As a company proprietor for over a decade, I rely on software and automation to improve procedures and provide results. So when GoHighLevel arised on the scene few years back, it absolutely caught my focus Boost Your SEO with GoHighLevel.
The concept was attractive– an all-in-one customer management system with marketing, sales, and service devices incorporated together. As an entrepreneur constantly seeking to streamline and scale my service, it appeared like a dream come to life theoretically. That wouldn’t want a single service that does it all?
However in this thorough GoHighLevel testimonial, I’ll take you inside my disastrous journey of trying (and stopping working) to switch to this preferred brand-new software application. You’ll discover:
If you’re considering whether GoHighLevel is right for your very own organization needs, ideally you can learn from my painful mistakes and blew up expectations.
Looter: I do NOT advise GoHighLevel. If you need a CRM, begin with this checklist of best CRMs rather. I make use of Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re trying to find a sales, marketing, and project monitoring choice to GoHighLevel, after that here are a few we recommend.
Backstory: Why I Considered Switching from Keap
To recognize what attracted me to GoHighLevel to begin with, you require context about 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 demands.
I discovered Keap instinctive to utilize and it handled everything I required– CRM, e-mail marketing, sales funnels, membership sites, and client support.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are designed to help small businesses maintain their customers while including brand-new ones effortlessly. Automate follow-ups with emails and texts, making sure leads and clients get the ideal messages at the right time. Usage internet site and social networks kinds to simplify lead follow-up, and handle your development with very easy visit organizing and lead monitoring. Boost sales with automated pricing estimate, invoicing, and repayment processing, maximizing your time. With Keap, small companies can conserve 10 hours weekly and increase revenue by 39%. Beginning with a 14-day free trial, no bank card needed.
Why we like Keap
Keap offers a comprehensive consumer connection management (CRM) and marketing automation option tailored for small businesses and business owners. We appreciate Keap’s focus on streamlining sales procedures and supporting consumer connections via effective automation devices. The platform’s all-in-one strategy combines CRM, email marketing, invoicing, and job monitoring, making it especially attractive for organizations seeking to settle their technology pile.
Essentially, it just functioned reliably with very little fuss or upkeep needed. My open and click-through rates were wonderful (like 35% fantastic). Automations ran efficiently with no concerns.
So why on earth was I lured to uproot my entire operational structure from a system that worked to attempt something unproven and untested?
In knowledge I can confess I got seduced by the alarm phone call of “shiny item syndrome”. You recognize the sensation: when everybody’s discussing a new tool that will certainly transform your service … The lawn commonly looks greener beyond, and I questioned whether GoHighLevel could reduce rubbing points that I would certainly found out to tolerate throughout the years with Keap.
I withstood initially, but a couple of more aggravations led me to assume perhaps it was time for an adjustment.
The Investment: Migrating My Company to GoHighLevel
Earlier this year I chose to take the plunge. I enrolled in HighLevel’s Firm plan at $297/month, spending significantly greater than the $97/month starter price.
This had not been a choice I ignored. I understood switching systems was mosting likely to require migrating all my Keap data and basically restoring my whole tech infrastructure from scratch utilizing every one of the GoHighLevel integrations offered.
Below’s a review of simply a few of the initiative called for:
- By hand exporting 20,000+ email subscriber records
- Recreating lots of automations and workflows
- Relocating client accounts, notes, and project information to the new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe payment integration
- Setting up landing pages, promotions, and sales funnels throughout once more
- Learning a completely international UX and interface design
Done in, I invested around 30-40 laborious hours of setup work transitioning every little thing over– as well as taking care of lost productivity during the switch.
But inevitably, it was a calculated investment I wanted to make. I figured some temporary discomfort would pay off with GoHighLevel offering a much better long-term service for my service, Dripify. Oh exactly how incorrect I was …
It only took me regarding a month of hands-on use to recognize I had made a big error. The problems started accumulating quickly, till it reached a factor I had to reduce my losses and switch back to Keap entirely.
Let’s walk through the nightmarish problems I encountered.
Safety Issues & Numerous Bugs
Provided GoHighLevel placed itself as an all-in-one automation platform, I made sure to diligently recreate each and every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These consisted of series for onboarding brand-new email clients, onboarding brand-new customers, automating follow-ups for webinar enrollments, sending out event reminders, handling subscription expirations and a lot more.
Whatever seemed to be working penalty … till all of a sudden it wasn’t. One morning, I awoke to locate 171 entirely unnecessary emails had actually been sent out to individuals who need to NOT have actually obtained them. This happened three days in a row, with a various set of 160 people every day.
I frantically tried fixing and reconstructing the automation from square one. Yet the issue lingered.
When I frantically reached out to their assistance group, they slightly declared “web server problems” were at fault. But this description didn’t make any sense, given that the errors continued occurring each morning like clockwork unassociated to any type of downtime.
In my mind, this huge failure was entirely undesirable and just didn’t help my business. I have thousands of get in touches with relying upon my automated campaigns running smoothly.
So if GoHighLevel was going to be totally unreliable, exactly how could I delegate mission-critical workflows and sensitive customer information to their innovation?
The unintuitive user interface only compounded these concerns …
Frustrating UX
Coming from Keap where every little thing was seamless and instinctive, GoHighLevel’s learning curve really felt steep and complicated.
Easy jobs like editing workflows involved digging through menu systems that were all over the place. Secret setups were unexplainably spread in absolutely various areas. Moving in between features felt disjointed or confusing.
I’ll inform you what I mean by discussing their funnel builder as an instance. There were 3 different setups panels to take care of general, individual, and product setups. Yet for some insane factor, the links to gain access to each of these core setups were expanded on contrary sides of the display. What!?
As a person that values clean, thoughtful layout, this seriously frustrated me.
It reinforced that GoHighLevel still felt like a work-in-progress as opposed to a sleek item ready for prime-time usage. Their priorities appeared focused on cramming in every feature imaginable, with bad usability as an afterthought.
And talking features, I quickly understood the small cost tag included expensive concessions …
Deceptive Pricing Boost Your SEO with GoHighLevel
Among GoHighLevel’s greatest selling points is the cost effective cost for access to so many features. Yet I rapidly discovered this cheap base expense was misleading.
They nickle-and-dimed customers with erratic fees for core capability. Instantly my charge card declarations had vague $10 charges from GoHighLevel occasionally.
As it ended up, you obtain charged each time you send out an email with their servers. So for high volume individuals, this added up to numerous dollars in unforeseen costs.
Between these per-email charges and paying extra for deliverability attachments like Mailgun, my “cost effective” GoHighLevel registration ended up costing considerably MORE than my Keap plan.
The reduced sticker price was alluring, but just not practical in practice. This bait-and-switch left a poor taste in my mouth.
Email Rates Suffered
The final dealbreaker was seeing my carefully nurtured email open prices drop nearly over night after switching over to GoHighLevel.
Previously, my audience interaction constantly hit 35-40% open rates in Keap month after month. Once I moved their records over to GoHighLevel, efficiency tanked immediately to a useless 9% open rate.
No matter how much I maximized my sending out methods or tried every troubleshooting trick, I might barely push open prices back right into the teens– still a 50%+ decrease from my previous standards Boost Your SEO with GoHighLevel.
Let me repeat: my exact same target market and e-mails all of a sudden had dreadful engagement. The only thing I can believe that would be creating this was whatever was occurring behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For an agency so based on email marketing, this was a big deal.
Between the crippling deliverability issues, hidden costs, busted features, and terrible user interface, I had lastly reached my limitation …
Why I Give up GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Simply 45 days after migrating my firm to GoHighLevel, I recognized I had made a massive mistake. The disadvantages dramatically exceeded any benefits.
No software application is perfect, however the sheer volume of issues was past acceptable.
At the end of the day, software comes down to depend on. If I can not trust it to manage critical functions competently or think a vendor has my benefits in mind, after that it’s time to walk away– even after investing substantial time, money, and effort moving.
So I made the difficult contact us to reverse training course and return back to Keap totally simply weeks after going all in on GoHighLevel. Allow’s explore what I picked up from this fiasco.
Trick Takeaways: What I Learned From My GoHighLevel Mistake
My time with HighLevel can be summarized as a pricey misadventure. Yet in knowledge, it showed me a couple of vital lessons:
- Stay with what works. Don’t upset what’s functioning unless something is definitively much better across the board. Modification brings risk.
- Veterinarian asserts thoroughly. Marketing hype around new software program often covers larger underlying defects. Deep due diligence is essential.
- Choose simplicity over features. Properly designed devices need to make your work life less complicated, not much more complicated and unpleasant.
- Transparency constructs trust fund. Nontransparent pricing, unethical reseller terms, and finger-pointing to avert troubles damages depend on.
- Look for impartial evaluations. Delighted assistance examines indicate less if excessive problems indicate poor overall usability.
- Excellence is difficult. No solitary remedy can flawlessly meet every distinct company need. Locate the least-bad fit.
- Advancement over transformation. Step-by-step improvements normally surpass dangerous wholesale reinvention of what already works fine.
In other words, I discovered to be a lot more doubtful of “as well great to be true” marketing claims and much less lured by the appeal of shiny brand-new items. The devices you make use of daily need to make trust fund through transparency and efficiency, not glossy advertising.