As an agency owner for over a years, I rely upon software application and automation to simplify procedures and supply results. So when GoHighLevel emerged on the scene couple of years back, it certainly caught my attention GoHighLevel Welcome Course.
The idea was appealing– an all-in-one customer administration platform with marketing, sales, and solution devices incorporated with each other. As an entrepreneur always wanting to streamline and scale my business, it felt like a desire happened on paper. That wouldn’t want a single service that does it all?
But in this extensive GoHighLevel review, I’ll take you inside my devastating trip of trying (and falling short) to switch over to this prominent brand-new software program. You’ll discover:
If you’re thinking about whether GoHighLevel is right for your own business demands, ideally you can pick up from my excruciating errors and inflated expectations.
Looter: I do NOT recommend GoHighLevel. If you require a CRM, begin with this listing of finest CRMs rather. I use Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re seeking a sales, marketing, and project management option to GoHighLevel, after that here are a few we advise.
Backstory: Why I Considered Changing from Keap
To recognize what attracted me to GoHighLevel in the first place, you need context regarding my previous configuration. For over 5 years I had actually been gladly depending on Keap (previously Infusionsoft) to fulfill all my client monitoring and automation needs.
I discovered Keap instinctive to make use of and it took care of everything I needed– CRM, email marketing, sales funnels, membership websites, and customer support.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are designed to aid small businesses keep their clients while including brand-new ones easily. Automate follow-ups with e-mails and messages, guaranteeing leads and customers get the ideal messages at the right time. Usage web site and social media forms to enhance lead follow-up, and handle your development with simple visit organizing and lead monitoring. Boost sales with automated estimating, invoicing, and payment handling, freeing up your time. With Keap, local business can save 10 hours each week and boost earnings by 39%. Begin with a 14-day free trial, no credit card called for.
Why we like Keap
Keap provides an extensive client connection monitoring (CRM) and marketing automation service customized for small companies and business owners. We appreciate Keap’s concentrate on improving sales processes and nurturing customer partnerships with effective automation devices. The platform’s all-in-one strategy integrates CRM, email marketing, invoicing, and task administration, making it especially attractive for organizations aiming to settle their tech stack.
For the most part, it simply functioned accurately with minimal hassle or maintenance called for. My open and click-through rates were great (like 35% excellent). Automations ran smoothly without any problems.
So why in the world was I attracted to uproot my entire operational structure from a system that worked to try something unproven and untested?
In knowledge I can confess I obtained attracted by the alarm phone call of “glossy things disorder”. You recognize the sensation: when everyone’s speaking about a new tool that will reinvent your business … The grass typically looks greener on the other side, and I asked yourself whether GoHighLevel could decrease rubbing factors that I would certainly learned to tolerate for many years with Keap.
I withstood in the beginning, however a few more aggravations led me to assume possibly it was time for an adjustment.
The Investment: Moving My Company to GoHighLevel
Earlier this year I decided to start. I enrolled in HighLevel’s Company plan at $297/month, spending dramatically more than the $97/month starter expense.
This had not been a decision I ignored. I knew switching platforms was mosting likely to call for moving all my Keap information and basically rebuilding my entire technology facilities from the ground up making use of every one of the GoHighLevel integrations available.
Below’s an overview of simply some of the initiative required:
- By hand exporting 20,000+ e-mail client documents
- Recreating lots of automations and workflows
- Moving client accounts, notes, and project information to the brand-new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe invoicing integration
- Setting up landing pages, promos, and sales funnels throughout again
- Learning an entirely international UX and user interface design
Done in, I invested around 30-40 laborious hours of setup job transitioning whatever over– as well as handling shed productivity throughout the switch.
But inevitably, it was a calculated investment I wanted to make. I figured some temporary pain would pay off with GoHighLevel supplying a much better long-lasting service for my service, Dripify. Oh exactly how incorrect I was …
It just took me concerning a month of hands-on usage to realize I had made a big blunder. The issues began piling up swiftly, till it reached a point I had to cut my losses and switch back to Keap totally.
Let’s walk through the nightmarish issues I ran into.
Safety And Security Issues & Lots of Bugs
Provided GoHighLevel placed itself as an all-in-one automation platform, I made sure to carefully recreate every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These included series for onboarding new email subscribers, onboarding new customers, automating follow-ups for webinar enrollments, sending event reminders, managing membership expirations and a lot more.
Everything appeared to be functioning fine … till instantly it had not been. One early morning, I awoke to locate 171 entirely pointless e-mails had actually been sent out to individuals that need to NOT have actually received them. This happened three days in a row, with a different set of 160 people daily.
I frantically tried troubleshooting and restoring the automation from the ground up. However the trouble lingered.
When I desperately reached out to their support group, they vaguely declared “server issues” were to blame. But this explanation didn’t make any kind of feeling, considering that the errors proceeded taking place each early morning like clockwork unrelated to any kind of downtime.
In my mind, this substantial failing was totally undesirable and just really did not benefit my service. I have hundreds of calls relying upon my automated campaigns running smoothly.
So if GoHighLevel was going to be completely undependable, just how could I hand over mission-critical workflows and sensitive client data to their innovation?
The unintuitive interface just compounded these problems …
Irritating UX
Originating from Keap where everything was smooth and user-friendly, GoHighLevel’s learning curve really felt high and complicated.
Basic tasks like editing and enhancing workflows included excavating through food selection systems that were all over the place. Trick settings were unexplainably spread in totally various areas. Relocating between functions really felt disjointed or complex.
I’ll inform you what I imply by talking about their funnel builder as an instance. There were 3 separate settings panels to handle overall, private, and item arrangements. Yet for some crazy reason, the links to access each of these core settings were expanded on contrary sides of the display. What!?
As somebody who values tidy, thoughtful style, this seriously upset me.
It reinforced that GoHighLevel still felt like a work-in-progress rather than a refined product all set for prime-time usage. Their top priorities appeared focused on packing in every feature under the sun, with bad use as a second thought.
And speaking of features, I soon recognized the low cost tag featured expensive compromises …
Misleading Pricing GoHighLevel Welcome Course
Among GoHighLevel’s most significant selling factors is the economical cost for accessibility to a lot of features. Yet I promptly learned this economical base cost was deceitful.
They nickle-and-dimed customers with sporadic fees for core performance. All of a sudden my credit card statements had vague $10 fees from GoHighLevel here and there.
As it ended up, you obtain charged every time you send out an email with their servers. So for high quantity users, this added up to thousands of bucks in unexpected expenses.
Between these per-email fees and paying additional for deliverability attachments like Mailgun, my “affordable” GoHighLevel membership ended up costing substantially MORE than my Keap plan.
The low price tag was appealing, however simply not sensible in practice. This bait-and-switch left a negative taste in my mouth.
Email Rates Suffered
The last dealbreaker was seeing my meticulously supported e-mail open prices plunge nearly overnight after switching to GoHighLevel.
Formerly, my audience engagement continually hit 35-40% open prices in Keap month after month. But once I migrated their records over to GoHighLevel, performance tanked immediately to a pitiful 9% open price.
Regardless of how much I optimized my sending out methods or attempted every repairing technique, I might hardly push open rates back right into the teens– still a 50%+ decrease from my previous benchmarks GoHighLevel Welcome Course.
Let me repeat: my exact same audience and e-mails unexpectedly had horrible engagement. The only point I can assume that would certainly be creating this was whatever was happening behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For an agency so based on e-mail marketing, this was a big deal.
In between the crippling deliverability problems, hidden fees, damaged features, and dreadful interface, I had ultimately reached my restriction …
Why I Quit GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Simply 45 days after migrating my firm to GoHighLevel, I knew I had made a massive mistake. The cons significantly outweighed any advantages.
No software program is best, however the large volume of issues was past appropriate.
At the end of the day, software program boils down to depend on. If I can’t trust it to deal with essential features effectively or think a vendor has my best interests in mind, after that it’s time to leave– even after spending considerable time, cash, and initiative moving.
So I made the hard call to turn around program and return back to Keap completely simply weeks after going done in on GoHighLevel. Allow’s explore what I gained from this debacle.
Secret Takeaways: What I Learned From My GoHighLevel Blunder
My time with HighLevel can be summarized as a costly accident. Yet in knowledge, it educated me a few key lessons:
- Adhere to what works. Do not upset what’s functioning unless something is definitively better across the board. Change brings risk.
- Vet declares thoroughly. Marketing hype around brand-new software program typically obscures larger underlying flaws. Deep due persistance is essential.
- Select simplicity over features. Properly designed tools ought to make your job life less complicated, not extra complicated and untidy.
- Transparency constructs trust. Nontransparent pricing, questionable reseller terms, and finger-pointing to avert issues ruins trust.
- Seek objective reviews. Delighted support reviews suggest much less if extreme concerns indicate poor total functionality.
- Excellence is impossible. No single remedy can perfectly satisfy every unique service requirement. Locate the least-bad fit.
- Development over revolution. Incremental enhancements normally exceed risky wholesale reinvention of what already works fine.
Basically, I found out to be a lot more doubtful of “as well excellent to be true” marketing cases and much less lured by the appeal of glossy brand-new items. The devices you utilize daily need to gain trust via openness and performance, not glossy advertising.