Kartra lets you use recipient conditions to control who receives your Emails and Sequence emails.
Recipient conditions work differently depending on how the email is sent:
For an Email, you select the audience that should receive the one-time message before sending it.
For a Sequence email, contacts must first be subscribed to the Sequence. Recipient conditions on an email step determine which of those contacts receive that particular email when they reach the step.
Why target your emails?
Not every message needs to go to every contact.
Targeting lets you send messages based on information Kartra has about your contacts, such as their interests, purchases, subscriptions, or previous activity. This can help you make your emails more relevant to the people receiving them and avoid repeatedly sending messages to contacts who aren't interested or engaged.
For example, instead of sending the same promotion to your entire audience, you could target:
Previous customers with an offer related to something they purchased.
Contacts who showed interest in a particular product or topic.
Members of a particular list who also have a specific tag.
Contacts who engaged with previous emails or content.
For Emails, targeting can also help you avoid sending to large groups of inactive or unengaged contacts, which may increase your deliverability risk. Kartra provides a recipient risk indicator to help you assess the selected audience before sending.
Choose recipients for an Email
When creating an Email, use the From-To settings to define the contacts who should receive it.
You can select recipients based on conditions such as:
Subscription to a list.
Tags assigned to the contact.
Purchases.
Email engagement.
Access to a membership.
Other contact information and activity available in Kartra.
Using multiple conditions
You can combine multiple conditions using AND/OR logic to create a more specific audience.
Using AND narrows the audience to contacts who meet all the connected conditions.
Using OR lets you include contacts who meet different qualifying conditions.
For example, you could target contacts who are:
Subscribed to the "2026 Summit Registrants" list AND have the "Past attendees" tag.
This means that only the members of the 2026 Summit Registrants list that have the Past attendees tag will be selected as recipients.
Check the recipient risk indicator
When you select recipients for an Email, Kartra assesses the audience and displays a color-coded risk indicator.
The indicator ranges from red for higher-risk audiences to dark green for audiences with no identified risk.
Kartra considers engagement and deliverability signals such as:
How frequently contacts open your emails.
How recently they engaged with an email.
Bounce rates within the selected audience.
A red or orange indicator suggests that the selected audience may present a higher deliverability risk. Kartra also displays guidance based on the risk level to help you adjust your recipient selection before sending.
The risk indicator only applies to Emails. It isn't available for Sequence emails.
Choose recipients for a Sequence email
Sequence emails work differently because you don't select the complete audience for each email before sending.
Contacts first subscribe to the Sequence through a starting rule, an automation, or manual subscription. They then move through the Sequence based on its configured steps and timing.
When you add an email step to a Sequence, its recipient settings determine which contacts should receive that email when they reach the step.
If the email should be sent to everyone who reaches the step, select Anyone reaching this step.
You can also add recipient conditions when only certain contacts reaching the step should receive the email.
For example, you could use a condition to send a particular Sequence email only to contacts with a specific tag. This lets you adapt the communication within the same Sequence based on information you have about each contact.
Recipient conditions don't add new contacts to the Sequence. Only contacts who are already subscribed to the Sequence and reach the email step can be eligible to receive it.