As a firm proprietor for over a decade, I depend on software and automation to simplify operations and deliver results. So when GoHighLevel emerged on the scene couple of years back, it certainly caught my focus GoHighLevel Custom Fields.
The idea was attractive– an all-in-one client management platform with marketing, sales, and service devices incorporated together. As an entrepreneur constantly looking to simplify and scale my business, it appeared like a dream come to life on paper. That would not want a solitary option that does it all?
Yet in this thorough GoHighLevel evaluation, I’ll take you inside my tragic trip of trying (and stopping working) to switch to this preferred new software program. You’ll discover:
If you’re considering whether GoHighLevel is right for your very own organization demands, ideally you can pick up from my unpleasant errors and inflated assumptions.
Spoiler: I do NOT suggest GoHighLevel. If you require a CRM, begin with this list of finest CRMs instead. I utilize Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re trying to find a sales, marketing, and task management option to GoHighLevel, then right here are a few we suggest.
Backstory: Why I Took Into Consideration Switching from Keap
To comprehend what attracted me to GoHighLevel to begin with, you require context regarding 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 needs.
I discovered Keap instinctive to make use of and it dealt with every little thing I required– CRM, email marketing, sales funnels, membership websites, and customer support.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are made to aid local business keep their clients while adding brand-new ones effortlessly. Automate follow-ups with emails and messages, making certain leads and customers receive the ideal messages at the right time. Usage web site and social networks kinds to simplify lead follow-up, and handle your development with very easy visit organizing and lead tracking. Boost sales with automated pricing quote, invoicing, and repayment processing, freeing up your time. With Keap, small companies can save 10 hours each week and boost earnings by 39%. Begin with a 14-day free trial, no bank card required.
Why we like Keap
Keap offers a thorough customer connection monitoring (CRM) and marketing automation remedy tailored for local business and entrepreneurs. We appreciate Keap’s focus on enhancing sales procedures and supporting consumer partnerships with effective automation tools. The system’s all-in-one strategy incorporates CRM, e-mail marketing, invoicing, and task management, making it specifically appealing for services aiming to settle their technology stack.
Essentially, it simply functioned dependably with minimal fuss or maintenance needed. My open and click-through rates were excellent (like 35% great). Automations ran efficiently with no concerns.
So why on earth was I lured to uproot my entire operational structure from a system that worked to try something unproven and untested?
In hindsight I can admit I obtained seduced by the alarm call of “shiny things disorder”. You know the feeling: when everybody’s discussing a brand-new tool that will certainly transform your service … The yard often looks greener beyond, and I wondered whether GoHighLevel may minimize friction factors that I would certainly learned to endure over the years with Keap.
I resisted at first, yet a couple of more aggravations led me to assume maybe it was time for an adjustment.
The Investment: Migrating My Company to GoHighLevel
Previously this year I decided to start. I registered for HighLevel’s Company plan at $297/month, spending substantially greater than the $97/month starter price.
This wasn’t a choice I took lightly. I knew changing platforms was going to require migrating all my Keap information and basically rebuilding my whole tech facilities from scratch utilizing every one of the GoHighLevel integrations available.
Below’s an introduction of simply a few of the effort needed:
- By hand exporting 20,000+ e-mail client documents
- Recreating loads of automations and workflows
- Moving client profiles, notes, and job data to the new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe billing integration
- Establishing landing pages, promos, and sales funnels throughout once more
- Learning an entirely international UX and interface layout
All in, I invested around 30-40 tiresome hours of arrangement work transitioning everything over– not to mention managing shed efficiency during the button.
But ultimately, it was a calculated financial investment I agreed to make. I figured some short-term pain would certainly pay off with GoHighLevel giving a better lasting option for my service, Dripify. Oh exactly how wrong I was …
It just took me about a month of hands-on use to realize I had made a big error. The concerns began piling up swiftly, until it got to a factor I had to reduce my losses and switch over back to Keap totally.
Allow’s walk through the nightmarish troubles I ran into.
Safety And Security Issues & Many Vermin
Offered GoHighLevel positioned itself as an all-in-one automation system, I made sure to carefully recreate every workflow from my old Keap account.
These included series for onboarding brand-new e-mail subscribers, onboarding brand-new clients, automating follow-ups for webinar registrations, sending out occasion suggestions, handling membership expiries and a lot more.
Whatever seemed to be working penalty … up until all of a sudden it wasn’t. One morning, I awoke to locate 171 entirely pointless emails had been sent out to customers who ought to NOT have obtained them. This took place 3 days straight, with a various batch of 160 people daily.
I anxiously tried fixing and rebuilding the automation from the ground up. Yet the issue lingered.
When I desperately reached out to their assistance team, they vaguely asserted “web server problems” were responsible. But this description didn’t make any kind of sense, given that the errors continued occurring each morning like clockwork unassociated to any type of downtime.
In my mind, this substantial failing was completely unacceptable and just didn’t help my business. I have countless calls relying upon my automated campaigns running efficiently.
So if GoHighLevel was mosting likely to be absolutely unstable, just how could I delegate mission-critical workflows and sensitive customer data to their technology?
The unintuitive interface only compounded these concerns …
Frustrating UX
Coming from Keap where every little thing was smooth and intuitive, GoHighLevel’s learning contour really felt steep and challenging.
Basic jobs like editing and enhancing workflows involved digging via food selection systems that were all over the place. Trick settings were unexplainably scattered in totally various sections. Moving in between features felt disjointed or complicated.
I’ll tell you what I suggest by discussing their funnel builder as an instance. There were 3 different setups panels to manage total, specific, and item setups. Yet for some insane factor, the links to access each of these core settings were spread out on contrary sides of the display. What!?
As a person that values clean, thoughtful layout, this seriously irritated me.
It reinforced that GoHighLevel still felt like a work-in-progress rather than a refined product all set for prime-time usage. Their concerns appeared concentrated on packing in every feature under the sun, with inadequate use as an afterthought.
And speaking of features, I soon realized the low price tag featured costly concessions …
Misleading Pricing GoHighLevel Custom Fields
Among GoHighLevel’s most significant marketing points is the inexpensive price for access to a lot of features. But I swiftly learned this cheap base expense was deceitful.
They nickle-and-dimed individuals with sporadic fees for core capability. Suddenly my credit card declarations had obscure $10 fees from GoHighLevel here and there.
As it turned out, you obtain charged every single time you send an e-mail via their web servers. So for high volume users, this added up to numerous bucks in unforeseen expenses.
Between these per-email costs and paying added for deliverability attachments like Mailgun, my “affordable” GoHighLevel subscription ended up setting you back significantly MORE than my Keap plan.
The low sticker price was appealing, yet just not realistic in practice. This bait-and-switch left a negative taste in my mouth.
Email Rates Suffered
The last dealbreaker was seeing my very carefully nurtured email open prices drop nearly over night after changing to GoHighLevel.
Previously, my audience involvement regularly hit 35-40% open rates in Keap month after month. But once I moved their documents over to GoHighLevel, performance tanked instantaneously to a pathetic 9% open rate.
Despite just how much I enhanced my sending techniques or tried every troubleshooting technique, I might barely push open prices back right into the teens– still a 50%+ decrease from my previous standards GoHighLevel Custom Fields.
Let me repeat: my exact same target market and emails all of a sudden had terrible involvement. The only thing I could assume that would be triggering this was whatever was happening behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For an agency so dependent on email marketing, this was a big deal.
Between the crippling deliverability problems, hidden charges, broken features, and horrible interface, I had finally reached my limit …
Why I Give up GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Just 45 days after migrating my agency to GoHighLevel, I recognized I had actually made a massive blunder. The disadvantages significantly exceeded any type of benefits.
No software application is ideal, however the large volume of troubles was past acceptable.
At the end of the day, software application comes down to count on. If I can not trust it to handle important features effectively or think a supplier has my best interests in mind, then it’s time to leave– even after spending significant time, cash, and initiative migrating.
So I made the difficult contact us to reverse course and return back to Keap totally simply weeks after going done in on GoHighLevel. Let’s explore what I learned from this fiasco.
Trick Takeaways: What I Picked up from My GoHighLevel Error
My time with HighLevel can be summed up as a costly ill fortune. Yet in hindsight, it educated me a few essential lessons:
- Stay with what jobs. Don’t disturb what’s functioning unless something is definitively much better across the board. Modification brings danger.
- Vet asserts completely. Marketing buzz around new software often obscures larger underlying defects. Deep due diligence is crucial.
- Choose simplicity over features. Well-designed devices must make your work life less complicated, not a lot more complicated and messy.
- Transparency builds depend on. Nontransparent pricing, shady reseller terms, and finger-pointing to escape troubles ruins depend on.
- Look for honest reviews. Delighted support examines mean less if excessive issues imply inadequate overall usability.
- Perfection is difficult. No solitary solution can completely meet every distinct business requirement. Find the least-bad fit.
- Evolution over change. Step-by-step enhancements typically surpass high-risk wholesale reinvention of what currently works penalty.
Simply put, I learned to be much more doubtful of “also excellent to be real” marketing insurance claims and less tempted by the allure of shiny brand-new items. The devices you utilize daily ought to gain depend on with openness and efficiency, not glossy advertising.