I’ve had the chance to use Kajabi emails for nearly 2 years now.

During this time, I’ve seen Kajabi Email Marketing capabilities improve from decent to the point where you can replace Kajabi alternatives, such as ActiveCampaigns and ConvertKit, with a single subscription to Kajabi.

Or can you, really?

In this review, we will be letting you know if Kajabi can really replace full-blown specialist email marketing tools. We will be focusing on two very important aspects: automation and email deliverability.

You may also need to be aware of certain trade-offs when switching. We’ll share that, too.

But first, a quick recap.

What does Kajabi Emails do?

Kajabi’s email marketing service lets you collect email addresses from a website, landing page, podcast, webinar, and more.

Then you can segment your email subscribers using tags, set up automated email campaigns with triggers (including automated responses), and customize your emails to improve deliverability and conversions.

The inbuilt Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool enables you to manage your contacts, including cleaning email duplicates and inactive subscribers.

Now, if you’ve read our full Kajabi review, you know that Kajabi is an all-in-one platform for online business owners.

It is especially ideal for creating, marketing, and selling digital products, like online courses, coaching sessions, group trainings, ebooks, and spreadsheets. Heck! You can even receive payments directly to Kajabi Payments (which supports Google Pay and Apple Pay).

Kajabi’s features reflect this emphasis on digital products.

The Kajabi email marketing system is based on three key components: Email Broadcast, Email Sequence, and Event Email.

Picture this:

Here’s what the different types of emails are all about:

• Email Broadcast: Send one-time broadcasts or email blasts. It is ideal for making announcements, sending newsletters, delivering targeted reminders, and sharing one-time offers.
• Email Sequence: Send a series of follow-up emails based on rules, triggers, and subscriber behavior. It is great for email marketing campaigns (email automation).
• Event Email: This enables you to create marketing emails around a specific date for announcements, flash sales, product launches, event registration, podcast or webinar attendance, in-person or digital events, and more.

Now, let’s dig into the detailed Kajabi email marketing review so you can tell what you are getting (and whether Kajabi alternatives, such as ConvertKit and Keap, are the better email marketing platforms).

One more thing. I recommend approaching this Kajabi emails review from the angle of creating and selling digital products.

But if you are looking into selling physical products and services, you may need to consider Kajabi’s competitor products like Systeme, Ontraport or ActiveCampaign, and even ThriveCart.

Kajabi Email Marketing Features: What Can You Do With Kajabi Emails?

Here’s what email marketing by Kajabi delivers.

1. Collecting emails, email list management, and CRM in Kajabi

You already know this. Your email list is your greatest asset. Even if your social media channels are suspended or something, the mailing list can still be of value since you can move with it anywhere.

In this regard, Kajabi enables you to build your contact list in multiple ways, including:

• Build a subscribe page and add it to your website’s navigation bar
• Offer lead magnets using Kajabi’s Freebie Sales Pipeline
• Include email subscribe pop-ups, sign-up forms, contact page, forms, etc
• Email subscribe landing pages
• Offer gated content through memberships, webinars, podcasts, and online community.
• Use a subscribe footer under blog posts

Kajabi also lets you bulk-upload emails to its in-built CRM. You can further clean the mailing list (remove duplicate emails and inactive subscribers) and insert custom fields to add more subscriber details (for segmentation).

In fact, like ConvertKit, Kajabi’s email marketing is tag-based, not list-based. This means you can tag customers according to their specific behavior, such as subscriber status or purchase history, which is great for segmentation and hyper-personalizing emails.

Email templates and email composer

I like the fact that Kajabi offers a generous number of email templates to start with. You can choose from them to create beautiful emails. Or, you can create your emails from a blank canvas.

These are targeted, purpose-driven templates, and are even named accordingly, such as cart abandonment, drip email notification, and assessment completion emails:

You can further customize Kajabi emails to suit the feel and look of your brand. Yet, Kajabi’s Email editor also enables you to create and send beautiful emails from scratch.

That’s great because plain text or simple emails do get better engagement than emails that are overly customized. You know, something like this:

Despite that, I think you can still send impressive membership, community, training, webinar, and podcast emails to further connect with your people through your branding. The email personalization can foster instant brand recognition and connection, which may help boost engagement.

But if you are wondering, Kajabi’s visual email editor only works for Email Broadcasts for now, not Sequences.

In addition, you can also use a custom email domain to improve deliverability, instant recognition, trust, and further put your brand in front of your target audience.

In fact, you can use your actual signature at the bottom of your Kajabi emails by adding its HTML code in a Text block.

But I’m looking forward to the day when Kajabi can natively A/B test emails (or even do split testing). Currently, you have to create multiple emails, send them out, and manually go through each one’s statistics to see which one works better.

Yet, you wouldn’t know what email variables led to what; whether it was your CTA, subject line, countdown timer, or other email component that helped increase your conversions.

A/B testing is one feature I like about ConvertKit vs Kajabi emails – even though ConvertKit only lets you test two email subject lines at once. Picture this:

To get similar functionality in Kajabi, you’d need to integrate a separate A/B testing tool, like Optimizely or KISSmetrics, to your Kajabi email marketing system. Not great for an all-in-one platform.

Kajabi Email automation

As mentioned earlier, Kajabi is an all-in-one platform that provides a wide range of features. You can create courses, communities, coachings, sell digital products, host webinars, and more.

It also offers a seamless automation engine that enables you to connect these features using triggers and actions.

It’s like having your own Zapier integrated right into Kajabi.

This all means you don’t need to spend extra money on integrating separate apps for the job anymore.

An example here would be when a subscriber clicks the link in an Event email and they are automatically registered as an attendee. You are also free to set up multiple triggers, based on your email Campaign goals.

Here’s how it works, essentially.

From my experience, this email sequence system will work for most content creators (great as an autoresponder, too!).

Speaking of Kajabi Email Sequences, you can use the Email Campaigns tab under Marketing to:

• Create, customize, and schedule email sequences
• Provide a timeline for sending the emails after a contact subscribes to receive them
• Send multiple emails per day (provided you do not want them sent right away)
• Add emails to sequences
• Add automations to your Kajabi email sequences

You first pick a suitable email sequence template. Then you add to it and customize its content to meet your campaign goals.

You can then go to the sequence settings to add the specific automations you wish to have. Here’s a quick illustration of how the Kajabi email sequence builder and automation options work in Kajabi:

I like that Kajabi provides a lot of well-thought-out automations in the form of conditions (When/Then).

Here’s a better view of how you go from start to adding the conditional automations:

Yet, if you are coming from a dedicated sales funnel platform like ActiveCampaign and ClickFunnels, you may find Kajabi’s sequences a bit limited.

Among the limitations here are:

• You cannot pause an active email sequence once its running
• There is no way to set delivery times for individual emails
• If you want to create splits and paths in response to certain conditions, you’ll need to create another sequence.
• You can’t set more than one email in a sequence to go out immediately. You must wait until the next day.

Yet, as I’ve mentioned earlier, you probably won’t be needing these capabilities when selling digital products, including courses and 1-on-1 coaching sessions (which is what Kajabi is best for).

Email deliverability in Kajabi

I like Kajabi’s email deliverability efforts, too.

For example, you can enable double-opt-in, requiring new subscribers to verify their email addresses to be subscribed into your CRM. This is great for ensuring quality leads.

As these quality leads engage with your emails, email delivery platforms consider your domain safe and credible (sender reputation), which further improves your email deliverability. Here’s the process the typical email takes to your subscribers’ inboxes (if ever) for perspective:

Image: Kajabi

I also like Kajabi SPF and DKIM spam detection systems, which can also help reduce spam and protect your email domain’s reputation.

Besides, Kajabi’s auto-resend feature enables you to retry delivering emails that have bounced or haven’t been delivered for whatever reason – all in an effort to improve deliverability.

Furthermore, Kajabi enables you to test your custom domain connection (DNS records for your webmail) to prevent webmail disruption, like this:

Moreover, Kajabi offers tips on creating emails that do not trigger spam alarms in your recipient’s inbox. This also includes practicing email warming, which involves sending your most engaging emails to the most active contacts incrementally.

One thing, though.

I’d like to see Kajabi address the issue of unsubscription options (or lack thereof) soon. Right now, if a subscriber hits the unsubscribe button in a Kajabi email footer, they are automatically removed from future emails.

It would be great if there were options, such as letting them choose whether to receive your newsletter instead of marketing emails. This can help creators understand what their subscribers really want — and choose how to fulfill those needs without losing the subscriber entirely.

Kajabi Email marketing metrics

I like that we can view both individual email metrics as well as overall metrics for Broadcasts, Sequences, and Events.

Kajabi email metrics include statistics such as emails sent, delivered, opened, clicked, hard bounced (bounce rates), unsubscribed, customers, and net revenue generated. You can click each metric to view even more granular details about it.

Yes, you can view email metrics for your overall sequence and the individual emails within that sequence. You can see this, including Kajabi email statuses, next to each sequence under Email Campaigns:

In addition, you can view what actions individual recipients took. You can also filter the details by their name, action taken, email, and the date and time of their last action. And you can use this information to determine what techniques are working and which ones to improve.

Nothing fancy here. But the metrics do get the job done.

Kajabi Email marketing pricing

Again, you’ll notice Kajabi pricing is targeted to online entrepreneurs who want an all-in-one business solution, rather than only an email marketing platform.

Consider this:

Kajabi’s base plan costs $149 per month. It lets you send unlimited marketing emails, but it limits your reach to 10,000 contacts and 1,000 active customers. In addition, you can create unlimited landing pages to collect email addresses, promote a product, or showcase something.

Yet, to really take advantage of Kajabi email automations, custom branding, and affiliate marketing, you’ll need to upgrade to the higher $199/month and $399/month plans.

Also, if you’re planning to have your entire email marketing system in Kajabi, you may eventually end up upgrading to the Pro plan at $399 per month. You will be able to have up to 100,000 contacts in your email list with this upgrade. Once again, this can be cheaper than working with a separate tool like ConvertKit and provides you with an integrated approach when it comes to running an online business.

Kajabi Email Marketing Review: Verdict

Here’s the deal. Competitors like ConvertKit may seem more affordable.

However, Kajabi does offer more features within a single platform and subscription, such as courses, communities, coaching, memberships, and podcasts. It also provides good builders for broadcast and sequence emails, sales funnels, and website and landing pages.

The Kajabi email marketing platform is perfect for businesses that need an all-in-one online platform. When you have an email marketing tool integrated into an all-in-one platform, the resulting features can be very powerful.

In this regard, you can possibly replace separate tools, such as ConvertKit for email marketing, ThriveCart for checkouts, and Teachable for course creation, with a single Kajabi subscription. Considering it, it’s a real good value for money!

Kajabi Emails FAQs

Does Kajabi support email marketing automations and autoresponders?

Yes, you can use Kajabi Email Campaigns for sequences (automations) and set up autoresponses.

Is ConvertKit better than Kajabi for email marketing?

It depends. Kajabi is more of an all-in-one business platform for online business owners with solid email list management and automation capabilities. ConvertKit, on the other hand, is a dedicated email marketing platform. It lacks some of Kajabi’s features, including podcasting and 1-on-1 coaching.

What are the limitations of Kajabi email marketing?

Kajabi emails do not support A/B tests or split testing. Additionally, you cannot re-schedule individual emails in an active email sequence or send more than one sequence email per day.