As a company proprietor for over a decade, I count on software and automation to enhance procedures and provide results. So when GoHighLevel emerged on the scene few years back, it certainly captured my attention GoHighLevel A2P Registration.
The concept was appealing– an all-in-one customer management platform with marketing, sales, and service devices incorporated with each other. As an entrepreneur constantly seeking to simplify and scale my service, it seemed like a dream happened on paper. Who wouldn’t want a solitary option that does it all?
Yet in this extensive GoHighLevel review, I’ll take you inside my tragic journey of attempting (and failing) to switch over to this prominent new software program. You’ll find out:
If you’re considering whether GoHighLevel is right for your own business demands, hopefully you can learn from my agonizing blunders and blew up assumptions.
Looter: I do NOT recommend GoHighLevel. If you need a CRM, begin with this list of best CRMs instead. I utilize Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re searching for a sales, marketing, and task management alternative to GoHighLevel, then below are a few we advise.
Backstory: Why I Took Into Consideration Switching from Keap
To recognize what attracted me to GoHighLevel to begin with, you need context about my previous configuration. For over 5 years I had been gladly relying on Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) to fulfill all my client management and automation needs.
I found Keap instinctive to use and it dealt with whatever I required– CRM, email marketing, sales funnels, subscription sites, and customer support.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are made to help small companies keep their customers while adding new ones easily. Automate follow-ups with emails and texts, making certain leads and customers receive the ideal messages at the right time. Use internet site and social media sites types to simplify lead follow-up, and handle your development with simple appointment scheduling and lead tracking. Boost sales with automated pricing quote, invoicing, and repayment handling, freeing up your time. With Keap, local business can save 10 hours per week and increase income by 39%. Start with a 14-day free trial, no bank card required.
Why we like Keap
Keap uses a comprehensive client partnership management (CRM) and marketing automation solution tailored for local business and entrepreneurs. We appreciate Keap’s focus on streamlining sales processes and supporting consumer connections via effective automation tools. The system’s all-in-one technique incorporates CRM, e-mail marketing, invoicing, and task administration, making it particularly appealing for services wanting to combine their technology pile.
Generally, it just functioned accurately with very little fuss or maintenance needed. My open and click-through rates were fantastic (like 35% excellent). Automations ran smoothly with no concerns.
So why in the world was I tempted to uproot my entire operational foundation from a system that functioned to attempt something unproven and untested?
In hindsight I can confess I obtained attracted by the siren telephone call of “glossy object disorder”. You recognize the sensation: when everyone’s speaking about a new tool that will certainly revolutionize your business … The turf typically looks greener on the other side, and I wondered whether GoHighLevel could minimize rubbing factors that I ‘d discovered to tolerate throughout the years with Keap.
I withstood at first, however a few more aggravations led me to assume possibly it was time for a modification.
The Investment: Moving My Agency to GoHighLevel
Previously this year I determined to start. I registered for HighLevel’s Agency plan at $297/month, spending considerably greater than the $97/month starter cost.
This had not been a decision I ignored. I knew changing systems was mosting likely to call for moving all my Keap data and basically reconstructing my whole technology framework from scratch using all of the GoHighLevel integrations readily available.
Right here’s an overview of just a few of the initiative needed:
- By hand exporting 20,000+ email client documents
- Recreating dozens of automations and workflows
- Relocating client accounts, notes, and job information to the new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe billing integration
- Establishing landing pages, discounts, and sales funnels around once more
- Learning a totally foreign UX and interface design
All in, I invested around 30-40 tiresome hours of setup job transitioning everything over– in addition to dealing with lost performance during the button.
Yet ultimately, it was a computed financial investment I agreed to make. I figured some short-term discomfort would certainly repay with GoHighLevel giving a better long-lasting solution for my service, Dripify. Oh how wrong I was …
It just took me regarding a month of hands-on usage to understand I had actually made a huge mistake. The concerns began accumulating promptly, till it got to a factor I had to reduce my losses and switch back to Keap entirely.
Let’s go through the nightmarish issues I ran into.
Safety And Security Issues & Numerous Vermin
Given GoHighLevel placed itself as an all-in-one automation platform, I took care to thoroughly recreate every workflow from my old Keap account.
These consisted of sequences for onboarding brand-new email customers, onboarding new clients, automating follow-ups for webinar registrations, sending out event suggestions, taking care of subscription expiries and much more.
Every little thing appeared to be functioning fine … up until unexpectedly it wasn’t. One morning, I awoke to locate 171 entirely irrelevant e-mails had been sent to customers that ought to NOT have received them. This happened three days in a row, with a different batch of 160 people daily.
I desperately tried fixing and restoring the automation from scratch. However the trouble persisted.
When I frantically reached out to their assistance team, they slightly declared “server concerns” were at fault. But this explanation didn’t make any kind of sense, since the errors continued occurring each morning like clockwork unconnected to any type of downtime.
In my mind, this huge failing was completely undesirable and simply really did not work for my service. I have hundreds of get in touches with relying upon my automated campaigns running efficiently.
So if GoHighLevel was going to be totally unreliable, how could I leave mission-critical workflows and sensitive client data to their technology?
The unintuitive interface just worsened these concerns …
Discouraging UX
Originating from Keap where every little thing was seamless and intuitive, GoHighLevel’s learning contour felt steep and difficult.
Straightforward tasks like editing workflows included digging through menu systems that were all over the place. Key settings were unexplainably spread in entirely different areas. Relocating in between features felt disjointed or confusing.
I’ll inform you what I suggest by talking about their funnel builder as an example. There were 3 different settings panels to manage overall, individual, and item configurations. Yet for some crazy reason, the web links to accessibility each of these core setups were expanded on opposite sides of the screen. What!?
As a person that values tidy, thoughtful design, this seriously upset me.
It enhanced that GoHighLevel still seemed like a work-in-progress as opposed to a polished product all set for prime-time use. Their top priorities seemed focused on packing in every feature under the sun, with bad usability as an afterthought.
And talking features, I quickly realized the low price tag featured expensive concessions …
Misleading Pricing GoHighLevel A2P Registration
One of GoHighLevel’s biggest selling factors is the cost effective price for access to so many features. However I rapidly discovered this low-cost base expense was deceitful.
They nickle-and-dimed users with occasional fees for core functionality. Unexpectedly my bank card statements had obscure $10 costs from GoHighLevel occasionally.
As it ended up, you obtain charged every single time you send an email via their servers. So for high quantity individuals, this added up to numerous dollars in unanticipated costs.
Between these per-email costs and paying added for deliverability add-ons like Mailgun, my “inexpensive” GoHighLevel registration wound up costing considerably greater than my Keap plan.
The low price tag was alluring, however just not sensible in practice. This bait-and-switch left a bad taste in my mouth.
Email Fees Suffered
The final dealbreaker was seeing my thoroughly supported email open rates plunge practically overnight after switching over to GoHighLevel.
Previously, my audience interaction constantly struck 35-40% open prices in Keap month after month. But once I moved their documents over to GoHighLevel, performance tanked quickly to a useless 9% open price.
Regardless of just how much I maximized my sending out techniques or attempted every fixing method, I can hardly push open prices back right into the teens– still a 50%+ decrease from my previous benchmarks GoHighLevel A2P Registration.
Let me repeat: my exact same audience and e-mails unexpectedly had horrible interaction. The only point I could think that would be triggering this was whatever was happening behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a firm so dependent on email marketing, this was a big deal.
In between the debilitating deliverability concerns, hidden fees, busted features, and terrible interface, I had finally reached my limitation …
Why I Give up GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Simply 45 days after moving my agency to GoHighLevel, I knew I had actually made a significant error. The cons drastically outweighed any kind of benefits.
No software application is perfect, yet the sheer quantity of issues was past acceptable.
At the end of the day, software application comes down to trust. If I can’t trust it to manage important functions competently or believe a vendor has my best interests in mind, then it’s time to walk away– also after investing substantial time, money, and effort migrating.
So I made the challenging contact us to reverse training course and return back to Keap completely simply weeks after going done in on GoHighLevel. Allow’s discover what I learned from this debacle.
Trick Takeaways: What I Gained from My GoHighLevel Blunder
My time with HighLevel can be summarized as a pricey accident. But in knowledge, it instructed me a few essential lessons:
- Adhere to what works. Don’t upset what’s working unless something is definitively much better across the board. Change brings danger.
- Veterinarian claims completely. Marketing hype around brand-new software program commonly covers larger underlying problems. Deep due persistance is essential.
- Select simplicity over features. Well-designed tools should make your work life easier, not more complicated and untidy.
- Openness constructs trust. Opaque pricing, shady reseller terms, and finger-pointing to evade issues destroys trust fund.
- Look for objective reviews. Happy support reviews imply much less if extreme issues imply inadequate total functionality.
- Excellence is impossible. No solitary option can completely satisfy every special organization need. Locate the least-bad fit.
- Advancement over revolution. Incremental renovations normally surpass risky wholesale reinvention of what already works fine.
Simply put, I learned to be much more unconvinced of “also excellent to be real” marketing claims and less attracted by the appeal of shiny brand-new items. The tools you make use of daily should earn count on with openness and performance, not glossy advertising.