Kajabi Automations: Everything You Need to Know (2024)

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Kajabi is one of the most advanced online course platforms in the market, and its automation features are a big part of why.

Kajabi automations allow you to automate a variety of tasks in your business, from marketing emails to student support and engagement.

In this guide, we’ll walk you through everything you need to know to create and use Kajabi Automations for your business. We’ll explain how to set up automation rules and also share numerous use cases.

Let’s jump right in.

What Is Kajabi Automations?

Automations is a native Kajabi tool that allows you to perform specific actions inside the platform based on certain trigger events.

For example, if you want to send an onboarding email sequence to the course buyers, this tool will help you create a rule to do that automatically.

Automations in Kajabi have two main components:

  • Trigger is the “when” event—i.e., when something happens.
  • Action is the “then” event—i.e., the result of the trigger.

Kajabi has dozens of triggers and actions, and you can combine them to create hundreds of unique automations.

Apart from these two components, Kajabi also allows you to add a condition to your automation rule. A condition works as a filter and ensures the action happens only when the condition is met.

How does Kajabi Automations work?
Kajabi Automations is based on an action-trigger-condition rule

So how can using Kajabi Automations help automate your online business?

With Automations, you can:

  • Boost engagement by automating interaction with the students.
  • Completely automate email marketing by creating end-to-end campaigns.
  • Automate activities in your funnel and make sales and marketing easier.

In the next section, we’ll explore these triggers and actions in detail and learn how to put them to use.

How to Set Up a Kajabi Automation

Setting up an automation in Kajabi is straightforward. The platform has a dedicated section that you can access from the Marketing tab on the left sidebar in your admin dashboard.

Here you’ll see all your existing automations, and you can click on the New Automation button to create a new when/then/if rule.

How to create a new Kajabi Automation
You can find a dedicated section for Automations under the Marketing tab

Next, you’ll see the automations popup window where you can select your trigger and action.

Kajabi Automations has dozens of different triggers for form submission, offer purchase, student activity, email campaigns, etc.

Kajabi Automations triggers
Kajabi has dozens of automation triggers

Similarly, Kajabi Automations supports several different actions. These include sending an email, adding/removing tags, granting or revoking an offer, sending unique coupons, etc.

Kajabi Automation Actions
Kajabi has several different Automation actions

In addition to triggers and actions, you also can set conditions here. These conditions are based on contact details, member activity, email activity, product access, etc.

Kajabi Automations conditions
Kajabi Automations conditions

Besides having its own dedicated section, you can access Automations from almost every section of Kajabi. The platform has integrated it with individual tools—Kajabi Funnels, Forms, Emails, Offers, Products, Events, etc.

So, when you create an automation rule from inside these tools, you’ll only see the triggers related to that tool. For example, you’ll see just three related triggers inside the Email Campaign section.

Kajabi-email-campaign-automations
Automations inside Email Campaigns in Kajabi
Kajabi Email Automation Triggers
Automation triggers inside the Email Campaigns section

This approach is quite helpful as you can create automations while creating your products, forms, or anything else without going to a separate section.

And the automation rules created this way will also be available under the dedicated Automations section, which is awesome.

Basic vs Advanced Automations

Kajabi defines their Automations as Basic and Advanced, and these are the differences between the two.

The first difference between the two is that Basic Automations allows you to set triggers and actions only, while Advanced Automations allows you to set conditions as well.

Secondly, with Basic Automations, you can create Automations only from inside individual tools. You can’t access the dedicated Automations section.

Thirdly, Basic Automations is available on all Kajabi plans, while Advanced Automations is only available on the Growth and Pro plans at $199/month and $399/month.

Use Cases of Kajabi Automations

We handpicked some useful Kajabi Automation examples that you can implement in your online business. You can also use these as inspiration to create your own unique Automations in Kajabi.

Learning and Engagement

With Automations, you can enhance learning and engagement in your Kajabi course. This can lead to better completion rates and ultimately increase the lifetime value of your customers.

Congratulate students on making progress

Kajabi has multiple triggers for student activity. It can track when a user completes a lesson or a quiz and allows you to perform different actions based on that.

For example, you can send a congratulatory email (or even a coupon code) when a student passes a Kajabi quiz. This is a great way to motivate students and encourage them to make progress.

Kajabi quiz automations
Send a congratulatory email when someone passes a quiz

Alternatively, you can automate sending additional resources via email to students who fail the quiz. This way, you can ensure that students don’t get stuck and stop making progress.

Follow up with inactive students

Kajabi lets you track student inactivity and send a follow-up email (or even an email campaign) to get them back to your platform.

If you want to personalize it further, you can create specific emails for students based on their enrolled courses.

Send an email when a student becomes inactive
Send an email when a student becomes inactive

Additionally, it is also possible to automatically cancel a subscription due to inactivity.

Onboard students and do regular check-ins

You can use Kajabi Automations to automate your onboarding and regular check-ins.

When a user purchases your online course, you can add them to an onboarding email campaign.

Add users to an onboarding sequence automatically
Add users to an onboarding sequence automatically

It’s entirely up to you what you want to include in the onboarding sequence. For example, if you want to collect feedback from your students after x number of days, you can create an assessment and include it in an email in the sequence.

Email Marketing Automation

One of the primary use cases of Kajabi Automations is to let you automate your email marketing. In this section, we’ll look at some common use cases.

Add users to your email funnel

When users visit your Kajabi landing page (or a blog post) and submit the opt-in form, their information gets captured. And you can add them to your email campaign through Automations.

Adding users to your Kajabi email funnel automatically
Adding users to your Kajabi email funnel automatically

Similarly, if you use a webinar to promote your products, you can subscribe your webinar registrants to your sales campaign automatically.

Segment users based on their actions

Kajabi offers a tagging feature for list management and segmentation. Based on what tags a user has, you can send them personalized content and offers.

For example, if someone attends your webinar vs downloads your free eBook, you can have separate email funnels for them.

Another popular way of segmenting users is to include multiple link options in your welcome email, and based on the link they click, add a unique tag to them.

Adding a tag based on email link click
Adding a tag based on email link click

Remove users from your email funnel

For your email funnel to be effective, you should be able to remove users when they reach certain goals.

For example, when a user buys your premium product, they shouldn’t be receiving the sales emails anymore. You accomplish this by creating an automation rule which triggers based on user purchases.

Remove-users-email-sequence
Remove users from a sales campaign upon purchase

Similarly, if you want to give users an option to opt-out of a specific email campaign, you can do that by inserting a link in your email(s) and then triggering an Automation when a user clicks that link.

Sales and Marketing

Kajabi Automations offers dedicated triggers and actions to boost sales and marketing efforts. Let’s explore them with some examples.

Send upsell emails

Kajabi allows you to include 1-click upsells in your checkout process. However, you can take it to the next level by using Automations.

If someone doesn’t take the upsell offer on the thank you page, you can send them a follow-up email campaign.

Setting up an automation for the same is simple. Your trigger will be purchasing the main offer, and your action will be subscribing to the upsell email sequence.

The key here is to ensure that you don’t send emails to the members who have already bought the upsell offers. You can do this by creating a condition in your automation rule.

Sending an upsell email sequence
Sending an upsell email sequence

Selling webinars to your audience

Kajabi doesn’t let you directly include webinar (or live events) access as part of an offer. However, you can automate the selling of webinars using Automations.

To do that, you’ll first need to create an offer and then use Automations to register users to the Event when they purchase the offer.

The trigger, in this case, will be Purchased an Offer, and the action will be Register for Event. Select the offer and the event, and that’s it.

Selling webinars using Kajabi Automations
Selling webinars using Automations

In addition to Kajabi webinars, you can also sell multi-session events like virtual summits using Automations.

Win back members by offering a discount

Member retention is one of the biggest challenges for any membership site owner. Fortunately, you can use Automations to win back some of the canceled subscriptions.

For example, when a member cancels their subscription, you can give them a coupon code to reduce the price or access the membership for free for a couple of months.

This can be an effective way to win back customers.

Offering a coupon on membership cancellation
Offering a coupon on membership cancellation

Another way to retain students is to provide access to some of the content for free, even if they unsubscribe. By doing so, you can grant them an offer when they cancel the membership and keep them engaged.

Managing Business Operations

Managing students and business operations can be time-consuming, but if you implement Automations, things will become easier.

Send an email notification to your team

There are many scenarios where you would want to send an email to your team, but you wouldn’t want to do it manually each time.

And this is where Automations comes in handy.

A good example of this use case would be automating an email to your team every time a student submits an assignment. The team member can then evaluate the assignment.

Kajabi Automations allows you to send an email to your team
Kajabi Automations allows you to send an email to your team

This is also helpful in providing customer service. Whenever someone cancels a subscription, becomes inactive, or struggles with an assignment, you can notify a team member and ask them to contact the member personally.

Upgrade and downgrade tiers automatically

Automations lets you easily upgrade and downgrade member tiers, making it a useful feature for running a Kajabi membership site.

Let’s say you have two membership tiers: Basic and Advanced, and you want to manage upgrades automatically.

In this case, you can set an automation rule so that when members purchase the Advanced Offer, they get deactivated from the Basic Offer, and the payment gets discontinued.

Upgrading or downgrading tiers using Automations
Upgrading or downgrading tiers using Automations

You can similarly set up the downgrading of someone’s membership tier.

Kajabi Automations Limitations

There’s no doubt that Kajabi Automations is a powerful tool. In fact, no other online course platform offers anything similar.

Having said that, there’s still room for improvement, and this section will briefly discuss its limitations and what’s missing.

Missing Triggers

Although Kajabi has more than 20 triggers, some important ones are missing. For instance, there is no trigger for completing a course.

So, if you want to send a congratulatory email when a student completes your course, you can’t do that using Automations.

Moreover, there are no triggers for Kajabi Coaching or Communities products.

No Support for Multiple Triggers/Actions

Kajabi doesn’t allow you to have multiple triggers or actions in one automation rule. So, if you want to perform more than one action based on a trigger, you’ll need to create multiple automations.

Let’s say you want to add a Kajabi tag and send a welcome email upon successful purchase. In this case, you’ll need to create two different automations.

Similarly, if there are two or more optin forms and you want to send the same welcome sequence, you’ll need to create an automation rule for each form separately.

It’s more work on your end, and managing Automations becomes harder, so we’d love to see Kajabi Automations support multiple actions and triggers.

No Visual Automation Builder

While Kajabi has a powerful Automations tool, it doesn’t have a visual automation builder.

Visual builders let you visualize how a trigger will cause an action and build your entire email funnel from a single place. As a result, they work better for creating complex automation workflows.

All specialized email marketing platforms offer a visual automation builder. For example, ConvertKit has a visual automation tool where you can add multiple triggers and define actions and even supports some advanced elements like “Delay” and “Events.”

ConvertKit's Visual Automations Builder
This is how ConvertKit’s visual automation builder looks

Conclusion

In this article, we looked at what Kajabi Automations is and how it can help you save time and increase engagement and sales.

The examples we have included here are just a few of the possibilities Kajabi Automations offers. What you can do with it is only limited by your imagination.

If you are not using Kajabi yet, sign up for a free trial today to start building your business.

We hope this article helped you learn everything about Kajabi Automations.

What’s your favorite Automation example? How are you going to use it in your business? Let us know in the comments below.

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