As a firm owner for over a years, I rely on software program and automation to streamline procedures and provide results. So when GoHighLevel emerged on the scene few years back, it definitely caught my focus GoHighLevel Community.
The idea was appealing– an all-in-one client administration system with marketing, sales, and service devices incorporated with each other. As an entrepreneur always wanting to streamline and scale my company, it looked like a desire come true theoretically. That wouldn’t want a solitary option that does it all?
However in this in-depth GoHighLevel review, I’ll take you inside my disastrous journey of trying (and stopping working) to switch to this prominent brand-new software. You’ll learn:
If you’re thinking about whether GoHighLevel is right for your own business demands, ideally you can gain from my painful blunders and pumped up expectations.
Looter: I do NOT recommend GoHighLevel. If you need a CRM, start with this list of ideal CRMs rather. I utilize Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re looking for a sales, marketing, and job management option to GoHighLevel, then right here are a few we advise.
Backstory: Why I Took Into Consideration Changing from Keap
To understand what attracted me to GoHighLevel to begin with, you require context concerning my previous configuration. For over 5 years I had actually been gladly depending on Keap (previously Infusionsoft) to meet all my client monitoring and automation demands.
I located Keap instinctive to use and it managed everything I needed– CRM, e-mail marketing, sales funnels, membership websites, and client support.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are designed to assist local business maintain their customers while including brand-new ones easily. Automate follow-ups with emails and messages, ensuring leads and customers obtain the ideal messages at the right time. Usage website and social media kinds to simplify lead follow-up, and handle your development with very easy visit scheduling and lead tracking. Boost sales with automated quoting, invoicing, and repayment processing, maximizing your time. With Keap, small companies can conserve 10 hours weekly and rise earnings by 39%. Begin with a 14-day free trial, no bank card required.
Why we like Keap
Keap offers a comprehensive consumer relationship management (CRM) and marketing automation service customized for small businesses and business owners. We appreciate Keap’s concentrate on streamlining sales processes and nurturing client relationships via effective automation tools. The platform’s all-in-one technique combines CRM, e-mail marketing, invoicing, and job monitoring, making it specifically eye-catching for companies wanting to combine their tech pile.
Essentially, it simply worked accurately with minimal difficulty or upkeep needed. My open and click-through rates were fantastic (like 35% fantastic). 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 try something unproven and untested?
In hindsight I can confess I obtained seduced by the alarm telephone call of “shiny item disorder”. You know the feeling: when every person’s talking about a new tool that will revolutionize your business … The lawn frequently looks greener beyond, and I questioned whether GoHighLevel might reduce rubbing factors that I ‘d learned to tolerate throughout the years with Keap.
I withstood at first, yet a few more aggravations led me to believe perhaps it was time for a change.
The Investment: Moving My Agency to GoHighLevel
Previously this year I decided to start. I registered for HighLevel’s Agency plan at $297/month, investing significantly more than the $97/month starter expense.
This wasn’t a decision I ignored. I understood changing systems was going to need moving all my Keap data and essentially reconstructing my whole tech facilities from the ground up using all of the GoHighLevel integrations readily available.
Below’s a summary of simply several of the effort needed:
- By hand exporting 20,000+ email subscriber documents
- Recreating lots of automations and workflows
- Relocating customer accounts, notes, and task information to the brand-new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe billing integration
- Establishing landing pages, coupons, and sales funnels throughout again
- Learning a completely foreign UX and user interface style
Done in, I spent around 30-40 laborious hours of setup job transitioning whatever over– and also handling lost performance during the switch.
However eventually, it was a calculated investment I was willing to make. I figured some temporary pain would certainly settle with GoHighLevel giving a far better lasting service for my company, Dripify. Oh how wrong I was …
It just took me regarding a month of hands-on usage to recognize I had actually made a big error. The problems started piling up quickly, till it got to a point I had to cut my losses and switch over back to Keap completely.
Let’s walk through the nightmarish problems I experienced.
Safety Issues & Numerous Bugs
Provided GoHighLevel placed itself as an all-in-one automation system, I made sure to thoroughly recreate every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These included sequences for onboarding new e-mail customers, onboarding new customers, automating follow-ups for webinar enrollments, sending event reminders, handling subscription expirations and a lot more.
Everything appeared to be operating penalty … till instantly it wasn’t. One morning, I awoke to find 171 completely irrelevant emails had been sent to individuals who ought to NOT have actually received them. This took place three days straight, with a various batch of 160 individuals every day.
I frantically tried repairing and reconstructing the automation from square one. However the issue lingered.
When I seriously reached out to their assistance team, they slightly asserted “web server concerns” were to blame. But this explanation really did not make any sense, given that the errors proceeded taking place each early morning like clockwork unrelated to any kind of downtime.
In my mind, this enormous failing was totally inappropriate and simply didn’t work for my business. I have thousands of contacts depending on my automated campaigns running efficiently.
So if GoHighLevel was mosting likely to be entirely unreliable, just how could I entrust mission-critical workflows and delicate customer data to their modern technology?
The unintuitive user interface just compounded these concerns …
Aggravating UX
Coming from Keap where every little thing was smooth and instinctive, GoHighLevel’s learning curve felt steep and complicated.
Simple tasks like modifying workflows included excavating through food selection systems that were all over the place. Trick setups were unexplainably scattered in absolutely different areas. Moving in between functions felt disjointed or complicated.
I’ll inform you what I mean by talking about their funnel builder as an example. There were 3 separate settings panels to take care of overall, private, and item setups. Yet for some insane factor, the links to accessibility each of these core setups were expanded on contrary sides of the screen. What!?
As someone that values tidy, thoughtful design, this seriously annoyed me.
It strengthened that GoHighLevel still felt like a work-in-progress rather than a refined item ready for prime-time use. Their concerns appeared concentrated on packing in every feature imaginable, with inadequate use as a second thought.
And speaking of features, I soon recognized the low price tag included costly concessions …
Deceptive Pricing GoHighLevel Community
Among GoHighLevel’s largest marketing factors is the affordable price for accessibility to so many features. However I rapidly discovered this inexpensive base cost was deceptive.
They nickle-and-dimed customers with sporadic fees for core performance. Unexpectedly my credit card statements had obscure $10 fees from GoHighLevel here and there.
As it turned out, you obtain charged whenever you send out an email via their servers. So for high volume users, this amounted to hundreds of bucks in unanticipated costs.
In between these per-email charges and paying extra for deliverability add-ons like Mailgun, my “budget friendly” GoHighLevel subscription wound up costing dramatically MORE than my Keap plan.
The low price tag was alluring, however just not sensible in practice. This bait-and-switch left a negative preference in my mouth.
Email Rates Suffered
The final dealbreaker was seeing my carefully supported email open rates plummet nearly over night after changing to GoHighLevel.
Previously, my audience involvement consistently struck 35-40% open rates in Keap month after month. Once I moved their records over to GoHighLevel, performance tanked promptly to a pitiful 9% open rate.
No matter how much I maximized my sending techniques or attempted every fixing trick, I could barely push open rates back into the teenagers– still a 50%+ decrease from my previous standards GoHighLevel Community.
Let me repeat: my exact same target market and e-mails instantly had horrible interaction. The only point I might assume that would certainly be causing 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 issues, hidden costs, busted features, and dreadful interface, I had ultimately reached my limit …
Why I Give up GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Simply 45 days after moving my firm to GoHighLevel, I recognized I had actually made a substantial error. The cons substantially surpassed any type of advantages.
No software program is perfect, yet the large quantity of troubles was beyond appropriate.
At the end of the day, software program boils down to depend on. If I can’t trust it to handle essential features capably or think a vendor has my benefits in mind, after that it’s time to leave– also after spending considerable time, cash, and effort moving.
So I made the challenging phone call to reverse training course and return back to Keap totally just weeks after going all in on GoHighLevel. Let’s explore what I picked up from this fiasco.
Key Takeaways: What I Picked up from My GoHighLevel Blunder
My time with HighLevel can be summed up as a pricey accident. Yet in knowledge, it instructed me a couple of key lessons:
- Stay with what works. Don’t upset what’s working unless something is definitively much better across the board. Change brings risk.
- Vet asserts thoroughly. Marketing hype around new software application often covers larger underlying imperfections. Deep due diligence is vital.
- Choose simpleness over features. Well-designed devices ought to make your job life easier, not much more complicated and unpleasant.
- Transparency develops count on. Nontransparent pricing, unethical reseller terms, and finger-pointing to evade issues ruins trust.
- Seek honest reviews. Happy support evaluates suggest less if extreme concerns imply poor general use.
- Perfection is difficult. No single option can completely satisfy every special company demand. Find the least-bad fit.
- Development over transformation. Incremental improvements normally surpass risky wholesale reinvention of what currently functions penalty.
In other words, I found out to be extra cynical of “as well great to be real” marketing claims and less attracted by the appeal of shiny brand-new items. The devices you make use of daily ought to earn trust via openness and efficiency, not slick advertising.