What Is Kartra: Everything You Need To Know About It

Kartra was founded in 2018 by Mike Filsaime and Andy Jenkins – two very prominent internet marketing experts. The platform hasn’t been around that long, but the fact that it was conceived and created by these two marketing giants helped it garner a lot of interest right from the very beginning.

Okay, so what exactly is Kartra, and why is it important to learn about it? Is it just another website-building platform that claims to be unique and unlike anything else you’ve seen before? These are the questions that I’m going to try to answer in this article.

Landing Pages and Sales Funnels

Kartra is an SaaS platform mainly known for creating landing pages and sales funnels. Let me explain this one step at a time. 

SaaS stands for Software as a Service. This means that it’s cloud-based software, and access to its functionalities is provided through a subscription. You don’t need to download, install, or maintain software on a local machine. 

Just in case you’re not familiar with internet marketing terminology, a landing page is a free-standing page to which a user is redirected after clicking on a link or an ad on a website, social media page, or in an email. The sole purpose of a landing page is the "call to action," which in this case means to persuade a user to buy a product/service that you sell.

Furthermore, a sales funnel is a very important marketing concept that has to do with the way you move potential customers through a process from initial awareness to buying your product. Usually, five steps are associated with this notion:

1. Awareness: Users learn about what you offer.
2. Interest: They relate to and become interested in your product or service and actively search for more info.
3. Decision: They decide they want to try your product/service. 
4. Action: A user turns into a customer by buying from you.
5. Retention: This includes all the techniques you employ to keep your newly-won customer satisfied and loyal (emails, special offers, customer support, etc.).

Kartra in General Terms

Kartra allows you to choose from complete sales funnel templates created by marketing experts. Additionally, you can customize them to suit your personal needs and style.

What’s groundbreaking and unique about this platform is that it really is all in one – providing a fully integrated e-commerce sales and marketing solution. It gives you all the data on your online business and all the tools you need to run it successfully in one place, under one account. 

The tools that Kartra offers are not standalone apps that are put together to somehow make up a whole package. Each of them is an integral part of the same unit, and they constantly interact with the other pieces of software. 

On top of that, these tools are not elementary. They can compete with the best software in each of their respective individual fields: 

• Page builders 
• Email marketing tools 
• Sales funnel builders 
• Sales analytics software 
• Checkout/shopping cart tools 
• Affiliate systems 
• Membership site builders 
• Video hosting services 

This means that Kartra can do – to a certain extent – what Squarespace, Leadpages, Mailchimp, Teachable, Vimeo, Hellobar, Calendly, and ClickFunnels would all do together. Can you imagine that?

Is Kartra Just Another Site Builder?

Kartra is different from other site builders in that it focuses on internet marketing and sales. The purpose of the tools and features it offers is to give you the best marketing tools for achieving success in your online business.

If you just want a super-customizable and impeccably designed website where you introduce yourself, upload tons of pictures, and write articles – on philosophy, programming, or fishing for instance – then you shouldn't use Kartra. 

In that case, it’s better to build a separate site with one of the many existing site builders and connect it to Kartra to then get the e-commerce benefits.

Above all, Kartra is a business-centered web platform. As an all-in-one sales and marketing solution, it saves you a lot of time and money. The technical parts are taken care of, leaving you to focus on the one thing that really counts – doing business. 

What Kartra has in common with site builders is that it allows you to create different types of pages: landing pages, checkout pages, thank you pages, and sales pages. However, I’d emphasize that it’s not so much about the site or the pages, but rather, it’s about applying different business, management, and sales strategies with those types of pages. These different strategies will act to attract potential buyers to the products or services you offer. 

Another similarity with site builders is that Kartra offers pre-made templates for building pages. There are also specific templates for emails and forms too. You can customize the templates in a drag-and-drop interface. They’re all designed to be customized quickly and easily.

Customization in Kartra is less focused on aesthetics and more toward improving user experience to extend the time spent on your site and boost sales.

Overview of Kartra’s Features

General Features

Kartra is user-friendly, and it offers so many extremely useful features, like:

• An AI system to analyze customers’ behavioral patterns
• Countdown functionality
• The possibility of setting up help desk support via live chat, phone, and/or Skype calls
• Analytics for anything you need 
• Video hosting
• The option to cancel or change your subscription whenever you want
• Email marketing
• Marketing automation
• A marketing page builder
• A membership portal builder
• Shopping carts
• Online forms
• Link tracking
• Scheduling software
• An affiliate management system

The best thing is that there’s no need to hire web designers or do any custom programming. 

Hosting

When it comes to hosting, Kartra offers these options:

1. You can opt for Kartra’s own hosting service. 
2. You can connect Kartra to a domain name you already own. You just need to make some adjustments in the cPanel of your hosting account.
3. You can also host pages created with Kartra on more than one server. Kartra creates a .html file for every page you build, and it allows you to upload these files to different servers.

It’s worth noting that Kartra’s hosting service is very reliable, and Kartra always strives to reduce downtime to the absolute minimum, which is guaranteed by the fact that Kartra’s infrastructure runs on Amazon Web Services.

Security

Kartra holds to very high-security standards: 

1. It doesn’t track or store any of your customers’ payment data. 
2. The data in your account is secured by firewalls and Cloudflare. 
3. There’s no central database, so you’ll be able to avoid disaster easily if Kartra becomes a victim of a cyber-attack. 
4. The connection between you and your customers is always encrypted.
5. It’s PCI- and GDPR-compliant, which means Kartra protects cardholders’ data both in the US and the EU.

Integration

Kartra integrates easily with third-party software and other platforms like popular payment gateways, membership platforms, email marketing platforms, Zapier, and WordPress (just add a JavaScript one-liner to a blank WP page, and that’s it).

You may find integrations really helpful if you want to include a blog in your marketing strategy, which is always wise. Kartra is not optimized for blogging, so for that you’ll probably want something like DropInBlog. It’s easily integrated with Kartra, easy to use, and provides a whole range of benefits.

Pricing

Now let’s get down to pricing. Kartra is not exactly cheap – the prices range from $99/month to $499/month – but it’s considered good value for money. The alternative often requires combining quite a few different types of software, which begins to add up in price.

Kartra has an all-inclusive approach – all the features are available to everyone. The difference between the subscription packages is quantitative: the size of your contact list, the amount of bandwidth, the number of monthly email sends allowed, and so on. 

This is a fairly common pricing model, as it allows you to upgrade your package in line with the growth of your business and customer base.

FAQs