As a company proprietor for over a decade, I count on software program and automation to enhance operations and deliver outcomes. So when GoHighLevel emerged on the scene couple of years back, it most definitely caught my focus GoHighLevel Math Calculation.
The concept was attractive– an all-in-one client administration system with marketing, sales, and service tools incorporated together. As an entrepreneur constantly seeking to simplify and scale my company, it looked like a desire come to life theoretically. That would not desire a single option that does it all?
Yet in this thorough GoHighLevel review, I’ll take you inside my disastrous journey of trying (and falling short) to switch over to this popular brand-new software program. You’ll discover:
If you’re considering whether GoHighLevel is right for your own organization needs, ideally you can gain from my uncomfortable errors and blew up expectations.
Looter: I do NOT advise GoHighLevel. If you require a CRM, begin with this list of best CRMs rather. I utilize Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re searching for a sales, marketing, and job monitoring option to GoHighLevel, after that right here are a few we recommend.
Backstory: Why I Took Into Consideration Changing from Keap
To understand what attracted me to GoHighLevel in the first place, you require context concerning my previous configuration. For over 5 years I had been gladly counting on Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) to meet all my customer administration and automation requirements.
I discovered Keap intuitive to make use of and it took care of everything I required– CRM, email marketing, sales funnels, subscription websites, and client assistance.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are designed to assist small businesses maintain their clients while including brand-new ones easily. Automate follow-ups with e-mails and texts, making certain leads and customers get the best messages at the right time. Usage internet site and social media sites kinds to enhance lead follow-up, and handle your development with very easy visit scheduling and lead tracking. Boost sales with automated estimating, invoicing, and repayment processing, freeing up your time. With Keap, local business can save 10 hours weekly and increase revenue by 39%. Beginning with a 14-day free trial, no charge card called for.
Why we like Keap
Keap uses a thorough client relationship administration (CRM) and marketing automation solution customized for small companies and business owners. We appreciate Keap’s concentrate on simplifying sales processes and nurturing customer partnerships with effective automation tools. The system’s all-in-one approach integrates CRM, email marketing, invoicing, and task monitoring, making it particularly eye-catching for organizations looking to settle their tech pile.
For the most part, it just functioned reliably with marginal hassle or upkeep called for. My open and click-through prices were excellent (like 35% fantastic). Automations ran smoothly without concerns.
So why in the world was I attracted to uproot my entire functional foundation from a system that functioned to attempt something unverified and untried?
In hindsight I can admit I obtained attracted by the alarm telephone call of “glossy item syndrome”. You understand the feeling: when every person’s speaking about a brand-new tool that will change your organization … The turf commonly looks greener beyond, and I wondered whether GoHighLevel could decrease friction points that I would certainly learned to tolerate for many years with Keap.
I resisted initially, yet a couple of even more aggravations led me to assume possibly it was time for a change.
The Financial investment: Migrating My Company to GoHighLevel
Earlier this year I chose to start. I registered for HighLevel’s Firm plan at $297/month, spending considerably more than the $97/month starter expense.
This wasn’t a decision I ignored. I knew switching over platforms was going to call for moving all my Keap information and essentially reconstructing my entire tech framework from scratch making use of all of the GoHighLevel integrations readily available.
Right here’s an introduction of just a few of the initiative needed:
- By hand exporting 20,000+ e-mail customer documents
- Recreating loads of automations and workflows
- Moving customer profiles, notes, and task data to the brand-new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe billing integration
- Setting up landing pages, coupons, and sales funnels all over once again
- Learning a completely international UX and user interface style
All in, I invested around 30-40 tiresome hours of arrangement work transitioning everything over– and also managing shed performance during the switch.
But inevitably, it was a calculated financial investment I wanted to make. I figured some temporary discomfort would certainly repay with GoHighLevel providing a better long-term service for my business, Dripify. Oh exactly how incorrect I was …
It just took me concerning a month of hands-on usage to understand I had actually made a big blunder. The concerns began piling up promptly, until it reached a factor I had to reduce my losses and switch over back to Keap entirely.
Let’s go through the horrible problems I experienced.
Protection Issues & Lots of Vermin
Offered GoHighLevel placed itself as an all-in-one automation platform, I took care to meticulously recreate each and every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These included series for onboarding brand-new email clients, onboarding brand-new customers, automating follow-ups for webinar enrollments, sending out event tips, taking care of membership expiries and much more.
Whatever seemed to be working fine … till instantly it wasn’t. One early morning, I woke up to locate 171 completely unnecessary emails had been sent to users who need to NOT have actually received them. This took place 3 days in a row, with a different set of 160 people daily.
I frantically attempted troubleshooting and restoring the automation from the ground up. But the trouble continued.
When I desperately connected to their assistance group, they vaguely declared “web server problems” were to blame. But this explanation didn’t make any feeling, because the mistakes proceeded occurring each morning like clockwork unassociated to any kind of downtime.
In my mind, this large failure was entirely undesirable and just didn’t benefit my business. I have hundreds of get in touches with depending on my automated campaigns running efficiently.
So if GoHighLevel was mosting likely to be completely unstable, just how could I turn over mission-critical workflows and sensitive client information to their modern technology?
The unintuitive user interface only compounded these concerns …
Frustrating UX
Originating from Keap where everything was smooth and instinctive, GoHighLevel’s learning contour felt high and complicated.
Straightforward tasks like editing and enhancing workflows included digging through menu systems that were all over the place. Key setups were unexplainably scattered in entirely different sections. Relocating in between functions felt disjointed or complicated.
I’ll inform you what I imply by talking about their funnel builder as an example. There were 3 different setups panels to manage overall, private, and item arrangements. Yet for some insane factor, the links to gain access to each of these core setups were expanded on opposite sides of the display. What!?
As a person who values clean, thoughtful layout, this seriously frustrated me.
It reinforced that GoHighLevel still seemed like a work-in-progress rather than a refined product all set for prime-time use. Their priorities appeared concentrated on packing in every feature imaginable, with bad functionality as an afterthought.
And speaking of features, I soon understood the low cost tag included costly compromises …
Misleading Pricing GoHighLevel Math Calculation
One of GoHighLevel’s most significant selling points is the budget-friendly cost for access to numerous features. Yet I rapidly discovered this affordable base cost was deceptive.
They nickle-and-dimed individuals with occasional costs for core functionality. Suddenly my charge card declarations had obscure $10 costs from GoHighLevel here and there.
As it ended up, you obtain charged whenever you send an e-mail with their web servers. So for high volume users, this added up to hundreds of dollars in unexpected costs.
In between these per-email costs and paying extra for deliverability attachments like Mailgun, my “budget friendly” GoHighLevel registration ended up setting you back substantially MORE than my Keap plan.
The low sticker price was tempting, however just not practical in practice. This bait-and-switch left a poor taste in my mouth.
Email Fees Suffered
The final dealbreaker was seeing my very carefully nurtured email open prices drop almost overnight after switching to GoHighLevel.
Previously, my audience engagement consistently hit 35-40% open rates in Keap month after month. Once I moved their documents over to GoHighLevel, efficiency tanked instantly to a pathetic 9% open rate.
Despite how much I optimized my sending out methods or attempted every troubleshooting trick, I can barely nudge open rates back right into the teens– still a 50%+ decline from my previous criteria GoHighLevel Math Calculation.
Let me repeat: my exact same audience and e-mails instantly had awful interaction. The only thing I could believe that would be triggering this was whatever was taking place behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a company so depending on email marketing, this was a big deal.
In between the crippling deliverability issues, hidden fees, broken features, and terrible user interface, I had actually finally reached my restriction …
Why I Stop GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Simply 45 days after moving my firm to GoHighLevel, I recognized I had made a big error. The disadvantages drastically exceeded any kind of benefits.
No software is perfect, however the large quantity of problems was beyond acceptable.
At the end of the day, software comes down to count on. If I can not trust it to handle vital features properly or believe a vendor has my best interests in mind, then it’s time to leave– also after spending considerable time, money, and effort migrating.
So I made the hard phone call to reverse training course and return back to Keap totally simply weeks after going all in on GoHighLevel. Let’s explore what I gained from this fiasco.
Trick Takeaways: What I Picked up from My GoHighLevel Mistake
My time with HighLevel can be summarized as a costly accident. Yet in knowledge, it taught me a few essential lessons:
- Adhere to what jobs. Do not upset what’s functioning unless something is definitively better across the board. Adjustment brings threat.
- Veterinarian asserts thoroughly. Marketing buzz around new software usually covers bigger underlying imperfections. Deep due persistance is essential.
- Select simpleness over features. Properly designed devices need to make your work life easier, not more complex and untidy.
- Openness builds trust. Nontransparent pricing, dubious reseller terms, and finger-pointing to evade troubles damages depend on.
- Look for impartial reviews. Satisfied assistance evaluates suggest much less if excessive problems imply poor general use.
- Perfection is impossible. No solitary remedy can flawlessly fulfill every unique business requirement. Locate the least-bad fit.
- Advancement over change. Incremental improvements typically exceed dangerous wholesale reinvention of what already works penalty.
In short, I found out to be extra hesitant of “too good to be true” marketing claims and less tempted by the appeal of glossy brand-new objects. The tools you utilize daily should earn trust with openness and performance, not glossy advertising.