As a company owner for over a decade, I depend on software program and automation to improve procedures and supply results. So when GoHighLevel arised on the scene couple of years back, it most definitely caught my interest GoHighLevel Authorize.net Integration.
The idea was attractive– an all-in-one client monitoring platform with marketing, sales, and solution devices incorporated with each other. As an entrepreneur always wanting to streamline and scale my service, it looked like a desire come to life on paper. Who wouldn’t want a solitary service that does it all?
Yet in this comprehensive GoHighLevel testimonial, I’ll take you inside my tragic journey of trying (and falling short) to switch over to this prominent brand-new software. You’ll discover:
If you’re taking into consideration whether GoHighLevel is right for your own service requirements, with any luck you can learn from my painful mistakes and pumped up expectations.
Looter: I do NOT recommend GoHighLevel. If you require a CRM, start with this list of finest CRMs instead. I use Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re looking for a sales, marketing, and task monitoring alternative to GoHighLevel, after that here are a couple of we advise.
Backstory: Why I Thought About Switching Over from Keap
To comprehend what attracted me to GoHighLevel in the first place, you require context concerning my previous configuration. For over 5 years I had been gladly depending on Keap (previously Infusionsoft) to satisfy all my client management and automation needs.
I discovered Keap instinctive to make use of and it took care of every little thing I needed– CRM, email marketing, sales funnels, membership websites, and client support.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are made to help local business maintain their clients while adding brand-new ones easily. Automate follow-ups with e-mails and messages, making certain leads and clients obtain the ideal messages at the right time. Usage site and social networks kinds to enhance lead follow-up, and manage your development with very easy appointment organizing and lead tracking. Boost sales with automated quoting, invoicing, and payment handling, maximizing your time. With Keap, small businesses can conserve 10 hours per week and boost earnings by 39%. Start with a 14-day free trial, no credit card called for.
Why we like Keap
Keap offers a comprehensive client relationship management (CRM) and marketing automation solution customized for small businesses and entrepreneurs. We appreciate Keap’s focus on enhancing sales processes and supporting client connections with powerful automation devices. The system’s all-in-one strategy incorporates CRM, email marketing, invoicing, and task management, making it particularly eye-catching for services looking to combine their tech pile.
For the most part, it simply functioned reliably with marginal difficulty or upkeep called for. My open and click-through prices were wonderful (like 35% wonderful). Automations ran efficiently without issues.
So why in the world was I attracted to uproot my entire operational foundation from a system that functioned to attempt something unverified and untested?
In hindsight I can confess I got attracted by the alarm telephone call of “shiny things syndrome”. You know the sensation: when every person’s speaking about a new device that will certainly revolutionize your business … The yard usually looks greener beyond, and I asked yourself whether GoHighLevel might minimize friction factors that I ‘d discovered to tolerate throughout the years with Keap.
I stood up to initially, but a couple of even more irritations led me to assume possibly it was time for an adjustment.
The Financial investment: Migrating My Firm to GoHighLevel
Earlier this year I made a decision to take the plunge. I registered for HighLevel’s Firm plan at $297/month, investing substantially greater than the $97/month starter cost.
This wasn’t a decision I took lightly. I recognized switching over systems was going to require moving all my Keap data and basically reconstructing my whole tech infrastructure from scratch using every one of the GoHighLevel integrations readily available.
Right here’s an overview of just a few of the effort called for:
- By hand exporting 20,000+ email client documents
- Recreating lots of automations and workflows
- Relocating customer accounts, notes, and job information to the brand-new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe payment integration
- Establishing landing pages, promos, and sales funnels all over again
- Learning an entirely international UX and user interface design
Done in, I invested around 30-40 laborious hours of arrangement work transitioning everything over– as well as taking care of shed performance throughout the switch.
But ultimately, it was a calculated financial investment I wanted to make. I figured some temporary pain would certainly pay off with GoHighLevel offering a far better lasting option for my company, Dripify. Oh just how wrong I was …
It just took me about a month of hands-on usage to realize I had actually made a huge mistake. The concerns started piling up promptly, till it got to a factor I needed to reduce my losses and switch back to Keap totally.
Let’s go through the nightmarish problems I experienced.
Security Issues & Many Vermin
Provided GoHighLevel placed itself as an all-in-one automation system, I made sure to thoroughly recreate every workflow from my old Keap account.
These included sequences for onboarding new email clients, onboarding brand-new customers, automating follow-ups for webinar registrations, sending out event suggestions, taking care of membership expiries and a lot more.
Every little thing appeared to be operating fine … until instantly it wasn’t. One morning, I woke up to find 171 completely unimportant e-mails had been sent out to customers who should NOT have actually gotten them. This occurred 3 days in a row, with a various set of 160 people every day.
I anxiously tried troubleshooting and reconstructing the automation from scratch. Yet the problem persisted.
When I seriously reached out to their assistance group, they vaguely claimed “web server issues” were to blame. Yet this explanation didn’t make any sense, since the mistakes continued happening each morning like clockwork unconnected to any downtime.
In my mind, this massive failing was entirely unacceptable and simply really did not work for my business. I have thousands of calls relying upon my automated campaigns running efficiently.
So if GoHighLevel was mosting likely to be entirely undependable, exactly how could I hand over mission-critical workflows and delicate client information to their technology?
The unintuitive interface only compounded these problems …
Irritating UX
Originating from Keap where every little thing was smooth and intuitive, GoHighLevel’s learning curve really felt steep and complex.
Basic tasks like editing and enhancing workflows entailed excavating via food selection systems that were all over the place. Key settings were unexplainably spread in absolutely different areas. Moving in between features felt disjointed or confusing.
I’ll tell you what I imply by discussing their funnel builder as an instance. There were 3 different settings panels to manage total, private, and item configurations. Yet for some insane factor, the web links to gain access to each of these core settings were expanded on contrary sides of the screen. What!?
As someone who values clean, thoughtful style, this seriously irritated me.
It strengthened that GoHighLevel still seemed like a work-in-progress instead of a sleek product prepared for prime-time use. Their concerns seemed concentrated on cramming in every feature imaginable, with poor functionality as a second thought.
And speaking of features, I quickly understood the affordable price tag featured costly concessions …
Misleading Pricing GoHighLevel Authorize.net Integration
Among GoHighLevel’s biggest marketing factors is the economical price for accessibility to many features. Yet I promptly discovered this inexpensive base price was misleading.
They nickle-and-dimed users with sporadic fees for core functionality. All of a sudden my credit card declarations had obscure $10 charges from GoHighLevel occasionally.
As it turned out, you obtain charged each time you send an e-mail through their web servers. So for high quantity individuals, this added up to numerous dollars in unexpected prices.
Between these per-email costs and paying additional for deliverability attachments like Mailgun, my “inexpensive” GoHighLevel registration wound up setting you back considerably greater than my Keap plan.
The reduced sticker price was appealing, however simply not sensible in practice. This bait-and-switch left a negative preference in my mouth.
Email Rates Suffered
The last dealbreaker was seeing my thoroughly supported e-mail open prices plunge nearly over night after changing to GoHighLevel.
Previously, my audience involvement consistently struck 35-40% open prices in Keap month after month. But once I moved their records over to GoHighLevel, performance tanked quickly to a useless 9% open rate.
Despite how much I maximized my sending practices or attempted every repairing trick, I can barely push open prices back into the teenagers– still a 50%+ decline from my previous criteria GoHighLevel Authorize.net Integration.
Let me repeat: my exact same audience and emails unexpectedly had awful engagement. The only point I can believe that would be causing this was whatever was occurring behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a firm so dependent on email marketing, this was a big deal.
Between the debilitating deliverability issues, concealed costs, broken features, and dreadful interface, I had actually ultimately reached my restriction …
Why I Quit GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Just 45 days after migrating my company to GoHighLevel, I recognized I had made a big blunder. The cons drastically outweighed any benefits.
No software program is excellent, yet the sheer quantity of troubles was past appropriate.
At the end of the day, software program boils down to count on. If I can not trust it to take care of important features properly or believe a vendor has my benefits in mind, then it’s time to leave– even after investing significant time, money, and effort moving.
So I made the hard phone call to reverse training course and return back to Keap entirely simply weeks after going done in on GoHighLevel. Let’s explore what I picked up from this ordeal.
Trick Takeaways: What I Learned From My GoHighLevel Blunder
My time with HighLevel can be summarized as an expensive accident. But in knowledge, it educated me a couple of key lessons:
- Adhere to what jobs. Don’t disturb what’s working unless something is definitively better across the board. Adjustment brings threat.
- Vet asserts thoroughly. Marketing hype around new software program often obscures larger underlying imperfections. Deep due diligence is crucial.
- Pick simplicity over features. Well-designed tools ought to make your job life simpler, not extra difficult and unpleasant.
- Openness constructs count on. Opaque pricing, dubious reseller terms, and finger-pointing to escape issues destroys depend on.
- Seek honest evaluations. Pleased support examines imply much less if extreme problems suggest inadequate general use.
- Excellence is impossible. No solitary remedy can perfectly fulfill every unique organization demand. Discover the least-bad fit.
- Evolution over change. Incremental renovations typically surpass risky wholesale reinvention of what currently works fine.
Simply put, I learned to be much more unconvinced of “as well excellent to be real” marketing cases and less tempted by the attraction of glossy new objects. The tools you make use of daily must gain count on through openness and performance, not slick advertising.