As an agency owner for over a decade, I count on software application and automation to simplify operations and provide results. So when GoHighLevel emerged on the scene few years back, it absolutely caught my interest GoHighLevel For Personal Trainers.
The concept was enticing– an all-in-one client administration platform with marketing, sales, and service tools incorporated with each other. As an entrepreneur constantly seeking to streamline and scale my service, it felt like a desire come true theoretically. Who wouldn’t desire a solitary solution that does it all?
But in this comprehensive GoHighLevel review, I’ll take you inside my disastrous journey of attempting (and failing) to switch to this prominent new software application. You’ll discover:
If you’re thinking about whether GoHighLevel is right for your own business demands, hopefully you can learn from my agonizing errors and pumped up expectations.
Looter: I do NOT advise GoHighLevel. If you need a CRM, start with this list of finest CRMs rather. I utilize Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re trying to find a sales, marketing, and task administration alternative to GoHighLevel, then right here are a few we suggest.
Backstory: Why I Considered Changing from Keap
To comprehend what attracted me to GoHighLevel to begin with, you require context concerning my previous configuration. For over 5 years I had actually been gladly depending on Keap (previously Infusionsoft) to satisfy all my customer monitoring and automation needs.
I found Keap instinctive to make use of and it handled whatever I needed– CRM, e-mail marketing, sales funnels, membership websites, and customer assistance.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are designed to help small businesses keep their customers while adding new ones effortlessly. Automate follow-ups with emails and texts, making certain leads and clients obtain the right messages at the correct time. Usage web site and social media types to enhance lead follow-up, and handle your growth with easy appointment scheduling and lead tracking. Boost sales with automated quoting, invoicing, and payment processing, freeing up your time. With Keap, local business can save 10 hours per week and increase profits by 39%. Begin with a 14-day free trial, no bank card called for.
Why we like Keap
Keap uses a comprehensive consumer partnership administration (CRM) and marketing automation remedy tailored for small businesses and business owners. We value Keap’s focus on enhancing sales processes and nurturing consumer connections via powerful automation devices. The platform’s all-in-one method incorporates CRM, email marketing, invoicing, and job monitoring, making it particularly attractive for businesses aiming to combine their tech pile.
For the most part, it just worked dependably with very little difficulty or maintenance needed. My open and click-through prices were excellent (like 35% great). Automations ran smoothly without problems.
So why on earth was I lured to uproot my entire operational foundation from a system that functioned to attempt something unverified and untested?
In knowledge I can confess I obtained seduced by the siren phone call of “shiny item disorder”. You recognize the feeling: when everybody’s talking about a new tool that will reinvent your service … The yard usually looks greener beyond, and I asked yourself whether GoHighLevel might lower friction factors that I ‘d found out to tolerate throughout the years with Keap.
I resisted in the beginning, yet a few even more irritations led me to think maybe it was time for a change.
The Investment: Migrating My Agency to GoHighLevel
Previously this year I chose to start. I signed up for HighLevel’s Company plan at $297/month, investing substantially greater than the $97/month starter cost.
This had not been a choice I ignored. I recognized switching over systems was going to require migrating all my Keap information and essentially reconstructing my whole technology infrastructure from scratch making use of every one of the GoHighLevel integrations offered.
Here’s a summary of simply a few of the initiative needed:
- By hand exporting 20,000+ email client records
- Recreating loads of automations and workflows
- Relocating customer profiles, notes, and task information to the brand-new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe billing integration
- Setting up landing pages, promos, and sales funnels all over once again
- Learning a totally international UX and user interface design
All in, I invested around 30-40 laborious hours of arrangement job transitioning whatever over– not to mention dealing with shed performance during the button.
Yet inevitably, it was a computed financial investment I wanted to make. I figured some short-term pain would certainly pay off with GoHighLevel offering a better long-lasting service for my service, Dripify. Oh how incorrect I was …
It only took me regarding a month of hands-on use to understand I had actually made a big error. The problems started piling up swiftly, up until it got to a point I had to reduce my losses and change back to Keap entirely.
Allow’s go through the nightmarish problems I ran into.
Safety Issues & Several Bugs
Given GoHighLevel placed itself as an all-in-one automation platform, I made sure to diligently recreate every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These included series for onboarding brand-new e-mail customers, onboarding new customers, automating follow-ups for webinar registrations, sending out event pointers, taking care of subscription expirations and far more.
Every little thing appeared to be functioning fine … until suddenly it wasn’t. One early morning, I woke up to locate 171 completely unimportant emails had actually been sent to individuals that must NOT have obtained them. This occurred three days straight, with a various batch of 160 people daily.
I desperately tried fixing and rebuilding the automation from the ground up. But the problem persisted.
When I seriously connected to their support group, they vaguely declared “server concerns” were to blame. But this explanation didn’t make any kind of sense, since the mistakes continued occurring each morning like clockwork unassociated to any kind of downtime.
In my mind, this substantial failing was entirely undesirable and simply didn’t benefit my organization. I have countless calls relying upon my automated campaigns running smoothly.
So if GoHighLevel was going to be entirely unstable, exactly how could I entrust mission-critical workflows and delicate client information to their innovation?
The unintuitive interface only intensified these problems …
Aggravating UX
Coming from Keap where everything was smooth and intuitive, GoHighLevel’s learning contour felt steep and complex.
Straightforward tasks like editing workflows included digging via menu systems that were all over the place. Secret settings were unexplainably scattered in completely various areas. Moving between functions felt disjointed or complex.
I’ll tell you what I mean by speaking about their funnel builder as an instance. There were 3 different settings panels to take care of overall, individual, and item arrangements. Yet for some insane factor, the web links to gain access to each of these core settings were expanded on opposite sides of the screen. What!?
As somebody that values clean, thoughtful layout, this seriously upset me.
It enhanced that GoHighLevel still seemed like a work-in-progress as opposed to a sleek item prepared for prime-time usage. Their priorities appeared concentrated on stuffing in every feature imaginable, with inadequate functionality as an afterthought.
And talking features, I quickly recognized the affordable price tag included costly compromises …
Misleading Pricing GoHighLevel For Personal Trainers
One of GoHighLevel’s biggest selling factors is the budget friendly cost for access to numerous features. But I rapidly discovered this low-cost base cost was deceptive.
They nickle-and-dimed individuals with sporadic charges for core performance. Suddenly my credit card declarations had vague $10 costs from GoHighLevel here and there.
As it turned out, you obtain charged every time you send out an e-mail via their web servers. So for high quantity users, this added up to thousands of dollars in unforeseen prices.
In between these per-email fees and paying additional for deliverability add-ons like Mailgun, my “economical” GoHighLevel registration ended up costing considerably greater than my Keap plan.
The reduced sticker price was appealing, however just not realistic in practice. This bait-and-switch left a poor preference in my mouth.
Email Rates Suffered
The final dealbreaker was seeing my thoroughly supported email open rates drop nearly overnight after switching to GoHighLevel.
Formerly, my target market engagement regularly hit 35-40% open rates in Keap month after month. Once I moved their documents over to GoHighLevel, efficiency tanked instantly to a worthless 9% open price.
Regardless of just how much I maximized my sending out methods or tried every troubleshooting trick, I can hardly push open prices back right into the teens– still a 50%+ decrease from my previous standards GoHighLevel For Personal Trainers.
Let me repeat: my exact same audience and e-mails all of a sudden had terrible involvement. The only thing I can assume that would certainly be creating this was whatever was occurring behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a company so based on email marketing, this was a big deal.
In between the debilitating deliverability concerns, concealed charges, busted features, and terrible user interface, I had actually ultimately reached my restriction …
Why I Stop GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Just 45 days after moving my agency to GoHighLevel, I understood I had actually made a substantial mistake. The cons considerably surpassed any type of benefits.
No software application is ideal, yet the large quantity of problems was past appropriate.
At the end of the day, software program boils down to trust. If I can’t trust it to take care of crucial features competently or think a vendor has my benefits in mind, after that it’s time to leave– also after spending significant time, money, and effort moving.
So I made the hard call to reverse program and return back to Keap entirely simply weeks after going done in on GoHighLevel. Let’s explore what I picked up from this debacle.
Key Takeaways: What I Learned From My GoHighLevel Error
My time with HighLevel can be summarized as an expensive misadventure. However in hindsight, it taught me a couple of crucial lessons:
- Stay with what jobs. Don’t disturb what’s working unless something is definitively much better across the board. Change brings danger.
- Vet asserts completely. Marketing hype around brand-new software application often obscures bigger underlying imperfections. Deep due persistance is crucial.
- Pick simplicity over features. Well-designed devices should make your job life easier, not more complex and unpleasant.
- Transparency develops depend on. Opaque pricing, unethical reseller terms, and finger-pointing to evade issues damages trust.
- Look for honest evaluations. Happy support reviews imply less if too much concerns imply inadequate overall functionality.
- Perfection is impossible. No solitary solution can completely fulfill every one-of-a-kind organization demand. Discover the least-bad fit.
- Evolution over transformation. Incremental enhancements commonly outweigh dangerous wholesale reinvention of what currently works fine.
In short, I learned to be more unconvinced of “also excellent to be true” marketing cases and less attracted by the allure of shiny brand-new items. The tools you use daily must gain trust fund with transparency and performance, not slick advertising.