Pat and Lorna Shanks are a normal couple doing business together, only they’ve used SEO to rank #1 in search for “The Coolest Couple” (even Jimmy Kimmel took notice). They’ve used their 10 years as digital entrepreneurs to brings cool ideas to life for other businesses and help new digital entrepreneurs, independent professionals and business owners get the most out of their technology.
But, like most online business owners, they faced a few major challenges — and no, we’re not talking the challenge of getting up when it’s -22 degrees in their hometown of Edmonton, Alberta, Canada.
You see, while Pat is technically savvy, Lorna is not (although, Pat does say she’s the brains of the operation). It was difficult for Lorna to help with many of the projects that had a technical element to them, including setting up marketing campaigns and landing pages.
Also, their online business required a variety of functionalities to market and deliver their products and services to their clients. Between the two of them, they used WordPress, ActiveCampaign, Infusionsoft, OptimizePress, 1ShoppingCart and ThriveCart.
“It was painful. I mean, you had to go into the shopping cart, you go to the autoresponder, you have to make those two work together. So there’s always lots of challenges. There was no central place; everything was duct-taped together.”
After all was said and done, the Coolest Couple’s setup was anything but cool. It was pricey, challenging to run, and Lorna actually gave up on learning all of them and left it to tech-savvy Pat.
They really needed one easy-to-use, robust platform to reduce expenses, integrate their business operations and make it easier to work together on their business projects.
Cue Kartra
Pat and Lorna are no strangers to Kartra’s parent company, Genesis Digital. In fact, they’ve been following the work of the founders, Andy Jenkins and Mike Filsaime, for many years. They heard the initial vision for Kartra and witnessed how the platform’s capabilities expanded as it became a reality.
Because Kartra is an all-in-one platform that was built by internet marketers for digital entrepreneurs, it gave Pat and Lorna the comprehensive tools needed to run their business from a single dashboard. Even more, they have a greater range of resources to offer their clients such as A/B testing and a Helpdesk. They can also easily access understandable analytics to help monitor their success in their marketing campaigns.
“Some of the power features that pop out now are the Helpdesk with a ticket system. We like the Membership feature, and we get multiple memberships within Kartra. Of course, having your pages and your sequences and automations working together, where it all ties together, is awesome. I can tag stuff on a sales page, which I couldn’t do with ActiveCampaign or with Optimizepress. So having the tagging within pages, tagging within emails – that’s really cool.”
Bring On The Benefits
There is no doubt Kartra made business easier for The Coolest Couple. In fact, it has solved the challenge of being too technical. Unlike the other platforms, which Lorna shied away from, Kartra’s drag-and-drop functionality means Lorna can participate more in building and editing their projects — leading to more productivity for their business.
Plus, it makes streamlining their teaching and consulting portion of their business a cinch.
“[Kartra] gives us the ability to have a lot of these tools that we can use together, and we can teach people how to use Kartra instead of having to teach them how to use WordPress, how to use OptimizePress, [and] how to use an autoresponder. Instead of having all those tools, we’re now into one tool.”
Plus, they’ve reclaimed “found” time by not having to integrate different systems. Pat even estimates they are saving about 50% of their previous monthly subscription costs.
“Kartra has basically cut or reduced our overhead… lower fee, bigger bang for our buck.”
Check out their business at thecoolestcouple.com.
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