As a company proprietor for over a years, I depend on software application and automation to streamline procedures and provide results. So when GoHighLevel arised on the scene few years back, it definitely caught my focus GoHighLevel Academy.
The concept was attractive– an all-in-one client monitoring system with marketing, sales, and service tools incorporated with each other. As an entrepreneur constantly looking to streamline and scale my organization, it appeared like a dream happened theoretically. Who wouldn’t want a solitary solution that does it all?
Yet in this extensive GoHighLevel evaluation, I’ll take you inside my tragic trip of trying (and failing) to switch to this popular brand-new software. You’ll learn:
If you’re considering whether GoHighLevel is right for your own company demands, hopefully you can gain from my unpleasant blunders and blew up expectations.
Looter: I do NOT advise GoHighLevel. If you require a CRM, start with this listing of ideal CRMs rather. I use Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re looking for a sales, marketing, and job administration choice to GoHighLevel, after that here are a couple of we recommend.
Backstory: Why I Considered Switching from Keap
To recognize what attracted me to GoHighLevel to begin with, you require context concerning my previous configuration. For over 5 years I had actually been gladly relying on Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) to meet all my customer administration and automation needs.
I located Keap user-friendly to utilize and it managed everything I required– CRM, e-mail marketing, sales funnels, subscription sites, and client assistance.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are created to help small businesses maintain their clients while including new ones easily. Automate follow-ups with e-mails and messages, ensuring leads and customers get the right messages at the correct time. Usage website and social media types to streamline lead follow-up, and manage your development with simple appointment organizing and lead monitoring. Boost sales with automated quoting, invoicing, and payment processing, freeing up your time. With Keap, small companies can save 10 hours per week and increase revenue by 39%. Beginning with a 14-day free trial, no bank card needed.
Why we like Keap
Keap offers a thorough consumer relationship monitoring (CRM) and marketing automation solution tailored for small companies and entrepreneurs. We appreciate Keap’s focus on enhancing sales procedures and supporting customer partnerships with powerful automation tools. The system’s all-in-one technique incorporates CRM, e-mail marketing, invoicing, and task management, making it particularly appealing for services aiming to consolidate their tech pile.
Generally, it simply functioned reliably with marginal fuss or upkeep called for. My open and click-through prices were great (like 35% terrific). Automations ran efficiently without issues.
So why on earth was I tempted to uproot my entire functional structure from a system that functioned to attempt something unproven and untested?
In knowledge I can confess I got attracted by the alarm call of “glossy item disorder”. You recognize the sensation: when everyone’s talking about a brand-new device that will transform your company … The turf commonly looks greener beyond, and I questioned whether GoHighLevel might reduce rubbing points that I ‘d found out to endure for many years with Keap.
I stood up to at first, but a couple of more frustrations led me to assume perhaps it was time for a change.
The Investment: Migrating My Company to GoHighLevel
Earlier this year I decided to take the plunge. I registered for HighLevel’s Firm plan at $297/month, investing considerably more than the $97/month starter price.
This had not been a decision I ignored. I knew switching over platforms was mosting likely to require migrating all my Keap data and basically restoring my whole technology facilities from scratch utilizing all of the GoHighLevel integrations available.
Right here’s a summary of simply several of the initiative required:
- By hand exporting 20,000+ e-mail customer documents
- Recreating lots of automations and workflows
- Moving client accounts, notes, and task information to the brand-new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe billing integration
- Setting up landing pages, discounts, and sales funnels throughout once more
- Learning a completely foreign UX and user interface layout
Done in, I invested around 30-40 tedious hours of configuration work transitioning whatever over– not to mention dealing with lost performance throughout the button.
However inevitably, it was a computed financial investment I wanted to make. I figured some short-term discomfort would pay off with GoHighLevel offering a much better lasting remedy for my company, Dripify. Oh how wrong I was …
It only took me regarding a month of hands-on use to understand I had made a huge error. The problems began piling up swiftly, until it reached a point I had to cut my losses and switch over back to Keap entirely.
Allow’s walk through the nightmarish issues I came across.
Security Issues & Lots of Vermin
Given GoHighLevel positioned itself as an all-in-one automation system, I made sure to thoroughly recreate every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These consisted of series for onboarding brand-new e-mail clients, onboarding brand-new customers, automating follow-ups for webinar registrations, sending out occasion reminders, handling membership expiries and far more.
Whatever appeared to be operating penalty … up until unexpectedly it wasn’t. One early morning, I woke up to find 171 entirely unimportant emails had been sent out to customers who ought to NOT have actually gotten them. This happened three days straight, with a various set of 160 individuals every day.
I anxiously attempted fixing and restoring the automation from square one. However the trouble persisted.
When I seriously connected to their assistance team, they slightly declared “web server concerns” were to blame. Yet this explanation didn’t make any type of sense, considering that the errors proceeded occurring each early morning like clockwork unrelated to any downtime.
In my mind, this substantial failing was completely inappropriate and simply really did not work for my service. I have hundreds of get in touches with depending on my automated campaigns running efficiently.
So if GoHighLevel was mosting likely to be entirely unstable, how could I hand over mission-critical workflows and sensitive customer data to their modern technology?
The unintuitive interface just intensified these concerns …
Discouraging UX
Originating from Keap where whatever was seamless and user-friendly, GoHighLevel’s learning curve really felt steep and complicated.
Easy jobs like editing and enhancing workflows involved excavating with food selection systems that were all over the place. Trick setups were unexplainably spread in completely various areas. Moving between functions really felt disjointed or complex.
I’ll inform you what I indicate by speaking about their funnel builder as an instance. There were 3 different setups panels to take care of total, private, and product configurations. Yet for some crazy factor, the web links to access each of these core settings were spread out on opposite sides of the display. What!?
As someone who values clean, thoughtful design, this seriously upset me.
It reinforced that GoHighLevel still felt like a work-in-progress instead of a refined item ready for prime-time use. Their top priorities appeared concentrated on packing in every feature imaginable, with bad functionality as an afterthought.
And speaking of features, I quickly realized the low cost tag featured expensive compromises …
Misleading Pricing GoHighLevel Academy
Among GoHighLevel’s largest selling factors is the cost effective price for accessibility to many features. Yet I rapidly learned this affordable base expense was deceptive.
They nickle-and-dimed individuals with sporadic costs for core performance. Instantly my bank card statements had obscure $10 fees from GoHighLevel here and there.
As it turned out, you get billed every time you send an e-mail via their servers. So for high quantity users, this amounted to thousands of dollars in unexpected costs.
In between these per-email costs and paying added for deliverability add-ons like Mailgun, my “economical” GoHighLevel membership ended up setting you back dramatically MORE than my Keap plan.
The low sticker price was tempting, yet just not reasonable in practice. This bait-and-switch left a poor taste in my mouth.
Email Fees Suffered
The final dealbreaker was seeing my very carefully nurtured email open prices plunge nearly overnight after switching over to GoHighLevel.
Previously, my target market interaction constantly struck 35-40% open rates in Keap month after month. But once I moved their documents over to GoHighLevel, efficiency tanked instantly to a pathetic 9% open rate.
No matter just how much I maximized my sending techniques or tried every fixing method, I might barely push open rates back right into the teenagers– still a 50%+ decrease from my previous criteria GoHighLevel Academy.
Let me repeat: my exact same target market and e-mails unexpectedly had dreadful interaction. The only thing I might believe that would certainly be triggering 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 debilitating deliverability problems, hidden fees, broken features, and terrible interface, I had actually finally reached my restriction …
Why I Stop GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Just 45 days after migrating my firm to GoHighLevel, I understood I had actually made a big blunder. The disadvantages substantially surpassed any advantages.
No software application is perfect, but the large volume of troubles was beyond acceptable.
At the end of the day, software program boils down to depend on. If I can’t trust it to handle essential features effectively or think a supplier has my benefits in mind, after that it’s time to leave– even after spending significant time, money, and initiative migrating.
So I made the tough call to reverse training course and return back to Keap entirely simply weeks after going all in on GoHighLevel. Allow’s discover what I learned from this fiasco.
Key Takeaways: What I Gained from My GoHighLevel Blunder
My time with HighLevel can be summed up as a pricey accident. However in knowledge, it showed me a few key lessons:
- Stick to what works. Do not distress what’s working unless something is definitively far better across the board. Change brings threat.
- Vet claims completely. Marketing hype around brand-new software application usually covers bigger underlying imperfections. Deep due persistance is essential.
- Select simplicity over features. Properly designed tools should make your work life simpler, not a lot more complicated and untidy.
- Transparency develops count on. Nontransparent pricing, unethical reseller terms, and finger-pointing to evade issues ruins count on.
- Seek objective evaluations. Happy assistance assesses mean much less if excessive issues imply inadequate overall use.
- Perfection is difficult. No solitary service can perfectly fulfill every special company demand. Locate the least-bad fit.
- Advancement over revolution. Step-by-step improvements typically surpass risky wholesale reinvention of what already functions penalty.
Basically, I learned to be much more hesitant of “too great to be true” marketing cases and less attracted by the attraction of shiny new objects. The tools you utilize daily need to gain trust with openness and efficiency, not glossy advertising.