As a company owner for over a years, I rely on software program and automation to simplify procedures and supply results. So when GoHighLevel arised on the scene few years back, it definitely caught my interest GoHighLevel Email Campaigns.
The idea was enticing– an all-in-one customer monitoring system with marketing, sales, and service tools integrated together. As a business owner always wanting to simplify and scale my company, it looked like a desire become a reality on paper. That would not desire a solitary remedy that does it all?
But in this comprehensive GoHighLevel evaluation, I’ll take you inside my dreadful journey of trying (and stopping working) to switch to this popular brand-new software program. You’ll learn:
If you’re thinking about whether GoHighLevel is right for your very own business demands, ideally you can pick up from my excruciating blunders and inflated expectations.
Spoiler: I do NOT suggest GoHighLevel. If you need a CRM, begin with this list of finest CRMs instead. I utilize Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re trying to find a sales, marketing, and job management choice to GoHighLevel, after that below are a few we suggest.
Backstory: Why I Took Into Consideration Switching Over from Keap
To understand what attracted me to GoHighLevel in the first place, you require context about my previous configuration. For over 5 years I had actually been gladly depending on Keap (previously Infusionsoft) to fulfill all my customer management and automation requirements.
I found Keap intuitive to utilize and it managed everything I required– CRM, email marketing, sales funnels, membership sites, and client assistance.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are created to aid local business keep their customers while including new ones easily. Automate follow-ups with emails and messages, making certain leads and customers get the best messages at the right time. Usage site and social media forms to enhance lead follow-up, and manage your growth with very easy consultation scheduling and lead tracking. Boost sales with automated quoting, invoicing, and repayment handling, maximizing your time. With Keap, small businesses can conserve 10 hours weekly and increase income by 39%. Begin with a 14-day free trial, no charge card called for.
Why we like Keap
Keap uses a comprehensive consumer partnership administration (CRM) and marketing automation solution customized for small companies and entrepreneurs. We appreciate Keap’s concentrate on enhancing sales processes and nurturing client partnerships via effective automation tools. The platform’s all-in-one technique incorporates CRM, e-mail marketing, invoicing, and job management, making it specifically attractive for organizations aiming to settle their technology pile.
Generally, it simply functioned dependably with marginal fuss or maintenance required. My open and click-through rates were excellent (like 35% great). Automations ran smoothly with no issues.
So why on earth was I tempted to uproot my entire functional structure from a system that worked to try something unverified and untried?
In hindsight I can admit I got attracted by the alarm phone call of “shiny object disorder”. You know the feeling: when everybody’s speaking about a brand-new device that will certainly change your organization … The lawn usually looks greener beyond, and I questioned whether GoHighLevel may decrease friction points that I ‘d discovered to endure throughout the years with Keap.
I stood up to in the beginning, however a couple of even more disappointments led me to assume possibly it was time for a change.
The Financial investment: Moving My Agency to GoHighLevel
Previously this year I made a decision to take the plunge. I signed up for HighLevel’s Company plan at $297/month, investing dramatically greater than the $97/month starter price.
This had not been a choice I took lightly. I knew switching over systems was going to call for moving all my Keap data and basically rebuilding my whole technology infrastructure from scratch utilizing every one of the GoHighLevel integrations available.
Right here’s an overview of simply several of the effort called for:
- By hand exporting 20,000+ email customer documents
- Recreating dozens of automations and workflows
- Moving customer profiles, notes, and job information to the brand-new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe payment integration
- Setting up landing pages, promotions, and sales funnels around again
- Learning a completely international UX and user interface design
Done in, I invested around 30-40 tedious hours of setup work transitioning every little thing over– and also dealing with shed productivity throughout the switch.
But ultimately, it was a calculated investment I agreed to make. I figured some temporary pain would settle with GoHighLevel giving a far better long-lasting option for my service, Dripify. Oh exactly how wrong I was …
It just took me regarding a month of hands-on use to understand I had actually made a large blunder. The issues began accumulating promptly, till it got to a factor I had to reduce my losses and switch over back to Keap entirely.
Allow’s walk through the horrible issues I experienced.
Safety And Security Issues & Many Bugs
Provided GoHighLevel positioned itself as an all-in-one automation platform, I took care to carefully recreate every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These consisted of series for onboarding new email subscribers, onboarding brand-new clients, automating follow-ups for webinar enrollments, sending event suggestions, taking care of subscription expirations and much more.
Every little thing seemed to be functioning penalty … up until unexpectedly it wasn’t. One morning, I awoke to find 171 entirely unimportant emails had actually been sent to individuals who ought to NOT have actually received them. This happened three days straight, with a various set of 160 individuals each day.
I desperately tried repairing and restoring the automation from the ground up. However the trouble lingered.
When I seriously connected to their support team, they vaguely declared “server issues” were to blame. But this explanation didn’t make any type of feeling, considering that the errors proceeded taking place each morning like clockwork unassociated to any kind of downtime.
In my mind, this substantial failure was completely unacceptable and just didn’t work for my company. I have hundreds of get in touches with relying on my automated campaigns running efficiently.
So if GoHighLevel was mosting likely to be entirely unreliable, exactly how could I leave mission-critical workflows and sensitive customer data to their innovation?
The unintuitive interface only worsened these concerns …
Frustrating UX
Originating from Keap where whatever was seamless and instinctive, GoHighLevel’s learning contour really felt steep and complicated.
Basic jobs like editing and enhancing workflows included digging through menu systems that were all over the place. Key settings were unexplainably spread in completely different sections. Moving between functions really felt disjointed or confusing.
I’ll inform you what I suggest by speaking about their funnel builder as an example. There were 3 separate settings panels to handle total, specific, and item configurations. Yet for some crazy reason, the links to accessibility each of these core settings were expanded on contrary sides of the display. What!?
As somebody who values tidy, thoughtful design, this seriously annoyed me.
It enhanced that GoHighLevel still felt like a work-in-progress rather than a sleek product ready for prime-time usage. Their priorities seemed concentrated on packing in every feature under the sun, with bad usability as a second thought.
And talking features, I quickly recognized the small cost tag included costly concessions …
Misleading Pricing GoHighLevel Email Campaigns
One of GoHighLevel’s biggest marketing points is the budget-friendly price for access to a lot of features. But I swiftly discovered this affordable base expense was deceptive.
They nickle-and-dimed individuals with occasional fees for core functionality. Unexpectedly my charge card declarations had obscure $10 charges from GoHighLevel occasionally.
As it ended up, you obtain charged whenever you send an e-mail through their web servers. So for high quantity customers, this added up to thousands of dollars in unanticipated costs.
In between these per-email costs and paying additional for deliverability add-ons like Mailgun, my “budget friendly” GoHighLevel subscription ended up costing dramatically greater than my Keap plan.
The low price tag was alluring, but simply not reasonable in practice. This bait-and-switch left a bad taste in my mouth.
Email Rates Suffered
The final dealbreaker was seeing my carefully nurtured e-mail open rates drop practically overnight after switching to GoHighLevel.
Previously, my target market engagement constantly hit 35-40% open prices in Keap month after month. But once I migrated their records over to GoHighLevel, performance tanked promptly to a pitiful 9% open price.
Despite how much I optimized my sending practices or attempted every troubleshooting technique, I can hardly push open prices back right into the teens– still a 50%+ decline from my previous benchmarks GoHighLevel Email Campaigns.
Let me repeat: my exact same audience and emails unexpectedly had horrible engagement. The only thing I could assume that would certainly be triggering this was whatever was happening behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a firm so depending on email marketing, this was a big deal.
Between the debilitating deliverability concerns, concealed charges, damaged features, and awful user interface, I had actually finally reached my restriction …
Why I Stop GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Simply 45 days after migrating my company to GoHighLevel, I knew I had actually made a significant error. The cons substantially surpassed any kind of advantages.
No software application is excellent, yet the large quantity of problems was beyond acceptable.
At the end of the day, software comes down to trust. If I can’t trust it to handle vital features properly or believe a supplier has my best interests in mind, then it’s time to walk away– also after spending considerable time, cash, and effort moving.
So I made the challenging contact us to turn around course and return back to Keap completely simply weeks after going done in on GoHighLevel. Let’s explore what I picked up from this fiasco.
Trick Takeaways: What I Picked up from My GoHighLevel Blunder
My time with HighLevel can be summarized as an expensive accident. But in knowledge, it instructed me a couple of vital lessons:
- Stick to what jobs. Do not upset what’s working unless something is definitively better across the board. Change brings danger.
- Veterinarian claims thoroughly. Marketing hype around new software commonly covers bigger underlying imperfections. Deep due persistance is crucial.
- Pick simpleness over features. Well-designed tools ought to make your work life much easier, not more complex and messy.
- Openness builds depend on. Nontransparent pricing, unethical reseller terms, and finger-pointing to evade problems ruins trust fund.
- Look for unbiased reviews. Happy assistance examines indicate much less if too much problems suggest bad general functionality.
- Perfection is difficult. No single remedy can completely fulfill every special organization need. Discover the least-bad fit.
- Advancement over revolution. Step-by-step renovations commonly outweigh risky wholesale reinvention of what already works penalty.
Simply put, I learned to be extra unconvinced of “as well excellent to be true” marketing cases and much less attracted by the attraction of glossy new things. The tools you utilize daily need to gain depend on through transparency and performance, not slick advertising.