As an agency owner for over a decade, I count on software program and automation to simplify operations and deliver outcomes. So when GoHighLevel emerged on the scene few years back, it definitely caught my focus GoHighLevel SMTP.
The idea was enticing– an all-in-one customer management platform with marketing, sales, and solution devices incorporated with each other. As an entrepreneur always seeking to streamline and scale my business, it felt like a dream come to life on paper. Who would not desire a solitary remedy that does it all?
But in this in-depth GoHighLevel review, I’ll take you inside my dreadful trip of trying (and failing) to switch to this popular brand-new software. You’ll find out:
If you’re thinking about whether GoHighLevel is right for your own service demands, ideally you can pick up from my painful errors and pumped up expectations.
Looter: I do NOT recommend GoHighLevel. If you require a CRM, begin with this checklist of finest CRMs instead. I utilize Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re seeking a sales, marketing, and project management alternative to GoHighLevel, after that here are a couple of we advise.
Backstory: Why I Thought About Changing from Keap
To comprehend what attracted me to GoHighLevel to begin with, you require context regarding my previous setup. For over 5 years I had actually been happily depending on Keap (previously Infusionsoft) to fulfill all my client management and automation needs.
I located Keap user-friendly to utilize and it dealt with everything I required– CRM, e-mail marketing, sales funnels, subscription websites, and customer support.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are created to assist small companies maintain their customers while adding brand-new ones effortlessly. Automate follow-ups with emails and texts, making sure leads and clients get the ideal messages at the right time. Use website and social networks forms to enhance lead follow-up, and manage your development with very easy consultation scheduling and lead tracking. Boost sales with automated quoting, invoicing, and repayment handling, freeing up your time. With Keap, small companies can conserve 10 hours each week and rise profits by 39%. Beginning with a 14-day free trial, no credit card needed.
Why we like Keap
Keap supplies an extensive consumer partnership management (CRM) and marketing automation solution customized for local business and entrepreneurs. We appreciate Keap’s concentrate on improving sales procedures and nurturing consumer relationships through powerful automation devices. The system’s all-in-one method incorporates CRM, e-mail marketing, invoicing, and job monitoring, making it specifically attractive for companies aiming to combine their technology pile.
Generally, it just functioned accurately with marginal hassle or upkeep required. My open and click-through prices were great (like 35% excellent). Automations ran efficiently without any issues.
So why on earth was I attracted to uproot my entire functional structure from a system that worked to try something unverified and untested?
In knowledge I can confess I obtained attracted by the alarm phone call of “glossy things disorder”. You understand the feeling: when everybody’s talking about a new tool that will certainly change your company … The grass usually looks greener on the other side, and I asked yourself whether GoHighLevel could minimize friction points that I ‘d discovered to endure for many years with Keap.
I resisted in the beginning, however a few even more disappointments led me to think possibly it was time for a modification.
The Financial investment: Migrating My Agency to GoHighLevel
Earlier this year I determined to take the plunge. I registered for HighLevel’s Firm plan at $297/month, investing significantly greater than the $97/month starter cost.
This wasn’t a choice I took lightly. I knew changing systems was mosting likely to need moving all my Keap information and basically rebuilding my entire tech framework from the ground up using every one of the GoHighLevel integrations readily available.
Here’s a summary of simply several of the initiative needed:
- Manually exporting 20,000+ email client records
- Recreating lots of automations and workflows
- Relocating customer accounts, notes, and job information to the new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe billing integration
- Establishing landing pages, promos, and sales funnels around once more
- Learning a totally foreign UX and user interface layout
Done in, I invested around 30-40 tiresome hours of arrangement work transitioning everything over– and also handling lost productivity throughout the button.
Yet inevitably, it was a calculated financial investment I was willing to make. I figured some short-term pain would pay off with GoHighLevel giving a better lasting service for my company, Dripify. Oh exactly how wrong I was …
It just took me concerning a month of hands-on usage to understand I had made a huge error. The concerns started accumulating rapidly, till it got to a factor I had to cut my losses and change back to Keap entirely.
Allow’s walk through the nightmarish problems I came across.
Safety Issues & Lots of Bugs
Provided GoHighLevel placed itself as an all-in-one automation system, I made sure to thoroughly recreate every workflow from my old Keap account.
These consisted of sequences for onboarding brand-new e-mail clients, onboarding brand-new clients, automating follow-ups for webinar registrations, sending out occasion reminders, handling membership expirations and much more.
Every little thing appeared to be operating penalty … until suddenly it wasn’t. One early morning, I woke up to discover 171 completely irrelevant emails had actually been sent out to individuals that need to NOT have gotten them. This occurred 3 days straight, with a various set of 160 individuals daily.
I hysterically attempted repairing and rebuilding the automation from the ground up. But the trouble continued.
When I desperately connected to their assistance group, they slightly claimed “web server problems” were at fault. Yet this description really did not make any kind of feeling, considering that the mistakes continued taking place each early morning like clockwork unrelated to any type of downtime.
In my mind, this huge failing was completely unacceptable and simply really did not help my service. I have thousands of contacts relying on my automated campaigns running efficiently.
So if GoHighLevel was going to be totally undependable, just how could I hand over mission-critical workflows and sensitive client information to their innovation?
The unintuitive user interface only compounded these issues …
Discouraging UX
Originating from Keap where every little thing was smooth and instinctive, GoHighLevel’s learning curve really felt high and complicated.
Simple tasks like modifying workflows included digging through menu systems that were all over the place. Trick settings were unexplainably scattered in entirely different sections. Moving between features really felt disjointed or complex.
I’ll inform you what I imply by speaking about their funnel builder as an instance. There were 3 different setups panels to take care of overall, individual, and item arrangements. Yet for some insane factor, the web links to accessibility each of these core settings were spread out on opposite sides of the screen. What!?
As someone that values clean, thoughtful style, this seriously annoyed me.
It strengthened that GoHighLevel still seemed like a work-in-progress instead of a sleek product all set for prime-time use. Their priorities appeared concentrated on packing in every feature under the sun, with poor use as an afterthought.
And talking features, I quickly realized the low price tag featured costly compromises …
Misleading Pricing GoHighLevel SMTP
Among GoHighLevel’s biggest selling points is the budget-friendly rate for access to so many features. But I promptly discovered this low-cost base price was deceptive.
They nickle-and-dimed individuals with sporadic costs for core functionality. All of a sudden my charge card declarations had vague $10 fees from GoHighLevel occasionally.
As it ended up, you obtain billed each time you send an email through their web servers. So for high volume customers, this added up to thousands of bucks in unexpected costs.
Between these per-email costs and paying additional for deliverability add-ons like Mailgun, my “budget friendly” GoHighLevel subscription ended up costing considerably MORE than my Keap plan.
The reduced sticker price was appealing, however simply not realistic 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 nearly overnight after switching over to GoHighLevel.
Previously, my target market engagement consistently struck 35-40% open prices in Keap month after month. Once I migrated their documents over to GoHighLevel, performance tanked quickly to a pitiful 9% open rate.
Regardless of just how much I enhanced my sending practices or tried every fixing technique, I might hardly nudge open rates back right into the teenagers– still a 50%+ decline from my previous criteria GoHighLevel SMTP.
Let me repeat: my exact same target market and emails instantly had dreadful engagement. The only thing I can assume that would certainly be triggering this was whatever was happening behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a company so dependent on email marketing, this was a big deal.
Between the debilitating deliverability problems, hidden costs, broken features, and dreadful interface, I had actually ultimately reached my limit …
Why I Quit GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Simply 45 days after moving my company to GoHighLevel, I knew I had made a significant blunder. The cons substantially exceeded any advantages.
No software program is ideal, but the sheer quantity of problems was past appropriate.
At the end of the day, software application boils down to trust. If I can’t trust it to deal with important features capably or believe a vendor has my best interests in mind, after that it’s time to walk away– also after investing considerable time, money, and effort moving.
So I made the difficult contact us to reverse course and return back to Keap completely just weeks after going all in on GoHighLevel. Allow’s discover what I gained from this debacle.
Secret Takeaways: What I Picked up from My GoHighLevel Blunder
My time with HighLevel can be summed up as a costly ill fortune. But in hindsight, it educated me a few key lessons:
- Adhere to what works. Don’t distress what’s functioning unless something is definitively better across the board. Modification brings risk.
- Veterinarian claims extensively. Marketing buzz around new software application commonly covers larger underlying imperfections. Deep due persistance is vital.
- Choose simpleness over features. Properly designed tools need to make your job life easier, not a lot more complicated and unpleasant.
- Openness builds depend on. Opaque pricing, unethical reseller terms, and finger-pointing to escape troubles damages trust fund.
- Seek impartial reviews. Delighted assistance evaluates imply less if excessive problems imply inadequate general usability.
- Excellence is difficult. No solitary solution can perfectly fulfill every unique business demand. Discover the least-bad fit.
- Advancement over change. Incremental enhancements generally exceed dangerous wholesale reinvention of what currently functions penalty.
In other words, I learned to be a lot more hesitant of “also great to be real” marketing cases and much less attracted by the attraction of glossy brand-new objects. The devices you use daily ought to earn depend on via openness and performance, not glossy advertising.