As a company owner for over a years, I count on software and automation to improve procedures and supply outcomes. So when GoHighLevel arised on the scene couple of years back, it certainly caught my focus GoHighLevel Business Model.
The idea was attractive– an all-in-one customer management platform with marketing, sales, and solution devices incorporated with each other. As an entrepreneur constantly looking to simplify and scale my service, it felt like a dream happened on paper. Who wouldn’t desire a solitary service that does it all?
But in this extensive GoHighLevel review, I’ll take you inside my devastating journey of trying (and falling short) to switch to this prominent new software. You’ll learn:
If you’re taking into consideration whether GoHighLevel is right for your very own company requirements, with any luck you can gain from my excruciating mistakes and inflated assumptions.
Looter: I do NOT recommend GoHighLevel. If you require a CRM, begin with this listing of finest CRMs instead. I use Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re searching for a sales, marketing, and job administration alternative to GoHighLevel, then here are a few we suggest.
Backstory: Why I Took Into Consideration Changing from Keap
To understand what attracted me to GoHighLevel in the first place, you need context about my previous arrangement. For over 5 years I had been happily relying upon Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) to satisfy all my client management and automation demands.
I discovered Keap instinctive to make use of and it dealt with everything I needed– CRM, e-mail marketing, sales funnels, subscription sites, and customer assistance.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are created to help small companies maintain their clients while adding new ones easily. Automate follow-ups with e-mails and texts, making sure leads and clients get the ideal messages at the right time. Usage internet site and social networks forms to simplify lead follow-up, and manage your growth with simple appointment scheduling and lead monitoring. Boost sales with automated pricing estimate, invoicing, and payment handling, maximizing your time. With Keap, small companies can save 10 hours per week and boost revenue by 39%. Beginning with a 14-day free trial, no charge card needed.
Why we like Keap
Keap offers a thorough client partnership administration (CRM) and marketing automation solution tailored for local business and business owners. We value Keap’s focus on simplifying sales procedures and nurturing client relationships through powerful automation devices. The platform’s all-in-one strategy incorporates CRM, email marketing, invoicing, and job monitoring, making it particularly eye-catching for organizations aiming to consolidate their tech stack.
Generally, it just worked reliably with marginal fuss or upkeep called for. My open and click-through prices were great (like 35% wonderful). Automations ran efficiently without problems.
So why in the world was I attracted to uproot my entire functional foundation from a system that functioned to attempt something unproven and untried?
In knowledge I can admit I got attracted by the alarm telephone call of “shiny things disorder”. You understand the sensation: when every person’s talking about a new tool that will certainly transform your organization … The lawn usually looks greener beyond, and I wondered whether GoHighLevel may minimize rubbing factors that I would certainly learned to endure over the years with Keap.
I withstood at first, yet a couple of more stress led me to assume possibly it was time for a change.
The Investment: Migrating My Company to GoHighLevel
Previously this year I decided to start. I enrolled in HighLevel’s Company plan at $297/month, investing dramatically greater than the $97/month starter expense.
This wasn’t a choice I ignored. I understood switching over systems was going to call for migrating all my Keap data and basically reconstructing my whole technology infrastructure from square one using every one of the GoHighLevel integrations offered.
Below’s a review of simply a few of the initiative needed:
- Manually exporting 20,000+ email customer records
- Recreating dozens of automations and workflows
- Moving client profiles, notes, and project information to the new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe billing integration
- Setting up landing pages, coupons, and sales funnels around again
- Learning a totally international UX and interface layout
Done in, I spent around 30-40 laborious hours of setup job transitioning everything over– and also managing shed efficiency throughout the switch.
However eventually, it was a calculated financial investment I was willing to make. I figured some short-term discomfort would repay with GoHighLevel offering a much better lasting option for my company, Dripify. Oh just how incorrect I was …
It just took me regarding a month of hands-on usage to realize I had actually made a big error. The issues began piling up promptly, until it got to a factor I had to cut my losses and switch over back to Keap entirely.
Allow’s go through the horrible troubles I ran into.
Protection Issues & Lots of Bugs
Offered GoHighLevel positioned itself as an all-in-one automation system, I made sure to meticulously recreate every workflow from my old Keap account.
These included sequences for onboarding new email subscribers, onboarding brand-new customers, automating follow-ups for webinar registrations, sending occasion reminders, managing membership expiries and much more.
Everything appeared to be functioning fine … until suddenly it had not been. One early morning, I awoke to locate 171 entirely unimportant emails had been sent to users who must NOT have actually gotten them. This occurred 3 days straight, with a various set of 160 people each day.
I frantically attempted fixing and rebuilding the automation from scratch. Yet the issue continued.
When I desperately connected to their assistance team, they slightly declared “server issues” were to blame. But this explanation really did not make any type of sense, because the mistakes continued happening each early morning like clockwork unrelated to any kind of downtime.
In my mind, this massive failure was entirely inappropriate and simply really did not benefit my service. I have hundreds of contacts relying on my automated campaigns running smoothly.
So if GoHighLevel was mosting likely to be entirely unstable, exactly how could I delegate mission-critical workflows and delicate client information to their modern technology?
The unintuitive user interface just intensified these concerns …
Irritating UX
Coming from Keap where every little thing was smooth and intuitive, GoHighLevel’s learning curve felt high and difficult.
Simple tasks like editing and enhancing workflows included digging through food selection systems that were all over the place. Secret setups were unexplainably spread in absolutely various areas. Relocating between functions really felt disjointed or confusing.
I’ll inform you what I mean by talking about their funnel builder as an example. There were 3 separate setups panels to manage overall, individual, and item setups. Yet for some insane reason, the web links to gain access to each of these core setups were expanded on opposite sides of the screen. What!?
As a person that values clean, thoughtful style, this seriously irritated me.
It enhanced that GoHighLevel still seemed like a work-in-progress as opposed to a sleek item ready for prime-time usage. Their concerns appeared focused on stuffing in every feature under the sun, with bad usability as an afterthought.
And talking features, I quickly understood the low cost tag included pricey concessions …
Deceptive Pricing GoHighLevel Business Model
Among GoHighLevel’s most significant selling points is the budget friendly price for accessibility to many features. Yet I rapidly discovered this low-cost base expense was misleading.
They nickle-and-dimed users with erratic costs for core functionality. All of a sudden my credit card declarations had obscure $10 fees from GoHighLevel occasionally.
As it turned out, you obtain charged whenever you send out an e-mail with their web servers. So for high volume customers, this added up to thousands of dollars in unanticipated expenses.
In between these per-email charges and paying additional for deliverability add-ons like Mailgun, my “economical” GoHighLevel registration ended up costing considerably greater than my Keap plan.
The reduced price tag was appealing, however simply not reasonable in practice. This bait-and-switch left a poor taste in my mouth.
Email Rates Suffered
The last dealbreaker was seeing my carefully supported e-mail open prices drop virtually overnight after switching to GoHighLevel.
Formerly, my target market engagement regularly hit 35-40% open prices in Keap month after month. But once I migrated their documents over to GoHighLevel, efficiency tanked instantaneously to a worthless 9% open price.
No matter how much I optimized my sending out methods or attempted every troubleshooting method, I can barely push open prices back right into the teenagers– still a 50%+ decline from my previous standards GoHighLevel Business Model.
Let me repeat: my exact same audience and e-mails instantly had dreadful engagement. The only point I might assume that would be creating this was whatever was happening behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a company so dependent on email marketing, this was a big deal.
Between the crippling deliverability concerns, hidden fees, broken features, and dreadful interface, I had actually finally reached my limitation …
Why I Quit GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Just 45 days after migrating my firm to GoHighLevel, I knew I had made a big error. The disadvantages substantially outweighed any kind of advantages.
No software is perfect, yet the sheer volume of troubles was past appropriate.
At the end of the day, software application comes down to trust fund. If I can’t trust it to take care of crucial functions properly or believe a vendor has my best interests in mind, after that it’s time to walk away– also after spending considerable time, cash, and effort migrating.
So I made the tough phone call to reverse training course and return back to Keap totally just weeks after going done in on GoHighLevel. Let’s discover what I picked up from this fiasco.
Secret Takeaways: What I Picked up from My GoHighLevel Mistake
My time with HighLevel can be summed up as a costly ill fortune. But in knowledge, it showed me a few key lessons:
- Adhere to what works. Do not disturb what’s functioning unless something is definitively much better across the board. Modification brings danger.
- Veterinarian declares thoroughly. Marketing hype around brand-new software application frequently obscures larger underlying flaws. Deep due diligence is important.
- Select simpleness over features. Well-designed tools need to make your job life easier, not a lot more complicated and unpleasant.
- Transparency develops depend on. Opaque pricing, shady reseller terms, and finger-pointing to evade issues ruins count on.
- Seek impartial reviews. Pleased support assesses mean much less if extreme concerns imply bad overall functionality.
- Perfection is difficult. No single service can completely meet every unique service requirement. Discover the least-bad fit.
- Advancement over revolution. Incremental renovations normally surpass dangerous wholesale reinvention of what currently works penalty.
In short, I discovered to be a lot more unconvinced of “also good to be true” marketing claims and less attracted by the allure of glossy new things. The tools you utilize daily ought to earn trust through openness and efficiency, not slick advertising.