As an agency owner for over a years, I depend on software and automation to streamline procedures and provide results. So when GoHighLevel arised on the scene few years back, it absolutely captured my focus GoHighLevel Email Marketing.
The idea was appealing– an all-in-one client management system with marketing, sales, and service devices incorporated together. As an entrepreneur always aiming to simplify and scale my business, it appeared like a desire come true theoretically. That wouldn’t desire a solitary option that does it all?
However in this in-depth GoHighLevel review, I’ll take you inside my tragic trip of trying (and failing) to switch over to this popular new software program. You’ll discover:
If you’re taking into consideration whether GoHighLevel is right for your very own business requirements, hopefully you can gain from my agonizing errors and pumped up assumptions.
Looter: I do NOT recommend GoHighLevel. If you need a CRM, begin with this list of best CRMs rather. I use Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re seeking a sales, marketing, and job administration alternative to GoHighLevel, then below are a couple of we recommend.
Backstory: Why I Considered Switching Over from Keap
To recognize what attracted me to GoHighLevel in the first place, you need context regarding my previous setup. For over 5 years I had been gladly counting on Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) to fulfill all my customer management and automation needs.
I found Keap instinctive to use and it handled whatever I needed– CRM, email marketing, sales funnels, subscription sites, and client support.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are made to assist small companies maintain their clients while including new ones easily. Automate follow-ups with e-mails and messages, guaranteeing leads and clients get the right messages at the right time. Usage website and social media types to simplify lead follow-up, and manage your development with easy appointment organizing and lead monitoring. Boost sales with automated estimating, invoicing, and settlement handling, maximizing your time. With Keap, small companies can conserve 10 hours weekly and increase earnings by 39%. Beginning with a 14-day free trial, no credit card required.
Why we like Keap
Keap provides an extensive consumer partnership management (CRM) and marketing automation solution tailored for small companies and business owners. We appreciate Keap’s focus on enhancing sales processes and supporting customer partnerships with effective automation tools. The platform’s all-in-one approach incorporates CRM, e-mail marketing, invoicing, and task administration, making it specifically attractive for organizations seeking to combine their tech stack.
Essentially, it just functioned dependably with minimal difficulty or upkeep required. My open and click-through rates were excellent (like 35% excellent). Automations ran efficiently without issues.
So why on earth was I tempted to uproot my whole operational foundation from a system that functioned to try something unproven and untried?
In knowledge I can admit I obtained seduced by the siren call of “glossy object syndrome”. You understand the sensation: when every person’s speaking about a new tool that will change your organization … The turf commonly looks greener beyond, and I asked yourself whether GoHighLevel may lower friction factors that I ‘d found out to endure for many years with Keap.
I resisted initially, but a few more irritations led me to believe possibly it was time for a modification.
The Investment: Migrating My Firm to GoHighLevel
Previously this year I decided to start. I registered for HighLevel’s Agency plan at $297/month, investing significantly greater than the $97/month starter expense.
This had not been a choice I took lightly. I knew switching platforms was mosting likely to require moving all my Keap data and basically rebuilding my entire tech facilities from square one making use of every one of the GoHighLevel integrations offered.
Below’s a summary of just a few of the effort called for:
- Manually exporting 20,000+ email client records
- Recreating dozens of automations and workflows
- Moving client accounts, notes, and project information to the new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe billing integration
- Establishing landing pages, promotions, and sales funnels around once more
- Learning a totally international UX and user interface style
Done in, I invested around 30-40 laborious hours of arrangement job transitioning whatever over– not to mention handling lost efficiency during the button.
However ultimately, it was a calculated investment I agreed to make. I figured some temporary discomfort would repay with GoHighLevel giving a better lasting remedy for my organization, Dripify. Oh exactly how wrong I was …
It just took me about a month of hands-on use to understand I had actually made a big error. The problems began piling up swiftly, till it got to a point I had to reduce my losses and switch back to Keap completely.
Let’s go through the nightmarish troubles I experienced.
Security Issues & Several Bugs
Given GoHighLevel placed itself as an all-in-one automation system, I made sure to carefully recreate each and every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These included sequences for onboarding brand-new e-mail customers, onboarding brand-new clients, automating follow-ups for webinar registrations, sending out occasion suggestions, taking care of membership expiries and far more.
Whatever appeared to be functioning fine … till unexpectedly it wasn’t. One morning, I woke up to locate 171 completely unimportant e-mails had actually been sent out to individuals who need to NOT have received them. This took place three days in a row, with a different set of 160 individuals daily.
I hysterically attempted fixing and reconstructing the automation from square one. However the issue continued.
When I desperately reached out to their support group, they slightly declared “server concerns” were at fault. But this description really did not make any type of sense, because the mistakes proceeded taking place each early morning like clockwork unconnected to any type of downtime.
In my mind, this massive failure was totally inappropriate and just really did not benefit my company. I have thousands of contacts counting on my automated campaigns running smoothly.
So if GoHighLevel was going to be totally unstable, exactly how could I entrust mission-critical workflows and delicate client data to their modern technology?
The unintuitive interface just intensified these issues …
Frustrating UX
Originating from Keap where everything was seamless and user-friendly, GoHighLevel’s learning curve felt high and difficult.
Easy jobs like modifying workflows entailed digging via menu systems that were all over the place. Trick settings were unexplainably spread in entirely different areas. Moving between features really felt disjointed or complicated.
I’ll tell you what I mean by speaking about their funnel builder as an example. There were 3 separate setups panels to take care of overall, individual, and item arrangements. Yet for some crazy reason, the web links to gain access to each of these core setups were spread out on opposite sides of the display. What!?
As a person who values clean, thoughtful layout, this seriously annoyed me.
It reinforced that GoHighLevel still seemed like a work-in-progress instead of a sleek product ready for prime-time use. Their top priorities seemed focused on packing in every feature imaginable, with bad use as a second thought.
And talking features, I quickly realized the low cost tag included expensive compromises …
Deceptive Pricing GoHighLevel Email Marketing
One of GoHighLevel’s largest marketing points is the inexpensive price for accessibility to many features. But I promptly discovered this cheap base price was deceptive.
They nickle-and-dimed customers with occasional fees for core functionality. All of a sudden my credit card statements had unclear $10 charges from GoHighLevel occasionally.
As it ended up, you obtain billed every single time you send an email through their servers. So for high quantity individuals, this amounted to hundreds of dollars in unforeseen expenses.
Between these per-email fees and paying additional for deliverability attachments like Mailgun, my “economical” GoHighLevel registration ended up costing considerably greater than my Keap plan.
The low price tag was appealing, but just not sensible in practice. This bait-and-switch left a bad taste in my mouth.
Email Rates Suffered
The final dealbreaker was seeing my very carefully supported e-mail open rates drop virtually over night after switching to GoHighLevel.
Formerly, my target market involvement consistently hit 35-40% open prices in Keap month after month. Once I migrated their documents over to GoHighLevel, performance tanked instantly to a pathetic 9% open price.
Despite just how much I maximized my sending methods or tried every troubleshooting technique, I could barely nudge open rates back right into the teens– still a 50%+ decline from my previous standards GoHighLevel Email Marketing.
Let me repeat: my exact same audience and e-mails all of a sudden had terrible engagement. The only thing I might assume that would certainly be causing this was whatever was happening behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For an agency so depending on e-mail marketing, this was a big deal.
In between the debilitating deliverability concerns, hidden costs, busted features, and dreadful user interface, I had actually ultimately reached my limitation …
Why I Quit GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Simply 45 days after migrating my company to GoHighLevel, I understood I had made a significant blunder. The cons dramatically surpassed any kind of advantages.
No software is ideal, but the large volume of issues was past acceptable.
At the end of the day, software application boils down to trust fund. If I can’t trust it to deal with essential features competently or believe a supplier has my benefits in mind, after that it’s time to walk away– also after investing significant time, money, and effort moving.
So I made the difficult phone call to reverse program and return back to Keap completely simply weeks after going done in on GoHighLevel. Allow’s discover what I gained from this debacle.
Key Takeaways: What I Picked up from My GoHighLevel Blunder
My time with HighLevel can be summarized as a pricey ill fortune. However in knowledge, it educated me a couple of essential lessons:
- Stick to what jobs. Do not upset what’s functioning unless something is definitively far better across the board. Adjustment brings danger.
- Vet declares completely. Marketing buzz around brand-new software application often covers larger underlying problems. Deep due persistance is vital.
- Choose simpleness over features. Properly designed tools should make your work life simpler, not more difficult and untidy.
- Transparency builds trust. Nontransparent pricing, dubious reseller terms, and finger-pointing to evade troubles destroys count on.
- Look for objective evaluations. Happy assistance evaluates indicate less if extreme problems suggest inadequate general usability.
- Perfection is difficult. No single solution can perfectly meet every unique organization need. Discover the least-bad fit.
- Development over revolution. Incremental renovations usually outweigh high-risk wholesale reinvention of what currently functions penalty.
Simply put, I discovered to be more unconvinced of “too great to be real” marketing cases and less lured by the appeal of shiny new objects. The devices you make use of daily must make count on through transparency and efficiency, not glossy advertising.