As a firm proprietor for over a years, I rely on software and automation to improve operations and provide outcomes. So when GoHighLevel emerged on the scene few years back, it certainly captured my interest GoHighLevel Community Feature.
The concept was attractive– an all-in-one customer administration system with marketing, sales, and service tools integrated with each other. As an entrepreneur always looking to streamline and scale my business, it seemed like a dream come to life on paper. Who would not want a solitary option that does it all?
Yet in this thorough GoHighLevel testimonial, I’ll take you inside my disastrous trip of trying (and stopping working) to change to this popular new software. You’ll find out:
If you’re taking into consideration whether GoHighLevel is right for your very own organization requirements, hopefully you can pick up from my painful blunders and blew up assumptions.
Looter: I do NOT suggest GoHighLevel. If you require a CRM, begin with this list of ideal CRMs instead. I make use of Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re seeking a sales, marketing, and task management choice to GoHighLevel, then right here are a few we suggest.
Backstory: Why I Thought About Switching Over from Keap
To comprehend what attracted me to GoHighLevel in the first place, you need context regarding my previous arrangement. For over 5 years I had been happily counting on Keap (previously Infusionsoft) to satisfy all my client administration and automation needs.
I found Keap instinctive to utilize and it managed whatever I required– CRM, e-mail marketing, sales funnels, subscription sites, and customer assistance.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are developed to assist local business maintain their customers while including brand-new ones effortlessly. Automate follow-ups with emails and messages, making certain leads and customers get the right messages at the right time. Usage internet site and social media sites forms to enhance lead follow-up, and manage your growth with very easy consultation scheduling and lead monitoring. Boost sales with automated quoting, invoicing, and payment handling, freeing up your time. With Keap, small businesses can conserve 10 hours weekly and increase profits by 39%. Beginning with a 14-day free trial, no credit card needed.
Why we like Keap
Keap supplies a thorough client partnership monitoring (CRM) and marketing automation solution customized for local business and entrepreneurs. We appreciate Keap’s focus on streamlining sales processes and supporting consumer partnerships with powerful automation devices. The system’s all-in-one approach combines CRM, email marketing, invoicing, and task administration, making it specifically eye-catching for businesses wanting to consolidate their tech pile.
Generally, it just functioned dependably with marginal fuss or upkeep required. My open and click-through rates were fantastic (like 35% great). Automations ran smoothly without any concerns.
So why in the world was I attracted to uproot my whole operational foundation from a system that functioned to try something unproven and untested?
In knowledge I can admit I got seduced by the siren telephone call of “shiny item disorder”. You know the feeling: when every person’s speaking about a brand-new device that will certainly transform your company … The lawn commonly looks greener on the other side, and I wondered whether GoHighLevel might minimize friction factors that I ‘d found out to tolerate throughout the years with Keap.
I stood up to in the beginning, but a couple of even more aggravations led me to assume possibly it was time for a change.
The Financial investment: Migrating My Firm to GoHighLevel
Earlier this year I decided to take the plunge. I signed up for HighLevel’s Company plan at $297/month, investing considerably more than the $97/month starter cost.
This wasn’t a decision I ignored. I understood switching over systems was going to require migrating all my Keap information and essentially restoring my whole technology framework from scratch utilizing every one of the GoHighLevel integrations available.
Below’s a summary of simply a few of the initiative called for:
- By hand exporting 20,000+ e-mail subscriber 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, discounts, and sales funnels throughout again
- Learning a completely international UX and interface design
Done in, I invested around 30-40 tiresome hours of arrangement work transitioning every little thing over– as well as managing lost efficiency throughout the button.
However eventually, it was a computed financial investment I wanted to make. I figured some temporary discomfort would pay off with GoHighLevel supplying a far better lasting option for my organization, Dripify. Oh how incorrect I was …
It only took me regarding a month of hands-on use to realize I had made a large error. The concerns started piling up swiftly, up until it reached a factor I needed to cut my losses and switch over back to Keap entirely.
Let’s walk through the nightmarish problems I ran into.
Safety And Security Issues & Several Vermin
Provided GoHighLevel placed itself as an all-in-one automation system, I made sure to meticulously recreate every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These included series for onboarding brand-new e-mail customers, onboarding brand-new clients, automating follow-ups for webinar enrollments, sending out event tips, handling subscription expirations and much more.
Everything appeared to be working fine … until suddenly it had not been. One morning, I woke up to find 171 completely unnecessary emails had been sent to customers who should NOT have gotten them. This happened 3 days straight, with a different batch of 160 people daily.
I anxiously attempted troubleshooting and restoring the automation from square one. But the issue persisted.
When I desperately reached out to their support team, they slightly claimed “web server issues” were at fault. However this explanation really did not make any type of feeling, since the errors continued occurring each morning like clockwork unconnected to any type of downtime.
In my mind, this large failure was completely undesirable and just didn’t help my service. I have countless calls relying upon my automated campaigns running smoothly.
So if GoHighLevel was mosting likely to be totally unstable, how could I hand over mission-critical workflows and delicate client information to their modern technology?
The unintuitive user interface only compounded these problems …
Frustrating UX
Originating from Keap where whatever was smooth and user-friendly, GoHighLevel’s learning contour really felt high and complex.
Easy jobs like editing workflows entailed digging through menu systems that were all over the place. Trick setups were unexplainably spread in completely different areas. Moving in between functions felt disjointed or complicated.
I’ll tell you what I imply by speaking about their funnel builder as an instance. There were 3 separate setups panels to manage general, specific, and product arrangements. Yet for some insane reason, the links to access each of these core setups were spread out on contrary sides of the display. What!?
As someone who values clean, thoughtful style, this seriously upset me.
It reinforced that GoHighLevel still seemed like a work-in-progress as opposed to a polished item ready for prime-time usage. Their top priorities appeared focused on packing in every feature imaginable, with bad usability as an afterthought.
And talking features, I quickly recognized the small cost tag came with expensive concessions …
Misleading Pricing GoHighLevel Community Feature
Among GoHighLevel’s most significant marketing points is the inexpensive price for accessibility to so many features. But I quickly learned this inexpensive base expense was deceitful.
They nickle-and-dimed users with erratic costs for core functionality. Unexpectedly my credit card declarations had obscure $10 costs from GoHighLevel here and there.
As it ended up, you get charged every single time you send an email via their web servers. So for high volume individuals, this amounted to thousands of dollars in unforeseen costs.
In between these per-email fees and paying additional for deliverability add-ons like Mailgun, my “economical” GoHighLevel registration wound up setting you back considerably greater than my Keap plan.
The low price tag was appealing, yet just not practical in practice. This bait-and-switch left a bad preference in my mouth.
Email Fees Suffered
The last dealbreaker was seeing my meticulously supported email open rates plunge nearly overnight after changing to GoHighLevel.
Formerly, my target market engagement consistently hit 35-40% open prices in Keap month after month. Once I moved their records over to GoHighLevel, efficiency tanked instantaneously to a useless 9% open rate.
No matter just how much I maximized my sending methods or attempted every fixing method, I could barely nudge open prices back into the teenagers– still a 50%+ decrease from my previous criteria GoHighLevel Community Feature.
Let me repeat: my exact same target market and e-mails all of a sudden had terrible involvement. The only thing I might think that would be creating this was whatever was happening behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a firm so depending on email marketing, this was a big deal.
In between the crippling deliverability issues, hidden charges, broken features, and terrible interface, I had ultimately reached my limit …
Why I Give up GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Simply 45 days after migrating my firm to GoHighLevel, I recognized I had actually made a big blunder. The disadvantages considerably outweighed any kind of advantages.
No software program is best, however the large quantity of problems was past acceptable.
At the end of the day, software comes down to count on. If I can’t trust it to take care of vital functions capably or think a supplier has my best interests in mind, then it’s time to walk away– even after spending significant time, cash, and initiative migrating.
So I made the hard phone call to reverse program and return back to Keap completely just weeks after going all in on GoHighLevel. Let’s explore what I picked up from this ordeal.
Key Takeaways: What I Learned From My GoHighLevel Blunder
My time with HighLevel can be summed up as a costly accident. But in hindsight, it showed me a few key lessons:
- Adhere to what jobs. Do not disturb what’s working unless something is definitively better across the board. Change brings threat.
- Vet claims extensively. Marketing buzz around new software application usually obscures bigger underlying imperfections. Deep due persistance is important.
- Choose simpleness over features. Properly designed devices ought to make your job life much easier, not extra challenging and messy.
- Openness constructs count on. Opaque pricing, unethical reseller terms, and finger-pointing to evade troubles ruins count on.
- Seek objective testimonials. Happy assistance evaluates mean less if excessive problems indicate poor total usability.
- Perfection is impossible. No solitary option can completely fulfill every unique service need. Discover the least-bad fit.
- Evolution over change. Incremental improvements typically outweigh risky wholesale reinvention of what already functions fine.
Basically, I found out to be much more hesitant of “too good to be true” marketing cases and less tempted by the attraction of shiny brand-new items. The tools you utilize daily need to earn trust fund through transparency and performance, not glossy advertising.