The Beginner’s Guide to Kartra: Email

As a novice solopreneur,  I’ve never worked with a powerful all-in-one platform like Kartra to manage my business,  send email broadcasts,  and enhance my marketing. However, as I’ve been on my journey to get to know Kartra, I’ve discovered just how easy this versatile tool really is.

On my first stop, I put on my metaphorical hardhat and laid the groundwork for my art business’ online sales. I set up my profile, made my first list, established payment integrations, added my products to the Kartra system, and configured my opt-in form. And it was surprisingly easy to figure out!

My second stop was the page editor in Kartra. This is where I built out my site and displayed my products for people to start buying. Not only was it a necessary step, but it was a fun and creative one too.

Next stop: sending out emails to let people know about my new site and the latest artwork I’ve added.

Lead with leads.

Before you can send an email, you need someone to receive it.

If you’re unfamiliar with the term, leads are people whose contact information you’ve collected and have permission to email further. Kartra gives you the power to organize, automate (create a pre-set workflow that moves your leads through your consumer journey, based on their actions) and tag your leads to facilitate sending the right messages to the right people at the right times. Tagging allows you to organize your leads into smaller subsets or buckets, to make them easier to identify and target. All of this helps move your customer through their journey and towards a sale.

One popular way to collect leads is through opt-in forms. However, at this point, my business was still brand new, so I uploaded the leads I had from my previous in-person sales to get started.

To import my leads, I went to “My Campaigns” in the left-side navigation and then clicked “leads” at the top of the page before adding the email addresses and names of my leads. Read in-depth about how to import leads here.

Note: Import your leads a day or two before you send your first broadcast email. Kartra takes about a day to verify that your leads were obtained legally and that the emails are valid. This is to protect all Kartra users from deliverability issues in the future. Kartra will notify you of any bounced or blacklisted emails to keep your list clean and up to date.

Build out your broadcast.

You’ll often send an email to many people at once. That’s called a broadcast. Here’s how I learned to create one…and like everything else in Kartra, it was easy.

To begin setting my broadcast up, I navigated to “My Campaigns” on the left side, then tapped “Campaigns” at the very top of the page and next selected “Broadcasts” below.

Once on the correct page, I simply tapped the green “+” button to get started. After I entered a name for my email (to easily identify it later), Kartra ushered me to a new page with a series of steps: account, recipients, message, automations, send / schedule, and finish.

I chose to send my broadcast by email, but you can also send an SMS broadcast if you have your leads’ numbers and an SMS program integrated with Kartra, like Twilio, Nexmo or Tropo. (Click on “Integrations” in the blue sidebar to see all of Kartra’s current integrations. To learn more about integrations, watch the video in this blog post — https://www.kartra.com/blog/kartra-integrations/.)

Note: The “send from” email defaults to an @kartra.com name. I had to manually go into the “Send from email” section and change it to @andijanksart.com.

Once I configured my account information, I chose who I’d send my broadcast to. Kartra gives you a handlittle drop-down to choose your target audience segments. Because this was my first real broadcast and I don’t have a long list of leads yet, I decided to send it to everyone in my database (yes, I even included my mom on that list).

Neat Feature Alert: I discovered that Kartra tells you how many leads you selected — I have five total right now — and if any of them cannot be emailed for some reason. This provides an accurate count of how many people my broadcast will reach.

My last step before actually diving in and creating my first email was deciding whether I was going to send out just a regular broadcast or an A/B split test. For those that are unfamiliar, A/B split tests allow you to send out multiple variations of your email.

Why do this? To test which version of a particular message, headline, or image works better. You decide what percentage of your audience will receive each broadcast.

With a whopping five respondents, sending an A/B split test doesn’t really make any sense (too little people to do a meaningful test). However, for the sake of getting to know the platform better, I went with an A/B split test to determine whether a basic text email or an embellished and colorful template would resonate more with my audience.

Note: You should try to only test one variable among the versions tested—such as a headline, subject line or your featured image—to get accurate results and narrow down what is working (and what isn’t).

Here’s the fun part…crafting the email.

I chose to use the “basic builder” for my “A” email in my test while using the “advanced builder” for my “B” email. To switch between basic and advanced in the editor, just toggle the button below.

The basic builder is incredibly easy to use. I just wrote an email like I was writing to a friend. And like a standard email builder, I was able to bold, italicize, enlarge, change the font color, and insert an image into my email.

Note: Images cannot be larger than 1MB in the Kartra email editor, so please make sure to check your file sizes ahead of time.

One fantastic feature Kartra offers is dynamic variables. These variables gave me the power to personalize my emails, which is vital to engagement. Simply paste the dynamic variable code in and Kartra will customize it to your leads. For example, I added in the first name variable at the beginning of my email. To me it reads “Hi {first_name},” but to a lead it will present their own name, such as, “Hi David.”

Note: Don’t forget to add a link to your website. Your broadcasts are one step in your funnel (your customer’s buying journey) towards getting leads to your site to purchase your product. If you don’t have an easy way to get them to your site from your email, it won’t be very effective!

Once I finished off my “A” email, it was time to do my “B” version. To get there, I just scrolled down the page to the second email and toggled over to the advanced builder. The advanced builder looks almost identical to the basic builder, except for one significant difference. The advanced builder had a dropdown for design templates and components, much like the ones in the page builder.

The fact that it mimicked the page builder was very helpful. I found I was able to get through it quickly and painlessly because many of the editing features are the same.

Rather than using a fully pre-designed template, I chose to use components in my email to customize it to look the way I wanted. I added my logo at the very top and then dropped in a hero section. Using the editing features, I was able to change the background color and buttons to complement my image, while adjusting text size and color. From there, I dropped a few more basic sections in and customized them until I was happy with my final product.

Note: Be careful to not click the “x” delete button in the email editor. Unlike in the pages builder, there is no undo button.

Okay, so I wrote both emails…does this mean I can send them now?Nope, not yet. First, I had to ensure my split test was divided evenly and then send a test of each email to myself to make sure everything was good to go. To do this, scroll to the bottom of each email and decide the percentage of users you’ll send each version to. Since I chose to split evenly, I placed 50% for each. I then clicked the “send test email” button and filled out my email address to check if everything looked good.

NOTE: if you choose to use a dynamic variable, it will read as “TEST” in your test email if it is working correctly, such as “Dear TEST.” The only variables that don’t read “TEST” in a test email, are {email} (which will read as the email it’s sent to) and {date_joined} (which reads as 31 December 1969).

Once I determined my emails looked good to go and that all the variables were functioning correctly, it was time to move on to the next step.

Add Automation.

When I first saw the term “automation,” my mind instantly thought of cartoons (I know, that’s animation, but it’s this newbie’s closest frame of reference). After playing in Kartra, I finally began to understand what that term means, and I’m imparting my newfound wisdom to you.

Automation allows you to create a set of “rules” that help sort your leads into categories based on their actions. In my email’s case, I created two automations.

1. If a lead doesn’t open my email within the first 100 hours after I send it, they get added to a list called “ignore email.” By segmenting them this way, I can send a follow-up email a couple of days later reminding them and creating a more compelling subject line, so they’re more likely to open. Alternately, I can assign my leads to a sequence (to be discussed in a future article) which will AUTOMATICALLY send the follow-up email for me. Pretty neat, huh?
2. If a lead opened my email, they get added to a list called “opened email.” I know these leads are more interested in my product / company, and I can choose to pursue them more heavily at a later date, or add them to a sequence designed just for them.

You do not have to create an automation, but it’s a helpful way to further segment your leads without doing much work on your end.

Ready, set, email blastoff.

At this point, I’ve set up everything. I just need to send my email out. I have three options within Kartra: I can send it now, schedule it for a specific time, or save it as a draft and come back and edit later.

Because I don’t have any data on what times of day get the highest open rate amongst my audience, I chose to send it now.

Note: Once you hit 10 broadcasts within the Kartra system, the platform will give you suggestions on what day of the week and time of the day sees a higher email open rate, click through rate, sales conversion rate, etc.

And that’s it! I have to say, email has probably been the most straightforward tool to work with yet, which is great, as it’s an essential part of marketing a business.

But our journey doesn’t stop here. There’s still so much more to learn about this all-in-one platform. Carry on with me as I unearth all of Kartra’s capabilities in The Beginner’s Guide to Kartra.

Next up:

Map out a fully automated marketing chain of events to guide your prospect through their buyer’s journey — including emails, tagging, subscriptions and more — by using Kartra’s sequences section.