As a company proprietor for over a years, I count on software program and automation to enhance procedures and supply outcomes. So when GoHighLevel arised on the scene few years back, it absolutely captured my focus GoHighLevel Branded Domain.
The concept was enticing– an all-in-one customer administration platform with marketing, sales, and solution devices incorporated with each other. As a business owner constantly wanting to simplify and scale my organization, it appeared like a dream come to life theoretically. That would not want a single remedy that does it all?
However in this comprehensive GoHighLevel review, I’ll take you inside my dreadful journey of attempting (and failing) to switch over to this prominent brand-new software application. You’ll find out:
If you’re taking into consideration whether GoHighLevel is right for your own business demands, with any luck you can learn from my unpleasant errors and inflated expectations.
Spoiler: I do NOT suggest GoHighLevel. If you need a CRM, begin with this list of best CRMs rather. I utilize Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re seeking a sales, marketing, and job management choice to GoHighLevel, after that below are a few we recommend.
Backstory: Why I Considered Changing from Keap
To understand what attracted me to GoHighLevel to begin with, you require context about my previous arrangement. For over 5 years I had actually been happily relying upon Keap (previously Infusionsoft) to fulfill all my customer management and automation demands.
I discovered Keap intuitive to utilize and it dealt with everything I needed– CRM, e-mail marketing, sales funnels, subscription websites, and client support.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are created to aid small companies maintain their customers while including brand-new ones easily. Automate follow-ups with e-mails and texts, guaranteeing leads and customers obtain the right messages at the right time. Usage web site and social networks types to enhance lead follow-up, and handle your growth with easy visit scheduling and lead monitoring. Boost sales with automated pricing estimate, invoicing, and settlement handling, freeing up your time. With Keap, local business can save 10 hours per week and increase profits by 39%. Start with a 14-day free trial, no charge card called for.
Why we like Keap
Keap provides an extensive client relationship administration (CRM) and marketing automation service tailored for local business and entrepreneurs. We value Keap’s focus on streamlining sales processes and supporting consumer connections through effective automation tools. The platform’s all-in-one approach combines CRM, e-mail marketing, invoicing, and task monitoring, making it especially eye-catching for businesses wanting to combine their tech stack.
Generally, it just worked dependably with very little difficulty or maintenance needed. My open and click-through rates were excellent (like 35% excellent). Automations ran efficiently with no issues.
So why in the world was I tempted to uproot my whole functional foundation from a system that worked to attempt something unproven and untested?
In knowledge I can confess I obtained attracted by the siren call of “shiny item disorder”. You know the sensation: when everyone’s talking about a brand-new tool that will certainly reinvent your business … The turf commonly looks greener on the other side, and I asked yourself whether GoHighLevel may decrease friction factors that I ‘d discovered to endure over the years with Keap.
I withstood in the beginning, yet a few even more aggravations led me to think maybe it was time for a modification.
The Financial investment: Migrating My Firm to GoHighLevel
Earlier this year I chose to take the plunge. I enrolled in HighLevel’s Company plan at $297/month, spending substantially more than the $97/month starter expense.
This wasn’t a choice I ignored. I recognized switching platforms was going to need moving all my Keap data and essentially rebuilding my whole technology infrastructure from scratch utilizing all of the GoHighLevel integrations offered.
Right here’s an introduction of just several of the effort required:
- Manually exporting 20,000+ email customer records
- Recreating loads of automations and workflows
- Moving client profiles, notes, and task information to the new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe billing integration
- Establishing landing pages, promotions, and sales funnels throughout again
- Learning a totally foreign UX and user interface design
Done in, I spent around 30-40 tiresome hours of setup work transitioning whatever over– and also handling lost productivity throughout the button.
But inevitably, it was a computed investment I was willing to make. I figured some short-term pain would certainly settle with GoHighLevel giving a better long-lasting service for my service, Dripify. Oh how wrong I was …
It just took me concerning a month of hands-on usage to recognize I had actually made a large blunder. The issues started accumulating quickly, till it reached a point I had to cut my losses and switch over back to Keap entirely.
Allow’s walk through the horrible issues I ran into.
Security Issues & Several Bugs
Offered 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 customers, onboarding new clients, automating follow-ups for webinar registrations, sending occasion suggestions, managing subscription expiries and far more.
Every little thing appeared to be operating penalty … till suddenly it had not been. One morning, I awoke to find 171 entirely pointless e-mails had actually been sent out to individuals that must NOT have obtained them. This happened three days in a row, with a various batch of 160 individuals every day.
I desperately tried fixing and restoring the automation from square one. However the issue persisted.
When I seriously connected to their support group, they slightly declared “server problems” were responsible. However this explanation really did not make any kind of sense, given that the mistakes continued happening each morning like clockwork unassociated to any downtime.
In my mind, this massive failing was entirely unacceptable and just didn’t benefit my company. I have thousands of get in touches with relying on my automated campaigns running efficiently.
So if GoHighLevel was going to be completely unreliable, just how could I leave mission-critical workflows and sensitive customer information to their innovation?
The unintuitive interface only intensified these problems …
Discouraging UX
Coming from Keap where everything was smooth and user-friendly, GoHighLevel’s learning curve felt steep and challenging.
Straightforward jobs like editing and enhancing workflows entailed digging with food selection systems that were all over the place. Trick setups were unexplainably spread in totally various sections. Moving between functions felt disjointed or confusing.
I’ll inform you what I suggest by speaking about their funnel builder as an instance. There were 3 different setups panels to take care of total, private, and item arrangements. Yet for some insane factor, the web links to gain access to each of these core settings were expanded on contrary sides of the display. What!?
As a person who values tidy, thoughtful layout, this seriously frustrated me.
It strengthened that GoHighLevel still seemed like a work-in-progress as opposed to a polished product all set for prime-time use. Their priorities appeared concentrated on cramming in every feature under the sun, with inadequate usability as an afterthought.
And talking features, I quickly realized the small cost tag included costly concessions …
Misleading Pricing GoHighLevel Branded Domain
Among GoHighLevel’s most significant marketing points is the cost effective cost for access to so many features. Yet I rapidly learned this economical base expense was misleading.
They nickle-and-dimed individuals with erratic fees for core capability. Instantly my credit card statements had obscure $10 charges from GoHighLevel here and there.
As it turned out, you obtain charged every time you send an e-mail through their web servers. So for high quantity customers, this amounted to numerous bucks in unforeseen expenses.
In between these per-email fees and paying added for deliverability add-ons like Mailgun, my “cost effective” GoHighLevel subscription wound up setting you back significantly greater than my Keap plan.
The reduced sticker price was alluring, yet simply not reasonable in practice. This bait-and-switch left a poor taste in my mouth.
Email Fees Suffered
The last dealbreaker was seeing my meticulously nurtured email open prices drop almost over night after switching over to GoHighLevel.
Formerly, my target market engagement constantly hit 35-40% open rates in Keap month after month. Once I moved their documents over to GoHighLevel, performance tanked instantaneously to a useless 9% open rate.
No matter just how much I maximized my sending out methods or attempted every fixing technique, I might hardly push open rates back right into the teenagers– still a 50%+ decrease from my previous criteria GoHighLevel Branded Domain.
Let me repeat: my exact same audience and emails all of a sudden had terrible engagement. The only thing I can believe that would be triggering this was whatever was happening behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a company so dependent on e-mail marketing, this was a big deal.
Between the crippling deliverability problems, hidden costs, busted features, and terrible user interface, I had ultimately reached my limitation …
Why I Stop GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Just 45 days after migrating my agency to GoHighLevel, I recognized I had actually made a significant blunder. The disadvantages substantially outweighed any kind of benefits.
No software is ideal, but the sheer volume of troubles was beyond appropriate.
At the end of the day, software boils down to trust. If I can’t trust it to deal with essential functions effectively or think a supplier has my benefits in mind, then it’s time to leave– also after investing substantial time, money, and effort migrating.
So I made the difficult phone call to reverse course and return back to Keap totally simply weeks after going done in on GoHighLevel. Allow’s explore what I gained from this ordeal.
Trick Takeaways: What I Learned From My GoHighLevel Mistake
My time with HighLevel can be summarized as a pricey ill fortune. But in hindsight, it instructed me a few crucial lessons:
- Stick to what jobs. Do not upset what’s working unless something is definitively better across the board. Modification brings danger.
- Veterinarian claims thoroughly. Marketing hype around new software application frequently covers bigger underlying problems. Deep due diligence is necessary.
- Select simpleness over features. Properly designed tools need to make your work life simpler, not more complicated and unpleasant.
- Transparency develops trust fund. Opaque pricing, shady reseller terms, and finger-pointing to escape problems destroys depend on.
- Look for impartial testimonials. Delighted support examines suggest much less if too much issues indicate inadequate overall usability.
- Excellence is difficult. No single solution can flawlessly meet every one-of-a-kind service need. Locate the least-bad fit.
- Advancement over change. Incremental improvements usually exceed risky wholesale reinvention of what already works fine.
In short, I found out to be a lot more hesitant of “too excellent to be true” marketing claims and much less lured by the attraction of shiny new objects. The devices you use daily ought to make trust via transparency and efficiency, not slick advertising.