As a firm owner for over a decade, I rely upon software application and automation to improve procedures and supply results. So when GoHighLevel arised on the scene couple of years back, it definitely captured my attention GoHighLevel Email Warm Up.
The idea was attractive– an all-in-one client monitoring platform with marketing, sales, and solution devices incorporated with each other. As an entrepreneur constantly aiming to simplify and scale my organization, it felt like a desire become a reality theoretically. Who wouldn’t want a solitary service that does it all?
But in this extensive GoHighLevel evaluation, I’ll take you inside my devastating journey of attempting (and failing) to change to this popular brand-new software application. You’ll learn:
If you’re considering whether GoHighLevel is right for your own service needs, ideally you can gain from my uncomfortable blunders and pumped up assumptions.
Spoiler: I do NOT recommend GoHighLevel. If you need a CRM, begin with this listing of ideal CRMs rather. I make use of Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re seeking a sales, marketing, and task administration option to GoHighLevel, after that below are a couple of we suggest.
Backstory: Why I Took Into Consideration Changing from Keap
To understand what attracted me to GoHighLevel to begin with, you require context regarding my previous arrangement. For over 5 years I had been gladly relying upon Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) to satisfy all my client monitoring and automation demands.
I found Keap user-friendly to use and it took care of every little thing I required– CRM, e-mail marketing, sales funnels, membership websites, and client assistance.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are designed to help small businesses keep their customers while including new ones effortlessly. Automate follow-ups with emails and messages, guaranteeing leads and customers obtain the best messages at the right time. Use website and social media sites kinds to streamline lead follow-up, and handle your growth with simple visit organizing and lead monitoring. Boost sales with automated estimating, invoicing, and settlement handling, liberating your time. With Keap, small companies can conserve 10 hours each week and rise profits by 39%. Begin with a 14-day free trial, no credit card called for.
Why we like Keap
Keap offers a detailed client partnership management (CRM) and marketing automation remedy tailored for local business and business owners. We appreciate Keap’s focus on streamlining sales procedures and supporting client connections with powerful automation devices. The platform’s all-in-one approach combines CRM, e-mail marketing, invoicing, and job administration, making it specifically appealing for services seeking to settle their tech pile.
Generally, it simply functioned accurately with minimal difficulty or maintenance needed. My open and click-through prices were fantastic (like 35% excellent). Automations ran smoothly with no issues.
So why in the world was I lured to uproot my whole functional foundation from a system that worked to attempt something unproven and untested?
In hindsight I can confess I obtained attracted by the alarm phone call of “glossy item disorder”. You recognize the sensation: when every person’s talking about a brand-new tool that will certainly transform your business … The lawn usually looks greener beyond, and I wondered whether GoHighLevel may reduce rubbing points that I would certainly discovered to endure throughout the years with Keap.
I stood up to initially, yet a couple of more disappointments led me to think perhaps it was time for a change.
The Financial investment: Moving My Company to GoHighLevel
Earlier this year I decided to start. I enrolled in HighLevel’s Agency plan at $297/month, investing significantly more than the $97/month starter price.
This had not been a choice I ignored. I knew changing systems was mosting likely to call for moving all my Keap data and basically reconstructing my entire tech infrastructure from the ground up using every one of the GoHighLevel integrations offered.
Below’s an introduction of simply several of the effort needed:
- Manually exporting 20,000+ e-mail client records
- Recreating dozens of automations and workflows
- Moving customer profiles, notes, and task information to the brand-new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe billing integration
- Setting up landing pages, promotions, and sales funnels throughout once more
- Learning a totally foreign UX and user interface layout
All in, I spent around 30-40 tiresome hours of arrangement work transitioning whatever over– as well as managing shed efficiency during the button.
But eventually, it was a calculated financial investment I agreed to make. I figured some temporary discomfort would certainly settle with GoHighLevel supplying a much better long-lasting remedy for my company, Dripify. Oh how wrong I was …
It just took me concerning a month of hands-on use to understand I had made a big mistake. The problems started accumulating rapidly, up until it reached a point I needed to cut my losses and switch over back to Keap totally.
Allow’s go through the horrible troubles I came across.
Safety Issues & Numerous Vermin
Given GoHighLevel placed itself as an all-in-one automation platform, I took care to diligently recreate every workflow from my old Keap account.
These consisted of sequences for onboarding new email customers, onboarding brand-new customers, automating follow-ups for webinar registrations, sending out event pointers, taking care of membership expirations and far more.
Every little thing seemed to be functioning penalty … up until suddenly it had not been. One early morning, I awoke to locate 171 totally unimportant emails had been sent to customers that should NOT have gotten them. This took place 3 days in a row, with a different set of 160 individuals daily.
I anxiously tried troubleshooting and rebuilding the automation from scratch. Yet the trouble lingered.
When I seriously connected to their assistance group, they slightly asserted “web server problems” were responsible. Yet this explanation really did not make any kind of sense, because the errors proceeded happening each morning like clockwork unassociated to any type of downtime.
In my mind, this enormous failing was completely unacceptable and just didn’t benefit my service. I have hundreds of calls relying on my automated campaigns running efficiently.
So if GoHighLevel was going to be totally unstable, exactly how could I delegate mission-critical workflows and sensitive customer data to their technology?
The unintuitive interface only worsened these problems …
Frustrating UX
Coming from Keap where everything was seamless and instinctive, GoHighLevel’s learning curve really felt steep and challenging.
Simple jobs like modifying workflows entailed digging with food selection systems that were all over the place. Secret setups were unexplainably spread in totally various sections. Relocating in between features felt disjointed or complicated.
I’ll tell you what I mean by talking about their funnel builder as an example. There were 3 different setups panels to manage overall, individual, and product configurations. Yet for some insane factor, the web links to gain access to each of these core setups were expanded on contrary sides of the display. What!?
As somebody who values clean, thoughtful style, this seriously annoyed me.
It enhanced that GoHighLevel still seemed like a work-in-progress as opposed to a sleek product all set for prime-time use. Their concerns seemed concentrated on stuffing in every feature under the sun, with bad usability as a second thought.
And speaking of features, I soon realized the affordable price tag included costly compromises …
Misleading Pricing GoHighLevel Email Warm Up
Among GoHighLevel’s most significant selling factors is the affordable rate for accessibility to so many features. However I promptly learned this inexpensive base price was deceitful.
They nickle-and-dimed users with sporadic costs for core performance. Suddenly my credit card statements had unclear $10 charges from GoHighLevel occasionally.
As it turned out, you get charged every single time you send out an e-mail with their servers. So for high volume customers, this added up to thousands of bucks in unforeseen costs.
In between these per-email charges and paying added for deliverability add-ons like Mailgun, my “inexpensive” GoHighLevel subscription ended up setting you back dramatically MORE than my Keap plan.
The reduced sticker price was tempting, yet simply not practical in practice. This bait-and-switch left a negative taste in my mouth.
Email Fees Suffered
The last dealbreaker was seeing my carefully supported email open rates plunge almost over night after switching to GoHighLevel.
Formerly, my audience involvement consistently struck 35-40% open rates in Keap month after month. But once I moved their documents over to GoHighLevel, efficiency tanked promptly to a worthless 9% open rate.
Despite just how much I optimized my sending out practices or tried every troubleshooting technique, I can barely nudge open rates back into the teenagers– still a 50%+ decline from my previous benchmarks GoHighLevel Email Warm Up.
Let me repeat: my exact same audience and emails all of a sudden had dreadful engagement. The only thing I might believe that would certainly be creating this was whatever was taking place behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a firm so depending on e-mail marketing, this was a big deal.
In between the debilitating deliverability problems, concealed charges, busted features, and horrible user interface, I had ultimately reached my restriction …
Why I Quit GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Simply 45 days after migrating my firm to GoHighLevel, I recognized I had made a huge mistake. The disadvantages drastically exceeded any kind of benefits.
No software application is best, but the sheer volume of issues was past acceptable.
At the end of the day, software program boils down to trust fund. If I can not trust it to handle crucial functions competently or think a supplier has my best interests in mind, after that it’s time to leave– even after investing considerable time, cash, and effort migrating.
So I made the tough call to reverse training course and return back to Keap completely simply weeks after going done in on GoHighLevel. Let’s discover what I learned from this ordeal.
Trick Takeaways: What I Learned From My GoHighLevel Mistake
My time with HighLevel can be summed up as a costly ill fortune. Yet in knowledge, it showed me a couple of crucial lessons:
- Stay with what jobs. Do not disturb what’s working unless something is definitively much better across the board. Modification brings risk.
- Veterinarian declares thoroughly. Marketing hype around brand-new software program often covers bigger underlying imperfections. Deep due diligence is important.
- Pick simplicity over features. Well-designed tools should make your work life easier, not more challenging and messy.
- Transparency constructs depend on. Nontransparent pricing, questionable reseller terms, and finger-pointing to escape issues destroys count on.
- Look for unbiased testimonials. Satisfied assistance evaluates suggest less if excessive concerns indicate inadequate general usability.
- Perfection is impossible. No single option can completely meet every one-of-a-kind organization need. Locate the least-bad fit.
- Evolution over change. Incremental improvements generally exceed dangerous wholesale reinvention of what currently works penalty.
In other words, I learned to be a lot more unconvinced of “too excellent to be real” marketing cases and much less tempted by the appeal of shiny brand-new items. The tools you use daily need to earn depend on with transparency and performance, not glossy advertising.