As a company owner for over a decade, I count on software and automation to simplify operations and deliver outcomes. So when GoHighLevel arised on the scene couple of years back, it certainly caught my focus GoHighLevel Google Calendar Integration.
The concept was enticing– an all-in-one customer monitoring system with marketing, sales, and service tools incorporated together. As an entrepreneur constantly aiming to streamline and scale my service, it seemed like a desire become a reality theoretically. That wouldn’t want a solitary remedy that does it all?
But in this in-depth GoHighLevel review, I’ll take you inside my tragic trip of trying (and failing) to switch over to this prominent new software application. You’ll find out:
If you’re thinking about whether GoHighLevel is right for your very own organization requirements, with any luck you can gain from my painful blunders and blew up expectations.
Spoiler: I do NOT advise GoHighLevel. If you need a CRM, start with this listing of finest CRMs instead. I make use of Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re trying to find a sales, marketing, and task management option to GoHighLevel, then right here are a couple of we recommend.
Backstory: Why I Thought About Changing from Keap
To comprehend what attracted me to GoHighLevel to begin with, you need context regarding my previous arrangement. For over 5 years I had actually been gladly counting on Keap (previously Infusionsoft) to satisfy all my customer administration and automation needs.
I located Keap intuitive to use and it handled every little thing I required– CRM, e-mail marketing, sales funnels, membership websites, and customer assistance.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are developed to aid local business maintain their clients while including new ones effortlessly. Automate follow-ups with e-mails and texts, making sure leads and clients receive the right messages at the correct time. Use web site and social media sites forms to simplify lead follow-up, and manage your growth with easy consultation organizing and lead tracking. Boost sales with automated pricing estimate, invoicing, and settlement handling, freeing up your time. With Keap, small businesses can save 10 hours per week and increase earnings by 39%. Begin with a 14-day free trial, no bank card required.
Why we like Keap
Keap provides an extensive consumer partnership administration (CRM) and marketing automation solution tailored for small businesses and business owners. We value Keap’s concentrate on enhancing sales procedures and nurturing client partnerships through powerful automation devices. The platform’s all-in-one approach integrates CRM, e-mail marketing, invoicing, and job management, making it particularly eye-catching for companies looking to consolidate their tech pile.
Essentially, it just worked accurately with marginal hassle or maintenance required. My open and click-through rates were excellent (like 35% excellent). Automations ran efficiently with no concerns.
So why on earth was I attracted to uproot my entire operational foundation from a system that worked to try something unproven and untried?
In knowledge I can confess I got seduced by the siren call of “glossy item disorder”. You understand the feeling: when every person’s discussing a brand-new tool that will reinvent your service … The yard frequently looks greener beyond, and I wondered whether GoHighLevel may lower friction factors that I would certainly found out to tolerate for many years with Keap.
I withstood initially, however a few more disappointments led me to think possibly it was time for an adjustment.
The Investment: Migrating My Firm to GoHighLevel
Previously this year I determined to take the plunge. I signed up for HighLevel’s Firm plan at $297/month, investing dramatically greater than the $97/month starter cost.
This had not been a choice I ignored. I understood switching over systems was mosting likely to call for moving all my Keap information and essentially restoring my whole tech infrastructure from the ground up utilizing every one of the GoHighLevel integrations available.
Right here’s an overview of simply a few of the effort required:
- By hand exporting 20,000+ email client records
- Recreating dozens of automations and workflows
- Relocating client profiles, notes, and job data to the new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe payment integration
- Establishing landing pages, coupons, and sales funnels around again
- Learning an entirely international UX and user interface style
Done in, I spent around 30-40 tiresome hours of configuration work transitioning everything over– not to mention handling lost productivity during the switch.
Yet inevitably, it was a calculated financial investment I was willing to make. I figured some temporary pain would certainly pay off with GoHighLevel providing a much better lasting solution for my company, Dripify. Oh just how incorrect I was …
It just took me about a month of hands-on use to recognize I had made a big blunder. The issues started accumulating quickly, until it got to a factor I needed to reduce my losses and switch back to Keap totally.
Let’s walk through the nightmarish problems I ran into.
Security Issues & Several Bugs
Offered GoHighLevel positioned itself as an all-in-one automation system, I made sure to diligently recreate every workflow from my old Keap account.
These included sequences for onboarding brand-new email customers, onboarding new clients, automating follow-ups for webinar registrations, sending out event tips, managing membership expiries and far more.
Every little thing seemed to be operating fine … till unexpectedly it wasn’t. One morning, I woke up to find 171 completely irrelevant emails had been sent to users that should NOT have gotten them. This happened 3 days in a row, with a various set of 160 individuals daily.
I frantically tried fixing and restoring the automation from square one. But the issue continued.
When I frantically connected to their support group, they vaguely asserted “server concerns” were at fault. However this description really did not make any feeling, given that the mistakes proceeded happening each morning like clockwork unassociated to any downtime.
In my mind, this massive failure was completely unacceptable and simply really did not help my company. I have hundreds of calls depending on my automated campaigns running smoothly.
So if GoHighLevel was mosting likely to be absolutely undependable, exactly how could I leave mission-critical workflows and delicate client information to their modern technology?
The unintuitive interface only worsened these problems …
Aggravating UX
Coming from Keap where whatever was smooth and user-friendly, GoHighLevel’s learning contour really felt high and complicated.
Basic tasks like editing and enhancing workflows involved digging with menu systems that were all over the place. Trick settings were unexplainably spread in absolutely various areas. Moving in between features felt disjointed or complicated.
I’ll tell you what I indicate by discussing their funnel builder as an instance. There were 3 separate settings panels to take care of overall, specific, and item setups. Yet for some insane factor, the links to gain access to each of these core settings were spread out on contrary sides of the display. What!?
As a person that values clean, thoughtful design, this seriously frustrated me.
It reinforced that GoHighLevel still felt like a work-in-progress as opposed to a refined product ready for prime-time usage. Their priorities appeared concentrated on packing in every feature imaginable, with bad use as a second thought.
And talking features, I soon understood the low price tag featured costly compromises …
Deceptive Pricing GoHighLevel Google Calendar Integration
Among GoHighLevel’s biggest marketing factors is the budget friendly price for access to numerous features. But I rapidly learned this economical base price was misleading.
They nickle-and-dimed individuals with sporadic costs for core performance. Suddenly my credit card statements had vague $10 fees from GoHighLevel here and there.
As it turned out, you obtain billed whenever you send an e-mail via their web servers. So for high volume customers, this amounted to thousands of bucks in unanticipated expenses.
In between these per-email fees and paying additional for deliverability add-ons like Mailgun, my “affordable” GoHighLevel membership ended up setting you back considerably MORE than my Keap plan.
The reduced price tag was tempting, but simply not sensible in practice. This bait-and-switch left a poor taste in my mouth.
Email Rates Suffered
The last dealbreaker was seeing my very carefully nurtured e-mail open prices plummet almost over night after switching to GoHighLevel.
Previously, my audience involvement constantly struck 35-40% open rates in Keap month after month. Once I migrated their documents over to GoHighLevel, performance tanked immediately to a useless 9% open rate.
Regardless of how much I enhanced my sending out techniques or tried every troubleshooting trick, I could barely nudge open prices back into the teens– still a 50%+ decrease from my previous benchmarks GoHighLevel Google Calendar Integration.
Let me repeat: my exact same audience and e-mails all of a sudden had dreadful interaction. The only point I can assume that would certainly be creating this was whatever was taking place behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a company so depending on e-mail marketing, this was a big deal.
In between the crippling deliverability issues, concealed costs, broken features, and terrible user interface, I had finally reached my limitation …
Why I Give up GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Just 45 days after migrating my company to GoHighLevel, I understood I had actually made a significant error. The cons substantially surpassed any type of benefits.
No software application is excellent, but the sheer quantity of problems was beyond appropriate.
At the end of the day, software application boils down to depend on. If I can’t trust it to take care of vital functions effectively or think a vendor has my benefits in mind, after that it’s time to walk away– even after spending considerable time, cash, and effort migrating.
So I made the hard contact us to turn around training course and return back to Keap totally just weeks after going done in on GoHighLevel. Allow’s discover what I picked up from this fiasco.
Trick Takeaways: What I Picked up from My GoHighLevel Mistake
My time with HighLevel can be summed up as a pricey misadventure. Yet in knowledge, it educated me a few essential lessons:
- Adhere to what works. Do not disturb what’s functioning unless something is definitively better across the board. Adjustment brings threat.
- Veterinarian declares extensively. Marketing buzz around new software program typically covers bigger underlying problems. Deep due persistance is crucial.
- Select simplicity over features. Properly designed devices should make your job life easier, not a lot more complicated and unpleasant.
- Openness builds depend on. Opaque pricing, unethical reseller terms, and finger-pointing to escape troubles damages trust.
- Seek honest reviews. Happy support examines suggest less if extreme concerns imply bad total use.
- Perfection is impossible. No solitary solution can flawlessly meet every special service requirement. Locate the least-bad fit.
- Evolution over revolution. Step-by-step improvements typically surpass dangerous wholesale reinvention of what already works fine.
In short, I learned to be a lot more cynical of “also great to be real” marketing cases and less lured by the attraction of glossy new items. The devices you utilize daily need to make depend on via openness and efficiency, not slick advertising.