As a firm owner for over a decade, I count on software and automation to streamline procedures and deliver outcomes. So when GoHighLevel arised on the scene couple of years back, it certainly caught my attention GoHighLevel Facebook Ads.
The idea was appealing– an all-in-one customer management platform with marketing, sales, and solution tools integrated together. As a business owner constantly seeking to simplify and scale my organization, it seemed like a dream happened theoretically. That wouldn’t want a single solution that does it all?
Yet in this thorough GoHighLevel review, I’ll take you inside my dreadful trip of attempting (and falling short) to change to this prominent new software application. You’ll find out:
If you’re considering whether GoHighLevel is right for your own organization needs, with any luck you can gain from my excruciating blunders and blew up expectations.
Spoiler: I do NOT recommend GoHighLevel. If you require a CRM, begin with this checklist of finest CRMs instead. I utilize Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re trying to find a sales, marketing, and task management alternative to GoHighLevel, then right here are a few we recommend.
Backstory: Why I Thought About Changing from Keap
To understand what attracted me to GoHighLevel to begin with, you need context regarding my previous setup. For over 5 years I had actually been happily depending on Keap (previously Infusionsoft) to fulfill all my customer management and automation demands.
I discovered Keap instinctive to utilize and it took care of everything I needed– CRM, e-mail marketing, sales funnels, membership sites, and customer assistance.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are developed to help small companies maintain their customers while including new ones easily. Automate follow-ups with emails and texts, making certain leads and customers get the right messages at the right time. Use website and social networks kinds to simplify lead follow-up, and manage your growth with very easy appointment scheduling and lead tracking. Boost sales with automated pricing quote, invoicing, and payment processing, maximizing your time. With Keap, small companies can conserve 10 hours weekly and rise revenue by 39%. Begin with a 14-day free trial, no bank card called for.
Why we like Keap
Keap uses a detailed consumer partnership administration (CRM) and marketing automation option customized for local business and entrepreneurs. We value Keap’s concentrate on streamlining sales processes and supporting consumer relationships with powerful automation devices. The platform’s all-in-one approach combines CRM, e-mail marketing, invoicing, and task monitoring, making it especially eye-catching for services aiming to combine their tech stack.
For the most part, it just functioned reliably with marginal difficulty or maintenance needed. My open and click-through prices were wonderful (like 35% wonderful). Automations ran smoothly without any problems.
So why on earth was I tempted to uproot my entire operational structure from a system that functioned to attempt something unproven and untested?
In hindsight I can admit I obtained seduced by the alarm telephone call of “shiny object syndrome”. You understand the feeling: when everybody’s talking about a new tool that will certainly reinvent your service … The lawn usually looks greener on the other side, and I questioned whether GoHighLevel may decrease friction factors that I would certainly found out to endure throughout the years with Keap.
I stood up to at first, but a few even more irritations led me to believe possibly it was time for a change.
The Financial investment: Moving My Agency to GoHighLevel
Previously this year I made a decision to take the plunge. I signed up for HighLevel’s Company plan at $297/month, investing significantly greater than the $97/month starter cost.
This wasn’t a decision I took lightly. I knew switching systems was going to call for moving all my Keap information and basically restoring my entire tech framework from scratch using all of the GoHighLevel integrations readily available.
Here’s a review of just several of the initiative needed:
- By hand exporting 20,000+ e-mail customer documents
- Recreating loads of automations and workflows
- Moving client accounts, notes, and job data to the brand-new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe invoicing integration
- Establishing landing pages, discounts, and sales funnels all over once again
- Learning an entirely foreign UX and user interface design
All in, I spent around 30-40 tedious hours of setup work transitioning everything over– and also taking care of shed efficiency throughout the button.
But ultimately, it was a calculated financial investment I wanted to make. I figured some short-term pain would settle with GoHighLevel giving a much better long-term solution for my company, Dripify. Oh just how wrong I was …
It only took me about a month of hands-on use to understand I had actually made a large mistake. The concerns began piling up swiftly, until it reached a point I had to reduce my losses and change back to Keap completely.
Let’s walk through the horrible troubles I ran into.
Security Issues & Numerous Vermin
Provided GoHighLevel placed itself as an all-in-one automation system, I took care to carefully recreate every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These included series for onboarding new email subscribers, onboarding brand-new customers, automating follow-ups for webinar enrollments, sending out occasion tips, handling membership expirations and a lot more.
Every little thing seemed to be operating penalty … up until instantly it had not been. One morning, I woke up to find 171 entirely pointless emails had actually been sent out to individuals that must NOT have actually obtained them. This occurred 3 days in a row, with a different set of 160 individuals each day.
I frantically tried repairing and reconstructing the automation from the ground up. But the trouble persisted.
When I frantically reached out to their assistance team, they vaguely declared “server problems” were to blame. Yet this explanation didn’t make any sense, because the errors proceeded taking place each early morning like clockwork unrelated to any type of downtime.
In my mind, this substantial failing was completely inappropriate and simply didn’t benefit my service. I have countless get in touches with relying on my automated campaigns running smoothly.
So if GoHighLevel was going to be absolutely undependable, just how could I entrust mission-critical workflows and delicate client information to their innovation?
The unintuitive user interface just compounded these problems …
Discouraging UX
Coming from Keap where every little thing was smooth and intuitive, GoHighLevel’s learning contour really felt high and complicated.
Simple jobs like modifying workflows involved excavating with menu systems that were all over the place. Secret settings were unexplainably scattered in completely different areas. Relocating in between functions felt disjointed or complicated.
I’ll tell you what I mean by talking about their funnel builder as an instance. There were 3 separate setups panels to manage general, specific, and product setups. Yet for some insane factor, the links to accessibility each of these core settings were spread out on opposite sides of the display. What!?
As someone that values tidy, thoughtful layout, this seriously annoyed me.
It enhanced that GoHighLevel still felt like a work-in-progress as opposed to a polished product all set for prime-time use. Their concerns appeared focused on stuffing in every feature under the sun, with poor usability as an afterthought.
And speaking of features, I quickly recognized the small cost tag featured expensive concessions …
Misleading Pricing GoHighLevel Facebook Ads
Among GoHighLevel’s biggest selling points is the economical cost for access to a lot of features. But I promptly discovered this affordable base price was deceitful.
They nickle-and-dimed users with sporadic costs for core performance. Unexpectedly my charge card declarations had obscure $10 charges from GoHighLevel occasionally.
As it ended up, you get charged whenever you send out an e-mail via their servers. So for high quantity customers, this amounted to thousands of bucks in unexpected expenses.
In between these per-email charges and paying extra for deliverability add-ons like Mailgun, my “inexpensive” GoHighLevel registration ended up costing dramatically MORE than my Keap plan.
The low sticker price was appealing, yet simply not practical in practice. This bait-and-switch left a poor preference in my mouth.
Email Fees Suffered
The final dealbreaker was seeing my thoroughly nurtured email open rates plummet nearly over night after changing to GoHighLevel.
Previously, my target market interaction continually hit 35-40% open rates in Keap month after month. But once I migrated their records over to GoHighLevel, performance tanked instantaneously to a pitiful 9% open price.
Despite how much I optimized my sending out methods or tried every troubleshooting method, I could hardly nudge open prices back into the teens– still a 50%+ decrease from my previous benchmarks GoHighLevel Facebook Ads.
Let me repeat: my exact same target market and e-mails all of a sudden had dreadful involvement. The only thing I could think that would be creating this was whatever was happening behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a firm so depending on e-mail marketing, this was a big deal.
Between the debilitating deliverability problems, hidden costs, broken features, and horrible user interface, I had actually lastly reached my restriction …
Why I Give up GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Simply 45 days after moving my agency to GoHighLevel, I recognized I had actually made a significant mistake. The cons substantially surpassed any kind of advantages.
No software program is ideal, but the large volume of problems was past acceptable.
At the end of the day, software application boils down to count on. If I can’t trust it to manage important features competently or believe a supplier has my benefits in mind, then it’s time to walk away– even after investing significant time, cash, and effort moving.
So I made the difficult phone call to turn around program and return back to Keap entirely simply weeks after going all in on GoHighLevel. Let’s discover what I learned from this ordeal.
Key Takeaways: What I Learned From My GoHighLevel Blunder
My time with HighLevel can be summed up as a pricey accident. Yet in hindsight, it taught me a couple of essential lessons:
- Stick to what works. Do not upset what’s working unless something is definitively far better across the board. Adjustment brings danger.
- Veterinarian claims extensively. Marketing buzz around new software program often obscures bigger underlying defects. Deep due diligence is essential.
- Pick simpleness over features. Well-designed devices ought to make your work life much easier, not more challenging and unpleasant.
- Openness develops count on. Opaque pricing, shady reseller terms, and finger-pointing to avert troubles ruins trust fund.
- Seek objective reviews. Pleased assistance assesses mean less if extreme issues imply inadequate overall usability.
- Perfection is difficult. No single remedy can completely fulfill every one-of-a-kind company requirement. Discover the least-bad fit.
- Advancement over transformation. Step-by-step renovations usually exceed dangerous wholesale reinvention of what already works fine.
In short, I learned to be a lot more cynical of “as well good to be real” marketing cases and much less attracted by the allure of shiny new things. The tools you utilize daily ought to gain trust with transparency and performance, not slick advertising.