24. 💔 Why I left my online provider

Happy Valentine’s Day!

Today our Founder & CEO, Jill McAbe wants to share with you her love story.

A story about how she fell in and out of love…and eventually had to leave the online provider for her business.

(You may already be familiar with some of the details if you read our issue: 🥁 Big News! (We Moved) + A Way Better Platform at 1/10th the Price).

But over the years my needs began to change, my business was growing yet Kartra wasn’t growing with me.

The page builder was slow. I'd update text in an email only to go back and find it had reverted back to the previous set-up, and at the time of this article, they don't have a blogging function.

I had a critical need to be searchable online and get my work out to a bigger audience but Kartra's SEO strategies lagged behind market expectations.

But the most frustrating issue, was the arbitrary blocking of leads. Some of my paying customers email addresses would get blacklisted and because of that they'd be blocked and wouldn't receive any of our communications.

Yet even with all that...I stayed.

It was wasn't easy to just leave. I’d invested so much time, money, and training into this relationship. My entire catalog of webpages, memberships, and email sequences lived there. I wasn’t ready to just throw that all away. Afterall, we had history.

What I didn’t know at the time was I was struggling with something called the Sunk Cost Fallacy; a phenomenon whereby a person is reluctant to abandon a strategy or course of action because they have invested heavily in it, even when it is clear that abandonment would be more beneficial.

Then, as our team began to excitedly discuss plans and strategies for the upcoming quarters I had to admit to myself that our future couldn’t continue with this online provider. It was expensive, I wasn't comfortable recommending it to friends or clients and the lack of SEO was keeping me invisible to potential clients.

Our relationship had run its course.

Once I began searching I found that in the past six years things had changed and new options were available…and that's when I found ‘the one’.

Systeme caught my eye and the more I got to know it, the more I realized how much we had in common.

It has a page builder that is user-friendly and makes great looking pages. It has optimal SEO strategies. You create your own automation rules, which allows you to customize how you collect your data and it has one of the better industry blogging functions. As well, it supports paypal, something Kartra didn't.

What makes me really happy though is that it grows with your needs.

There is an all-in-one plan for free! Not just a 30 day trial, but a totally free plan. I needed a few more options at my business level, but even their paid plans are extremely reasonable, so I keep more money in my pocket and feel comfortable referring it to others.

Something else we appreciate with Systeme is it's amazing affiliate program. If you love using it and recommend it to others, it can end up paying for your own plan.

My team and I are now packing our resources into digital cardboard boxes and moving over to Systeme.

It wasn't an easy decision for us to switch online providers for our entire business but sometimes you have to ask yourself, "is this relationship serving my needs?". If the answer is no, then maybe it's time for a change, which can open you up to finding the one that truly is your better match.