KARTE

What KARTE is

KARTE is a customer experience (CX) platform from PLAID, Inc. (プレイド), and its email side is a marketing automation package called KARTE Message. KARTE itself analyzes how people behave on a company's website, and KARTE Message carries that behavior into channels outside the site, email and push notifications, with personalized sends that the company says run without code. The audience is consumer-facing businesses: PLAID's own material describes KARTE Message as marketing automation for BtoC companies.

Most of what KARTE publishes about email lives on CX Clip, its Japanese-language media site, which runs customer stories, how-to articles, event reports and product news. The clearest description of the email product is an article by the product marketing lead for KARTE Message, which explains how the company thinks email should be run and how its tools support that. When that article was published, KARTE Message was presented as a beta (β版).

How KARTE thinks about email

The article starts from the three reasons companies come to PLAID looking for a marketing automation tool: they want better results from email or push, they want to fold several tools (email, A/B testing, on-site messaging) into one, or they want to switch away from a tool that is not working. It then frames email goals by metric: getting information read (open rate), bringing people to the site or app (click rate) and getting them to buy (conversion rate).

From there it describes three levels of email marketing. The first is the bulk send, the same email to a whole list, which it calls cheap and easy to start. The second is the segment email, where different groups receive different content. The third is the step or scenario email, where a sequence is designed around when, to whom and with what content each message goes, so the whole series is tuned to the user rather than each message alone.

It names three matching problems: teams that see opens and clicks but cannot link email to purchases or sign-ups on the site; teams with no clear axis or data for splitting a list; and teams that want scenarios but do not know in what order messages should go.

Behavioral segmentation, the core idea

KARTE's answer is to segment by behavior as well as by attributes such as gender or age. The article gives two reasons. A behavioral segment makes the goal of a send measurable: mail only people who have not visited the site in the last month, and every visit that follows can be read as the effect of the email, which a mixed list of recent and long-lapsed visitors cannot show. A behavioral split such as registered versus not registered also prevents duplicate sends when a team later mails attribute-based segments.

On the analysis side, KARTE runs funnel analysis and what it calls n1 analysis, a look at individual users, on website behavior data. KARTE Message then uses those attributes and behaviors to personalize email and push without code.

A worked example from the article

The article walks through a recruiting and job-matching platform with two sides, job seekers and hiring companies. The team first broke down the steps each side takes before an interview, then ran a funnel analysis and found that many job seekers stalled at the step of receiving a scout message from a company.

It split job seekers who had received no scouts for a period into three segments: people who never appeared in companies' search results, people whose resumes were never opened, and people whose resumes were opened but who still received no scout. Looking at their behavior, it saw that the resumes of people without scouts were shorter than average. Each segment got a different email: search keywords that recruiters often use, tips for showing up higher in the resume list, and advice on improving a resume and how long it should be. After the sends, resumes got longer and more job seekers received scouts. Once results held steady for several months, the team automated the flow, sending a fixed template to users segmented by whether they had received a scout in the last month.

The article turns this into five steps it recommends for growing a service with behavioral email: map user behavior, analyze it, prepare the campaign, run it, and automate only after the results have proved stable over a period.

Choosing a tool, in KARTE's terms

PLAID lists four criteria for choosing a marketing automation tool, and they describe what it built KARTE Message to do. The first is whether the tool collects and manages behavioral data from the site and app and lets marketers use it in email. The second is whether it shortens the path from a hypothesis to an action, so marketers get through more test cycles and sharpen their judgment. The third is whether it can automate a campaign once a winning approach has been found. The fourth is whether marketers can actually use all of this, judged by difficulty and ease of use rather than by the feature list alone.

The wider KARTE family

CX Clip covers other parts of the product line. Articles introduce KARTE Blocks, a tool for improving a website more freely from the user's point of view, Craft Cross CMS, a headless CMS, and KARTE Datahub, for which PLAID offers a product document alongside an overview of KARTE itself. Another article describes automatic optimization of on-site messages using AI and machine learning, and a product note describes a half-modal message template for apps. For new customers there is an onboarding program, introduced in its own article.

Customers and community

The customer stories on CX Clip name QVC, au, Premium Water, the Nikkei digital edition, Sharp's COCORO STORE and Kaunet, which combined FAQ, an AI agent and live chat for support. PLAID runs a user community called KARTE Friends with regular meetups, and the site reports on its events and conferences.

Pricing and contact

The site publishes no prices for KARTE or KARTE Message; companies use the contact form, and PLAID offers a downloadable guide on choosing a BtoC marketing automation tool that also covers five features of KARTE Message. CX Clip has a weekly email newsletter.

Who it suits

KARTE suits a consumer brand or online service that already has meaningful site or app traffic and wants email and push decided by what people do there, with a marketing team willing to work through analysis before automating. The job-matching example shows the kind of multi-sided service where this approach pays off.

It is less suited to a team that wants a simple newsletter tool with a published price, or to anyone who needs an English-language interface and documentation, since the published material is in Japanese.