.

A Ticketing System

If your business has multiple departments, agents, or shifts, you definitely need a helpdesk tool that can assign tickets to customer inquiries and automatically direct them to the relevant staff members. That will ensure that all problems are dealt with quickly and efficiently.

Timesaving Tools

Often, the same question or problem pops up over and over again. Instead of having someone from your support team type out the answer manually every single time, you should invest in a helpdesk tool that allows you to create pre-set “canned responses.” This way, every time the same inquiry comes up, your staff could simply choose the template response and send it in a matter of seconds.

Multi-Channel Support

Ideally, you want to be able to support your customers not only over email but also via live chat, Skype, Facebook Messenger, and phone. That means that your helpdesk tool needs to support these and many other communication channels.

Secure Self-Billing Portal

Billing support covers everything from downloading invoices and issuing refunds to updating expired credit or debit cards and canceling subscriptions. As there is a lot that goes on behind the scenes in this help department, you might want to take some of the load off their backs by allowing your customers to do self-billing. You can use your helpdesk tool to create a self-billing portal so that your customers can update their payment cards, access their transaction history, and the like.  

Agent Analytics

The more you know about what transpires in your helpdesk, the better. You want to be fully briefed on the number of inquiries they get, how they are handled, and by whom. A good helpdesk tool can tell you all this and more.

10. Kartra Calendar

This section is only relevant to business models that include appointments or bookings, so you may want to skip ahead if that does not apply to you. However, if you run a restaurant, beauty salon, or any other business that offers pre-scheduled direct services to clients, then you might want to read my review of the Kartra Calendar.

Organizing a streamlined appointment system is a real pain in the neck, especially if you are doing it manually. Scheduling, rescheduling, avoiding double bookings, last-minute cancellations, sending out reminders… There’s a reason why everyone used to have a personal secretary in the pre-digital age.

Lucky for all of us, in this day and age, we have online calendars at our disposal. When you sign up to create your Kartra account, your subscription includes access to a multifunctional calendar tool that can do wonders for your booking system.

It allows your customers to see at a glance your availability and free time slots. They can easily book, reschedule, or cancel their appointments, sparing both you and them a lot of trouble.

What’s more, the Kartra calendar tool is optimized for both desktop and mobile devices and with a recent update can be integrated into every Kartra page.

You also have the option to approve and decline appointments, as well as to block out time slots or entire days. The tool also allows you to send automatic reminders, charge customers when they make the booking, and choose between different calendar models.

11. Kartra Affiliate Management

The Kartra affiliate management tool allows you to grow your business without paying anything in advance. However, note that affiliate management tools are more advanced and may not be suitable for fledgling businesses. But, as your business grows, there will come a moment when you will want to use such tools.

So, what does an affiliate management tool do? To answer this question, I first need to explain how businesses get online traffic. More often than not, it’s through advertising. You create your ads and pay Facebook or Google to run them, in the hope that someone might click on them.

Sometimes people do click on your ads, but sometimes, they don’t. In either case, you can write off the money you spent on ads as sunk costs unless and until they pay off in the future.

As you can probably gather, traditional advertising models can result in a lot of uncertainty for businesses. Fortunately, nowadays, there is a strategy that allows you to both generate traffic and withhold payment untilthat traffic has paid off and the sale has been closed.

That’s right, you guessed it. The strategy is called “affiliate marketing.”

Essentially, affiliates are experienced salespeople that run your ads for you and send out emails about your promotions to contacts in their mailing lists.

In exchange, they get a commission each time you make a sale.

If you want to know more about Kartra’s Affiliate program I recommend you check out my Kartra Affiliate Guide that I created with Kartra’s main affiliate manager Jennifer Daniels.

Finding Good Affiliates

So far, so good. But how does one find high-quality affiliates that can generate great profits? Well, to be absolutely honest, that’s no easy feat unless you have an affiliate program like GrooveFunnels.

Even if you manage to find good ones, you need to have a robust screening system in place that can help you sift through them. It’s easy to get overwhelmed by the many options offered by the market and end up with subpar service. And even if you team up with great affiliates, you’d still have to handle and calculate due payments and perform other accounting tasks.

You’d rather not do all that yourself? Lucky for you, that is where affiliate marketing tools come into play. Here are the features to look out for.

Affiliate Screening

I already mentioned the importance of the thorough screening of any potential affiliates. Affiliate marketing tools can help with that. You should choose a tool that can ensure your prospective affiliates are not only high quality but also fully compliant with all relevant rules and regulations. These can be your standard terms and conditions or more detailed questionnaires that you design specifically for affiliates.

Joint-Venture Brokers

Those of you out there who don’t have the time to personally recruit affiliates would undoubtedly appreciate the fact that affiliate management tools can do that for you. They team you up with joint-venture brokers that carry out all your recruiting. In exchange, they get a second-tier commission every time their affiliate base closes a sale.

Automated Payments

Successful and well-performing affiliates can generate a large number of payments. While that’s good news for your business, it also means there will be a lot of payments for you to track, manage, and review. If you do this manually, it’s bound to take up a lot of your time and energy.

Alternatively, you can get yourself an affiliate marketing tool with enabled automated payments. Once you set your desired parameters, all payments will go out automatically and hassle-free.

Flexible, Multi-Tier Commission Structures

You should be in full control over your affiliate commission structures at all times. If there is anything you don’t like, you should be able to easily change it. That’s why you want an affiliate management tool that offers flexible commission plans. You should be able to choose to set your commissions by:

• Dollar or percentage
• Product, product types, or all products
• Individual affiliates

You also want to be able to predefine sale and payment threshold milestones and offer commissions not just for sales but also for new email subscribers.

Affiliate Analytics

When working with affiliates, you definitely want to know your top performers from the average ones and the complete flops. Fortunately, good affiliate marketing tools will automatically let you know what percentage of your total revenue comes from affiliates. You can also see individual affiliates’ sales, earnings per click, rebills, conversions, and commissions.

Affiliate Marketplace

Last but not least, some of the best affiliate tools out there can also put you in touch with other professionals who might be looking for new products or services to promote. All you need is for your business to fit their criteria, and voila — you have got yourself a brand new affiliate partnership. That makes for a much more streamlined and simpler affiliate recruitment process, saving you a lot of time, money, and stress.

Kartra Integrations

In case you want to integrate it with other marketing tools you can use Webhooks or tools like Zapier to connect your Kartra account with popular applications like Teachable, Shopify, Campaign Monitor, and Zapier, Kartra provides business owners with a way of automating their daily tasks and increasing productivity.

Kartra is a software platform for online businesses and is one of the most popular integration platforms for SaaS applications because it can connect to over 1000 different applications from CRMs to security and analytics, and is constantly expanding its range of integrations.

If the existing Kartra features are not enough for your business and you’re looking to collect data from another marketing tool or pass data into another app, you’re in the right place. You can use webhooks to grand licenses for your software or connect Kartra with Zapier.

Zapier is a very popular tool for developers that lets you create custom integrations between hundreds of different business apps. These integrations make it possible to automate your business and make it more efficient.

The Zapier system is based on the concept of IFTTT: If This, Then That.

That means that you can set up various triggers with this funnel builder, and specify that those triggers should trigger another app to carry out a certain action like creating a new Kartra user in your marketing platform or starting a marketing automation sequence.

(For example, I’m using this to generate license keys for my “Ads Made Free” Facebook software after people opt-in to the free version on my squeeze page or buy the Pro version on my sales page).

With this feature, Zapier will automatically grand license keys once someone fills out a form or buy the product from me.

Kartra Review – Summary & Conclusion

If you made it thus far in this Kartra review, congratulations — and thank you!

You are one tough cookie. I really hope that you found this review useful and informative.

Personally, I am a great fan of Kartra myself and used it to create all the marketing automation for my Pareto Sales and Marketing Virtual Summit.

I believe think it is by far the ultimate all-in-one tool for running a business online right now. (With GrooveFunnels being the only real Kartra Alternative once they finish all their Grooveapp the next two years with really competitive pricing)

I have my very own Kartra subscription, and it has definitely helped increase my revenue and take my online business to the next level.

The starter Kartra pricing plan is very affordable and is the perfect choice for those of you who might be just starting to create their first marketing funnel.

However, Kartra is a great tool even if you have a well-established and profitable business. You’d be amazed at how much money you can save by canceling all those monthly subscriptions with different service providers.

And if you sign up using my affiliate link, you’d land even bigger savings when I show you how to get a 50% discount on Kartra!

In any case, please feel free to let me know what you thought of my Kartra review in the comments section down below.

I’d appreciate any type of feedback and am always happy to answer all your questions.