As a company proprietor for over a years, I rely upon software program and automation to enhance operations and deliver outcomes. So when GoHighLevel emerged on the scene few years back, it definitely captured my focus GoHighLevel Email Deliverability.
The idea was enticing– an all-in-one client management system with marketing, sales, and service tools integrated with each other. As a business owner constantly looking to simplify and scale my business, it felt like a desire happened theoretically. That wouldn’t want a single remedy that does it all?
Yet in this in-depth GoHighLevel testimonial, I’ll take you inside my tragic trip of attempting (and falling short) to switch over to this prominent brand-new software application. You’ll discover:
If you’re thinking about whether GoHighLevel is right for your very own service demands, hopefully you can pick up from my agonizing blunders and blew up expectations.
Looter: I do NOT advise GoHighLevel. If you need a CRM, begin with this list of best CRMs rather. I make use of Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re searching for a sales, marketing, and project administration option to GoHighLevel, after that right here are a couple of we suggest.
Backstory: Why I Took Into Consideration Changing from Keap
To understand what attracted me to GoHighLevel in the first place, you require context regarding my previous arrangement. For over 5 years I had been gladly relying on Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) to satisfy all my customer monitoring and automation needs.
I discovered Keap instinctive to make use of and it dealt with whatever I required– CRM, e-mail marketing, sales funnels, membership sites, and client assistance.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are designed to help small companies keep their clients while including new ones easily. Automate follow-ups with e-mails and texts, making certain leads and clients obtain the appropriate messages at the right time. Use site and social networks types to streamline lead follow-up, and manage your development with simple consultation scheduling and lead monitoring. Boost sales with automated estimating, invoicing, and settlement handling, liberating your time. With Keap, local business can conserve 10 hours weekly and rise income by 39%. Start with a 14-day free trial, no bank card needed.
Why we like Keap
Keap uses an extensive customer connection management (CRM) and marketing automation remedy customized for small companies and business owners. We value Keap’s concentrate on streamlining sales processes and supporting customer connections via powerful automation devices. The system’s all-in-one method combines CRM, e-mail marketing, invoicing, and job management, making it particularly attractive for businesses looking to combine their technology pile.
Generally, it simply worked accurately with very little difficulty or upkeep needed. My open and click-through rates were wonderful (like 35% terrific). Automations ran smoothly with no issues.
So why in the world was I attracted to uproot my entire functional structure from a system that worked to try something unverified and untested?
In hindsight I can confess I obtained attracted by the alarm telephone call of “glossy object disorder”. You know the feeling: when every person’s talking about a new device that will reinvent your organization … The yard often looks greener beyond, and I wondered whether GoHighLevel may minimize rubbing points that I ‘d found out to tolerate throughout the years with Keap.
I resisted at first, however a couple of even more irritations led me to assume perhaps it was time for a modification.
The Financial investment: Moving My Company to GoHighLevel
Earlier this year I made a decision to take the plunge. I registered for HighLevel’s Agency plan at $297/month, investing considerably more than the $97/month starter price.
This wasn’t a decision I took lightly. I recognized switching systems was going to need migrating all my Keap information and essentially reconstructing my whole tech infrastructure from scratch utilizing every one of the GoHighLevel integrations offered.
Below’s an overview of simply some of the initiative required:
- By hand exporting 20,000+ e-mail customer documents
- Recreating lots of automations and workflows
- Relocating customer profiles, notes, and job information to the new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe payment integration
- Establishing landing pages, discounts, and sales funnels throughout again
- Learning an entirely international UX and user interface layout
All in, I spent around 30-40 tiresome hours of setup work transitioning every little thing over– in addition to handling lost productivity during the switch.
But ultimately, it was a calculated financial investment I wanted to make. I figured some short-term pain would settle with GoHighLevel offering a much better lasting option for my service, Dripify. Oh just how wrong I was …
It just took me regarding a month of hands-on usage to realize I had actually made a huge mistake. The problems began accumulating swiftly, up until it got to a point I needed to cut my losses and change back to Keap completely.
Let’s walk through the nightmarish issues I experienced.
Safety And Security Issues & Several Vermin
Provided GoHighLevel placed itself as an all-in-one automation platform, I made sure to thoroughly recreate every workflow from my old Keap account.
These consisted of series for onboarding brand-new email clients, onboarding new customers, automating follow-ups for webinar registrations, sending occasion reminders, handling membership expirations and much more.
Everything seemed to be functioning fine … up until unexpectedly it wasn’t. One morning, I woke up to find 171 completely pointless e-mails had actually been sent to customers who should NOT have actually obtained them. This happened three days straight, with a different set of 160 individuals each day.
I hysterically attempted repairing and restoring the automation from the ground up. But the trouble lingered.
When I seriously reached out to their support group, they slightly asserted “web server problems” were to blame. However this explanation didn’t make any sense, considering that the errors continued taking place each early morning like clockwork unconnected to any type of downtime.
In my mind, this substantial failing was completely unacceptable and simply really did not help my service. I have countless get in touches with relying upon my automated campaigns running efficiently.
So if GoHighLevel was mosting likely to be completely unreliable, just how could I turn over mission-critical workflows and delicate customer information to their technology?
The unintuitive user interface only compounded these concerns …
Aggravating UX
Originating from Keap where everything was smooth and instinctive, GoHighLevel’s learning contour really felt high and complicated.
Easy tasks like editing workflows entailed digging through food selection systems that were all over the place. Key settings were unexplainably scattered in entirely various sections. Relocating between functions felt disjointed or confusing.
I’ll tell you what I mean by talking about their funnel builder as an example. There were 3 different settings panels to take care of overall, individual, and product setups. Yet for some insane reason, the links to access each of these core setups were expanded on contrary sides of the screen. What!?
As a person that values tidy, thoughtful style, this seriously irritated me.
It strengthened that GoHighLevel still seemed like a work-in-progress instead of a refined product ready for prime-time use. Their concerns appeared focused on packing in every feature under the sun, with poor functionality as a second thought.
And speaking of features, I soon realized the low cost tag featured costly compromises …
Deceptive Pricing GoHighLevel Email Deliverability
One of GoHighLevel’s biggest marketing factors is the economical price for accessibility to many features. However I rapidly learned this low-cost base cost was misleading.
They nickle-and-dimed customers with erratic charges for core performance. Suddenly my credit card declarations had unclear $10 charges from GoHighLevel occasionally.
As it turned out, you obtain billed every time you send an e-mail with their web servers. So for high volume individuals, this added up to hundreds of dollars in unexpected prices.
Between these per-email fees and paying added for deliverability add-ons like Mailgun, my “inexpensive” GoHighLevel membership wound up costing substantially greater than my Keap plan.
The low price tag was alluring, yet just not reasonable in practice. This bait-and-switch left a negative taste in my mouth.
Email Fees Suffered
The final dealbreaker was seeing my meticulously nurtured e-mail open rates drop almost over night after changing to GoHighLevel.
Previously, my target market interaction continually hit 35-40% open prices in Keap month after month. But once I moved their documents over to GoHighLevel, efficiency tanked instantaneously to a pitiful 9% open rate.
Despite just how much I maximized my sending out methods or tried every fixing technique, I might hardly nudge open rates back right into the teenagers– still a 50%+ decline from my previous benchmarks GoHighLevel Email Deliverability.
Let me repeat: my exact same audience and e-mails suddenly had dreadful involvement. The only thing I might believe that would be triggering this was whatever was taking place behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a company so depending on e-mail marketing, this was a big deal.
In between the crippling deliverability concerns, concealed charges, broken features, and terrible interface, I had actually finally reached my limit …
Why I Stop GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Simply 45 days after moving my firm to GoHighLevel, I understood I had actually made a massive blunder. The disadvantages dramatically exceeded any advantages.
No software application is excellent, yet the large quantity of problems was past appropriate.
At the end of the day, software boils down to trust. If I can not trust it to manage critical features effectively or think a vendor has my benefits in mind, then it’s time to walk away– even after investing considerable time, cash, and effort migrating.
So I made the hard call to reverse course and return back to Keap entirely just weeks after going all in on GoHighLevel. Allow’s explore what I picked up from this fiasco.
Trick Takeaways: What I Picked up from My GoHighLevel Mistake
My time with HighLevel can be summed up as a pricey ill fortune. But in knowledge, it educated me a couple of essential lessons:
- Stay with what jobs. Don’t distress what’s functioning unless something is definitively better across the board. Change brings danger.
- Veterinarian asserts completely. Marketing hype around brand-new software application commonly covers larger underlying problems. Deep due diligence is essential.
- Choose simpleness over features. Well-designed tools need to make your work life less complicated, not more complex and messy.
- Openness builds count on. Opaque pricing, questionable reseller terms, and finger-pointing to escape problems ruins count on.
- Seek impartial testimonials. Delighted support assesses suggest much less if extreme concerns imply bad overall usability.
- Excellence is impossible. No single option can flawlessly fulfill every unique business need. Find the least-bad fit.
- Evolution over revolution. Step-by-step renovations normally surpass dangerous wholesale reinvention of what already functions fine.
In other words, I learned to be extra cynical of “too excellent to be real” marketing claims and much less lured by the appeal of glossy brand-new objects. The tools you utilize daily need to gain trust with transparency and efficiency, not glossy advertising.