As a company proprietor for over a decade, I rely upon software and automation to improve procedures and supply results. So when GoHighLevel emerged on the scene few years back, it most definitely captured my attention GoHighLevel Community Events.
The idea was appealing– an all-in-one client management system with marketing, sales, and solution devices integrated with each other. As a business owner constantly looking to streamline and scale my business, it appeared like a dream come to life on paper. Who wouldn’t want a solitary service that does it all?
But in this in-depth GoHighLevel review, I’ll take you inside my devastating trip of trying (and failing) to switch over to this popular brand-new software application. You’ll learn:
If you’re taking into consideration whether GoHighLevel is right for your own company requirements, hopefully you can pick up from my uncomfortable mistakes and pumped up assumptions.
Looter: I do NOT advise GoHighLevel. If you need a CRM, begin with this listing of best CRMs instead. I utilize Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re looking for a sales, marketing, and project management choice to GoHighLevel, then right here are a couple of we recommend.
Backstory: Why I Considered Changing from Keap
To understand what attracted me to GoHighLevel in the first place, you need context regarding my previous configuration. For over 5 years I had been happily relying upon Keap (previously Infusionsoft) to satisfy all my customer monitoring and automation needs.
I located Keap instinctive to make use of and it took care of every little thing I needed– CRM, email marketing, sales funnels, subscription websites, and client assistance.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are developed to assist local business keep their customers while adding new ones effortlessly. Automate follow-ups with e-mails and messages, making certain leads and customers obtain the best messages at the right time. Use website and social networks forms to improve lead follow-up, and manage your growth with easy consultation organizing and lead monitoring. Boost sales with automated pricing estimate, invoicing, and settlement processing, maximizing your time. With Keap, small companies can conserve 10 hours per week and rise income by 39%. Begin with a 14-day free trial, no credit card called for.
Why we like Keap
Keap offers a detailed customer relationship management (CRM) and marketing automation service tailored for small businesses and entrepreneurs. We appreciate Keap’s concentrate on simplifying sales processes and nurturing consumer partnerships with effective automation devices. The platform’s all-in-one method incorporates CRM, email marketing, invoicing, and task management, making it particularly attractive for companies wanting to settle their tech stack.
Generally, it just worked accurately with very little hassle or upkeep needed. My open and click-through prices were great (like 35% excellent). Automations ran efficiently with no concerns.
So why on earth was I attracted to uproot my whole operational foundation from a system that worked to attempt something unverified and untried?
In hindsight I can admit I got seduced by the siren call of “glossy things syndrome”. You recognize the sensation: when every person’s discussing a brand-new device that will reinvent your business … The lawn often looks greener on the other side, and I wondered whether GoHighLevel might reduce friction points that I would certainly learned to endure over the years with Keap.
I stood up to initially, yet a few more frustrations led me to think perhaps it was time for an adjustment.
The Investment: Moving My Company to GoHighLevel
Earlier this year I decided to start. I signed up for HighLevel’s Company plan at $297/month, spending substantially greater than the $97/month starter price.
This wasn’t a decision I ignored. I knew changing platforms was mosting likely to need migrating all my Keap information and basically restoring my entire technology infrastructure from square one utilizing every one of the GoHighLevel integrations offered.
Right here’s an overview of simply several of the initiative called for:
- By hand exporting 20,000+ e-mail subscriber documents
- Recreating lots of automations and workflows
- Moving client profiles, notes, and task information to the brand-new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe payment integration
- Setting up landing pages, discounts, and sales funnels throughout again
- Learning a completely international UX and user interface layout
Done in, I invested around 30-40 laborious hours of setup work transitioning every little thing over– as well as managing lost efficiency during the button.
However ultimately, it was a calculated financial investment I wanted to make. I figured some temporary discomfort would settle with GoHighLevel offering a much better long-term solution for my service, Dripify. Oh exactly how wrong I was …
It only took me regarding a month of hands-on use to recognize I had actually made a huge mistake. The problems began piling up quickly, up until it reached a point I had to cut my losses and switch over back to Keap completely.
Let’s walk through the horrible issues I encountered.
Safety And Security Issues & Lots of Vermin
Offered GoHighLevel placed itself as an all-in-one automation platform, I took care to carefully recreate each and every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These included sequences for onboarding brand-new e-mail customers, onboarding brand-new clients, automating follow-ups for webinar enrollments, sending event suggestions, managing subscription expiries and far more.
Whatever seemed to be functioning penalty … up until instantly it wasn’t. One morning, I woke up to find 171 entirely unnecessary emails had been sent out to individuals that need to NOT have obtained them. This took place three days straight, with a different set of 160 people every day.
I hysterically attempted repairing and reconstructing the automation from square one. However the trouble lingered.
When I seriously reached out to their assistance team, they vaguely asserted “server issues” were responsible. But this description really did not make any type of sense, given that the mistakes continued taking place each morning like clockwork unassociated to any type of downtime.
In my mind, this large failing was entirely inappropriate and simply really did not benefit my service. I have hundreds of calls relying upon my automated campaigns running smoothly.
So if GoHighLevel was mosting likely to be entirely unreliable, just how could I leave mission-critical workflows and sensitive customer information to their modern technology?
The unintuitive user interface only intensified these issues …
Aggravating UX
Originating from Keap where every little thing was seamless and user-friendly, GoHighLevel’s learning curve really felt high and challenging.
Straightforward jobs like editing and enhancing workflows entailed digging through food selection systems that were all over the place. Trick setups were unexplainably spread in entirely different sections. Moving in between functions felt disjointed or complicated.
I’ll tell you what I suggest by talking about their funnel builder as an example. There were 3 separate setups panels to handle overall, private, and item configurations. Yet for some crazy reason, the links to accessibility each of these core settings were spread out on contrary sides of the screen. What!?
As someone that values clean, thoughtful design, this seriously frustrated me.
It strengthened that GoHighLevel still seemed like a work-in-progress as opposed to a sleek item all set for prime-time use. Their top priorities seemed focused on cramming in every feature under the sun, with inadequate functionality as a second thought.
And talking features, I soon recognized the small cost tag included pricey concessions …
Misleading Pricing GoHighLevel Community Events
Among GoHighLevel’s biggest marketing factors is the economical price for accessibility to so many features. Yet I rapidly discovered this affordable base cost was misleading.
They nickle-and-dimed individuals with erratic costs for core performance. Suddenly my credit card statements had obscure $10 charges from GoHighLevel occasionally.
As it turned out, you get charged every single time you send out an e-mail via their web servers. So for high quantity customers, this added up to thousands of bucks in unexpected prices.
In between these per-email costs and paying extra for deliverability attachments like Mailgun, my “budget-friendly” GoHighLevel subscription wound up costing dramatically greater than my Keap plan.
The reduced price tag was tempting, yet just not reasonable in practice. This bait-and-switch left a poor preference in my mouth.
Email Fees Suffered
The last dealbreaker was seeing my carefully nurtured e-mail open prices plunge almost over night after switching over to GoHighLevel.
Formerly, my target market involvement constantly hit 35-40% open rates in Keap month after month. But once I moved their documents over to GoHighLevel, performance tanked promptly to a worthless 9% open rate.
Regardless of how much I maximized my sending out techniques or attempted every repairing method, I can hardly nudge open prices back into the teenagers– still a 50%+ decline from my previous standards GoHighLevel Community Events.
Let me repeat: my exact same target market and e-mails unexpectedly had dreadful interaction. The only point I could think that would be creating this was whatever was taking place behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a firm so based on email marketing, this was a big deal.
Between the crippling deliverability problems, concealed costs, busted features, and horrible interface, I had actually finally reached my limit …
Why I Stop GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Just 45 days after migrating my firm to GoHighLevel, I knew I had made a significant error. The disadvantages drastically exceeded any type of benefits.
No software program is excellent, yet the large volume of troubles was beyond appropriate.
At the end of the day, software application comes down to count on. If I can’t trust it to deal with crucial functions capably or think a vendor has my best interests in mind, then it’s time to walk away– also after spending considerable time, cash, and initiative migrating.
So I made the hard call to reverse training course and return back to Keap entirely just weeks after going all in on GoHighLevel. Allow’s explore what I learned from this debacle.
Key Takeaways: What I Gained from My GoHighLevel Error
My time with HighLevel can be summed up as a costly ill fortune. However in hindsight, it showed me a few essential lessons:
- Stay with what jobs. Don’t distress what’s working unless something is definitively far better across the board. Change brings threat.
- Vet claims thoroughly. Marketing hype around brand-new software program typically covers bigger underlying problems. Deep due diligence is essential.
- Choose simplicity over features. Properly designed tools need to make your work life much easier, not a lot more difficult and untidy.
- Transparency constructs depend on. Nontransparent pricing, unethical reseller terms, and finger-pointing to evade issues damages count on.
- Look for unbiased testimonials. Pleased support evaluates imply less if too much issues suggest bad general functionality.
- Perfection is impossible. No single option can flawlessly meet every one-of-a-kind business demand. Find the least-bad fit.
- Evolution over change. Incremental improvements commonly surpass high-risk wholesale reinvention of what currently works penalty.
In other words, I found out to be much more unconvinced of “as well great to be true” marketing insurance claims and less lured by the allure of glossy brand-new items. The tools you use daily ought to make depend on with openness and performance, not slick advertising.