As a company proprietor for over a decade, I rely on software application and automation to enhance procedures and provide results. So when GoHighLevel emerged on the scene couple of years back, it definitely caught my attention GoHighLevel Eliza Agent Platform.
The concept was enticing– an all-in-one client management system with marketing, sales, and service tools incorporated with each other. As an entrepreneur constantly aiming to streamline and scale my service, it looked like a desire come to life on paper. That wouldn’t desire a single solution that does it all?
However in this extensive GoHighLevel review, I’ll take you inside my devastating journey of trying (and stopping working) to switch to this preferred new software application. You’ll learn:
If you’re considering whether GoHighLevel is right for your own organization requirements, ideally you can gain from my agonizing mistakes and blew up expectations.
Spoiler: I do NOT advise GoHighLevel. If you need a CRM, start with this listing of best CRMs rather. I make use of Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re searching for a sales, marketing, and task administration choice to GoHighLevel, then right here are a few we suggest.
Backstory: Why I Thought About Changing from Keap
To understand what attracted me to GoHighLevel in the first place, you require context about my previous setup. For over 5 years I had actually been happily counting on Keap (previously Infusionsoft) to fulfill all my client management and automation requirements.
I discovered Keap user-friendly to use and it managed every little thing I needed– CRM, e-mail marketing, sales funnels, subscription sites, and client assistance.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are created to aid small businesses maintain their clients while including brand-new ones effortlessly. Automate follow-ups with emails and messages, making certain leads and clients get the appropriate messages at the correct time. Usage web site and social networks forms to streamline lead follow-up, and manage your growth with easy consultation organizing and lead monitoring. Boost sales with automated pricing estimate, invoicing, and payment processing, maximizing your time. With Keap, local business can save 10 hours each week and increase earnings by 39%. Beginning with a 14-day free trial, no credit card required.
Why we like Keap
Keap supplies a comprehensive consumer partnership administration (CRM) and marketing automation remedy customized for small companies and business owners. We value Keap’s focus on improving sales processes and nurturing consumer connections with effective automation tools. The system’s all-in-one strategy combines CRM, e-mail marketing, invoicing, and task administration, making it particularly attractive for companies wanting to combine their tech pile.
Generally, it just worked reliably with marginal difficulty or maintenance needed. My open and click-through rates were fantastic (like 35% fantastic). Automations ran efficiently without any issues.
So why on earth was I tempted to uproot my entire functional foundation from a system that worked to try something unproven and untried?
In knowledge I can confess I got attracted by the siren call of “shiny object syndrome”. You recognize the feeling: when everyone’s speaking about a brand-new tool that will certainly revolutionize your business … The lawn commonly looks greener beyond, and I wondered whether GoHighLevel may minimize rubbing factors that I would certainly discovered to endure over the years with Keap.
I withstood in the beginning, but a couple of more frustrations led me to believe perhaps it was time for a change.
The Financial investment: Moving My Company to GoHighLevel
Earlier this year I decided to start. I registered for HighLevel’s Company plan at $297/month, spending considerably greater than the $97/month starter cost.
This wasn’t a choice I took lightly. I recognized switching over platforms was going to call for migrating all my Keap information and basically reconstructing my whole tech facilities from scratch utilizing all of the GoHighLevel integrations readily available.
Here’s an overview of simply several of the initiative needed:
- By hand exporting 20,000+ e-mail client records
- Recreating lots of automations and workflows
- Relocating customer accounts, notes, and project information to the new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe invoicing integration
- Setting up landing pages, coupons, and sales funnels throughout once more
- Learning an entirely international UX and interface style
All in, I invested around 30-40 tedious hours of setup job transitioning every little thing over– as well as handling shed performance throughout the switch.
But ultimately, it was a calculated investment I was willing to make. I figured some short-term discomfort would certainly repay with GoHighLevel offering a much better long-term solution for my service, Dripify. Oh just how incorrect I was …
It just took me concerning a month of hands-on usage to recognize I had actually made a huge mistake. The problems began accumulating swiftly, till it got to a factor I needed to reduce my losses and change back to Keap completely.
Allow’s walk through the nightmarish troubles I experienced.
Protection Issues & Lots of Vermin
Provided GoHighLevel placed itself as an all-in-one automation platform, I took care to diligently recreate each and every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These included sequences for onboarding new email customers, onboarding brand-new customers, automating follow-ups for webinar enrollments, sending out event pointers, handling subscription expiries and far more.
Whatever appeared to be working fine … until unexpectedly it wasn’t. One early morning, I woke up to discover 171 entirely unnecessary emails had actually been sent out to users that need to NOT have actually obtained them. This happened 3 days in a row, with a various set of 160 people each day.
I frantically attempted repairing and restoring the automation from square one. Yet the problem persisted.
When I frantically reached out to their assistance team, they vaguely claimed “web server problems” were to blame. But this description didn’t make any type of sense, because the mistakes continued happening each early morning like clockwork unrelated to any type of downtime.
In my mind, this huge failure was totally inappropriate and just really did not work for my service. I have hundreds of get in touches with depending on my automated campaigns running efficiently.
So if GoHighLevel was mosting likely to be absolutely unreliable, exactly how could I entrust mission-critical workflows and sensitive customer data to their technology?
The unintuitive user interface just worsened these concerns …
Aggravating UX
Coming from Keap where everything was smooth and instinctive, GoHighLevel’s learning curve felt high and complicated.
Easy tasks like modifying workflows entailed digging through menu systems that were all over the place. Key setups were unexplainably spread in absolutely different areas. Relocating between features really felt disjointed or complicated.
I’ll tell you what I suggest by speaking about their funnel builder as an example. There were 3 different settings panels to handle overall, private, and item setups. Yet for some crazy reason, the web links to accessibility each of these core settings were expanded on opposite sides of the screen. What!?
As someone that values clean, thoughtful layout, this seriously upset me.
It strengthened that GoHighLevel still felt like a work-in-progress rather than a sleek product all set for prime-time usage. Their priorities appeared concentrated on stuffing in every feature imaginable, with poor use as a second thought.
And talking features, I quickly understood the affordable price tag included costly compromises …
Misleading Pricing GoHighLevel Eliza Agent Platform
Among GoHighLevel’s most significant marketing factors is the cost effective cost for access to so many features. However I rapidly discovered this affordable base price was misleading.
They nickle-and-dimed customers with erratic charges for core capability. Suddenly my bank card statements had unclear $10 fees from GoHighLevel occasionally.
As it ended up, you obtain billed each time you send an email with their servers. So for high quantity customers, this added up to thousands of bucks in unanticipated prices.
In between these per-email charges and paying additional for deliverability add-ons like Mailgun, my “budget-friendly” GoHighLevel registration wound up costing considerably greater than my Keap plan.
The low sticker price was appealing, however just not reasonable in practice. This bait-and-switch left a bad taste in my mouth.
Email Rates Suffered
The last dealbreaker was seeing my very carefully nurtured e-mail open prices plunge practically overnight after switching to GoHighLevel.
Formerly, my target market involvement regularly hit 35-40% open rates in Keap month after month. But once I moved their records over to GoHighLevel, efficiency tanked instantly to a pathetic 9% open rate.
Regardless of just how much I optimized my sending out techniques or attempted every repairing trick, I could barely push open prices back into the teenagers– still a 50%+ decline from my previous criteria GoHighLevel Eliza Agent Platform.
Let me repeat: my exact same target market and e-mails unexpectedly had dreadful interaction. The only thing I might assume that would certainly be creating this was whatever was happening behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a firm so based on e-mail marketing, this was a big deal.
In between the crippling deliverability concerns, hidden charges, broken features, and horrible user interface, I had actually lastly reached my restriction …
Why I Give up GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Just 45 days after migrating my agency to GoHighLevel, I understood I had actually made a massive blunder. The disadvantages drastically outweighed any kind of advantages.
No software is perfect, but the sheer quantity of problems was past acceptable.
At the end of the day, software boils down to count on. If I can not trust it to manage critical features effectively or believe a supplier has my best interests in mind, after that it’s time to walk away– also after investing substantial time, money, and effort moving.
So I made the difficult contact us to turn around training course and return back to Keap entirely simply weeks after going done in on GoHighLevel. Allow’s discover what I learned from this debacle.
Trick Takeaways: What I Gained from My GoHighLevel Error
My time with HighLevel can be summarized as a costly ill fortune. Yet in knowledge, it educated me a couple of crucial lessons:
- Stick to what jobs. Do not upset what’s functioning unless something is definitively better across the board. Modification brings risk.
- Veterinarian declares completely. Marketing buzz around brand-new software application typically obscures bigger underlying imperfections. Deep due diligence is crucial.
- Select simplicity over features. Well-designed devices need to make your job life simpler, not a lot more challenging and messy.
- Openness constructs trust fund. Opaque pricing, shady reseller terms, and finger-pointing to escape problems destroys count on.
- Seek unbiased testimonials. Delighted support assesses indicate less if extreme problems suggest inadequate overall usability.
- Perfection is impossible. No single option can flawlessly satisfy every one-of-a-kind organization requirement. Find the least-bad fit.
- Development over transformation. Incremental improvements typically surpass dangerous wholesale reinvention of what already functions penalty.
In short, I learned to be more unconvinced of “also great to be real” marketing cases and less attracted by the appeal of shiny brand-new things. The devices you utilize daily ought to earn depend on through openness and performance, not glossy advertising.