As a firm proprietor for over a decade, I depend on software application and automation to streamline procedures and deliver outcomes. So when GoHighLevel emerged on the scene few years back, it absolutely captured my attention How To Upgrade To The GoHighLevel Unlimited Plan.
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 always aiming to simplify and scale my business, it seemed like a desire come to life theoretically. Who would not desire a single solution that does it all?
But in this comprehensive GoHighLevel review, I’ll take you inside my disastrous trip of attempting (and falling short) to switch to this preferred brand-new software. You’ll find out:
If you’re considering whether GoHighLevel is right for your own business requirements, ideally you can learn from my uncomfortable blunders and inflated assumptions.
Looter: I do NOT advise GoHighLevel. If you need a CRM, start with this checklist of ideal CRMs rather. I use Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re trying to find a sales, marketing, and task management choice to GoHighLevel, then here are a few we suggest.
Backstory: Why I Thought About Switching from Keap
To comprehend what attracted me to GoHighLevel in the first place, you require context regarding my previous setup. For over 5 years I had been gladly counting on Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) to satisfy all my customer administration and automation requirements.
I found Keap intuitive to utilize and it handled whatever I required– CRM, email marketing, sales funnels, membership websites, and client assistance.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are designed to aid local business maintain their customers while adding brand-new ones effortlessly. Automate follow-ups with emails and texts, ensuring leads and customers get the best messages at the right time. Usage website and social media sites types to enhance lead follow-up, and manage your growth with simple appointment scheduling and lead tracking. Boost sales with automated pricing estimate, invoicing, and payment processing, freeing up your time. With Keap, small businesses can save 10 hours weekly and rise earnings by 39%. Begin with a 14-day free trial, no bank card called for.
Why we like Keap
Keap provides an extensive client connection monitoring (CRM) and marketing automation option tailored for local business and entrepreneurs. We appreciate Keap’s concentrate on streamlining sales procedures and supporting consumer relationships via effective automation devices. The system’s all-in-one technique combines CRM, email marketing, invoicing, and job administration, making it especially appealing for businesses seeking to combine their technology pile.
Essentially, it simply worked reliably with minimal hassle or upkeep called for. My open and click-through rates were terrific (like 35% fantastic). Automations ran smoothly with no issues.
So why on earth was I tempted to uproot my whole functional structure from a system that worked to try something unproven and untested?
In hindsight I can admit I got seduced by the alarm telephone call of “shiny item syndrome”. You know the feeling: when everyone’s talking about a brand-new device that will change your business … The grass frequently looks greener on the other side, and I questioned whether GoHighLevel could reduce friction points that I ‘d found out to tolerate over the years with Keap.
I withstood in the beginning, yet a couple of more frustrations led me to think perhaps it was time for a change.
The Financial investment: Migrating My Firm to GoHighLevel
Previously this year I chose to take the plunge. I registered for HighLevel’s Agency plan at $297/month, spending significantly more than the $97/month starter cost.
This had not been a decision I ignored. I knew switching systems was going to need moving all my Keap information and essentially restoring my whole tech facilities from scratch making use of every one of the GoHighLevel integrations readily available.
Right here’s a review of simply some of the effort required:
- Manually exporting 20,000+ e-mail client records
- Recreating lots of automations and workflows
- Relocating customer accounts, notes, and task information to the new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe invoicing integration
- Establishing landing pages, coupons, and sales funnels throughout once again
- Learning a completely international UX and user interface style
All in, I spent around 30-40 tedious hours of arrangement job transitioning every little thing over– in addition to dealing with shed efficiency throughout the button.
But inevitably, it was a calculated investment I was willing to make. I figured some temporary pain would settle with GoHighLevel offering a better long-lasting option for my organization, Dripify. Oh how incorrect I was …
It only took me concerning a month of hands-on usage to understand I had actually made a big error. The concerns began piling up rapidly, up until it reached a point I had to cut my losses and switch over back to Keap completely.
Let’s go through the horrible issues I came across.
Safety And Security Issues & Numerous Vermin
Provided GoHighLevel placed itself as an all-in-one automation system, I made sure to carefully recreate every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These consisted of sequences for onboarding brand-new e-mail customers, onboarding new clients, automating follow-ups for webinar enrollments, sending out occasion suggestions, managing membership expiries and a lot more.
Whatever seemed to be working penalty … up until unexpectedly it had not been. One early morning, I woke up to locate 171 entirely irrelevant emails had been sent out to customers who should NOT have received them. This took place 3 days straight, with a different set of 160 people daily.
I anxiously tried troubleshooting and reconstructing the automation from the ground up. But the issue persisted.
When I frantically connected to their support team, they vaguely asserted “web server problems” were responsible. But this explanation didn’t make any type of feeling, considering that the mistakes continued happening each morning like clockwork unrelated to any type of downtime.
In my mind, this substantial failing was totally unacceptable and simply didn’t work for my business. I have countless contacts relying upon my automated campaigns running smoothly.
So if GoHighLevel was mosting likely to be totally undependable, just how could I entrust mission-critical workflows and delicate client information to their modern technology?
The unintuitive interface just compounded these issues …
Frustrating UX
Coming from Keap where every little thing was seamless and instinctive, GoHighLevel’s learning curve really felt steep and complicated.
Straightforward tasks like editing and enhancing workflows entailed digging through menu systems that were all over the place. Key setups were unexplainably spread in completely various areas. Moving between functions felt disjointed or confusing.
I’ll inform you what I suggest by talking about their funnel builder as an instance. There were 3 different settings panels to manage total, specific, and item arrangements. Yet for some insane reason, the web links to accessibility each of these core setups were spread out on contrary sides of the screen. What!?
As a person who values clean, thoughtful layout, this seriously frustrated me.
It strengthened that GoHighLevel still felt like a work-in-progress instead of a refined product ready for prime-time usage. Their top priorities appeared concentrated on stuffing in every feature under the sun, with bad functionality as an afterthought.
And speaking of features, I quickly recognized the small cost tag came with costly concessions …
Misleading Pricing How To Upgrade To The GoHighLevel Unlimited Plan
One of GoHighLevel’s most significant marketing points is the economical rate for accessibility to a lot of features. Yet I swiftly learned this cheap base price was deceptive.
They nickle-and-dimed users with occasional charges for core performance. Suddenly my bank card statements had vague $10 fees from GoHighLevel occasionally.
As it ended up, you obtain billed each time you send out an e-mail through their servers. So for high quantity customers, this added up to numerous dollars in unanticipated expenses.
Between these per-email costs and paying added for deliverability attachments like Mailgun, my “affordable” GoHighLevel registration wound up setting you back substantially greater than my Keap plan.
The reduced sticker price was appealing, but simply not reasonable in practice. This bait-and-switch left a poor taste in my mouth.
Email Fees Suffered
The final dealbreaker was seeing my carefully nurtured e-mail open prices drop nearly over night after switching to GoHighLevel.
Previously, my target market involvement constantly struck 35-40% open rates in Keap month after month. 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 fixing method, I can barely nudge open prices back into the teenagers– still a 50%+ decrease from my previous criteria How To Upgrade To The GoHighLevel Unlimited Plan.
Let me repeat: my exact same target market and emails all of a sudden had horrible interaction. The only point I could believe that would certainly be causing this was whatever was taking place behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a firm so based on e-mail marketing, this was a big deal.
In between the debilitating deliverability issues, concealed fees, damaged features, and terrible user interface, I had actually lastly reached my limit …
Why I Stop GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Simply 45 days after moving my firm to GoHighLevel, I recognized I had actually made a big mistake. The disadvantages dramatically exceeded any kind of benefits.
No software application is excellent, but the sheer volume of problems was past acceptable.
At the end of the day, software application comes down to trust fund. If I can’t trust it to take care of vital features properly or believe a vendor has my best interests in mind, after that it’s time to leave– even after investing significant time, money, and effort migrating.
So I made the difficult contact us to reverse course and return back to Keap totally simply weeks after going all in on GoHighLevel. Let’s discover what I learned from this fiasco.
Trick Takeaways: What I Learned From My GoHighLevel Mistake
My time with HighLevel can be summarized as a pricey misadventure. But in knowledge, it showed me a couple of essential lessons:
- Adhere to what works. Do not upset what’s functioning unless something is definitively better across the board. Change brings danger.
- Veterinarian declares extensively. Marketing buzz around new software typically covers bigger underlying imperfections. Deep due diligence is important.
- Choose simplicity over features. Properly designed devices should make your job life much easier, not extra complicated and unpleasant.
- Openness constructs trust. Nontransparent pricing, questionable reseller terms, and finger-pointing to evade problems damages trust fund.
- Seek honest reviews. Happy assistance examines mean much less if too much issues suggest bad overall use.
- Excellence is difficult. No single option can completely fulfill every special service requirement. Locate the least-bad fit.
- Development over transformation. Step-by-step enhancements usually exceed dangerous wholesale reinvention of what already works penalty.
In other words, I learned to be more doubtful of “too great to be real” marketing insurance claims and much less lured by the allure of glossy new objects. The devices you use daily must earn trust fund via transparency and efficiency, not glossy advertising.