As a company owner for over a decade, I rely upon software program and automation to improve operations and provide results. So when GoHighLevel arised on the scene few years back, it absolutely captured my attention GoHighLevel Real Estate Snapshot.
The idea was enticing– an all-in-one customer management platform with marketing, sales, and solution tools incorporated with each other. As an entrepreneur always seeking to simplify and scale my company, it looked like a desire come true on paper. That wouldn’t want a single solution that does it all?
However in this thorough GoHighLevel evaluation, I’ll take you inside my devastating journey of attempting (and falling short) to switch over to this prominent brand-new software application. You’ll discover:
If you’re considering whether GoHighLevel is right for your very own organization needs, ideally you can pick up from my unpleasant blunders and blew up assumptions.
Looter: I do NOT recommend GoHighLevel. If you need a CRM, begin with this listing of best CRMs rather. I utilize Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re searching for a sales, marketing, and task management alternative to GoHighLevel, after that right here are a couple of we recommend.
Backstory: Why I Took Into Consideration Switching 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 been happily depending on Keap (previously Infusionsoft) to meet all my customer administration and automation requirements.
I found Keap instinctive to use and it dealt with every little thing I required– CRM, e-mail marketing, sales funnels, subscription websites, and client support.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are developed to aid small businesses keep their customers while adding new ones easily. Automate follow-ups with emails and messages, guaranteeing leads and customers obtain the ideal messages at the correct time. Use website and social media kinds to improve lead follow-up, and manage your development with very easy appointment scheduling and lead tracking. Boost sales with automated quoting, invoicing, and settlement handling, maximizing your time. With Keap, local business can save 10 hours weekly and increase revenue by 39%. Beginning with a 14-day free trial, no bank card required.
Why we like Keap
Keap uses an extensive client connection administration (CRM) and marketing automation option customized for small businesses and entrepreneurs. We value Keap’s focus on enhancing sales procedures and nurturing customer connections via effective automation tools. The platform’s all-in-one strategy incorporates CRM, e-mail marketing, invoicing, and task administration, making it particularly eye-catching for services wanting to combine their technology pile.
Generally, it just worked dependably with very little hassle or upkeep required. My open and click-through rates were great (like 35% great). Automations ran smoothly with no problems.
So why on earth was I tempted to uproot my entire functional foundation from a system that worked to attempt something unproven and untried?
In hindsight I can admit I obtained attracted by the alarm call of “glossy item disorder”. You recognize the feeling: when everybody’s talking about a brand-new device that will certainly transform your organization … The lawn typically looks greener on the other side, and I wondered whether GoHighLevel may minimize rubbing points that I would certainly found out to tolerate for many years with Keap.
I stood up to in the beginning, however a few more stress led me to assume maybe it was time for an adjustment.
The Financial investment: Migrating My Company to GoHighLevel
Previously this year I made a decision to start. I signed up for HighLevel’s Firm plan at $297/month, investing significantly greater than the $97/month starter expense.
This had not been a choice I ignored. I knew changing systems was going to call for moving all my Keap information and basically reconstructing my whole technology facilities from square one using all of the GoHighLevel integrations readily available.
Right here’s a summary of just a few of the initiative required:
- By hand exporting 20,000+ email customer documents
- Recreating dozens of automations and workflows
- Relocating customer accounts, notes, and task information to the new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe billing integration
- Establishing landing pages, promos, and sales funnels around once more
- Learning a completely foreign UX and user interface style
Done in, I spent around 30-40 tedious hours of configuration job transitioning everything over– not to mention dealing with shed performance throughout the button.
However inevitably, it was a calculated investment I agreed to make. I figured some temporary discomfort would settle with GoHighLevel supplying a far better long-lasting service for my business, Dripify. Oh exactly how wrong I was …
It only took me concerning a month of hands-on use to realize I had made a big blunder. The problems began piling up rapidly, till it reached a point I needed to reduce my losses and change back to Keap entirely.
Allow’s walk through the horrible issues I experienced.
Safety And Security Issues & Numerous Bugs
Provided GoHighLevel positioned itself as an all-in-one automation platform, I took care to carefully recreate every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These included sequences for onboarding new e-mail customers, onboarding brand-new customers, automating follow-ups for webinar enrollments, sending out event reminders, handling membership expiries and much more.
Everything seemed to be working penalty … till unexpectedly it wasn’t. One morning, I awoke to discover 171 entirely unnecessary emails had actually been sent to customers that must NOT have obtained them. This occurred three days straight, with a different batch of 160 people each day.
I frantically attempted troubleshooting and reconstructing the automation from square one. However the issue persisted.
When I frantically reached out to their support group, they slightly asserted “server concerns” were to blame. But this description didn’t make any sense, given that the errors continued occurring each morning like clockwork unassociated to any downtime.
In my mind, this enormous failure was completely unacceptable and simply didn’t work for my organization. I have countless get in touches with relying upon my automated campaigns running efficiently.
So if GoHighLevel was mosting likely to be completely undependable, just how could I delegate mission-critical workflows and delicate client data to their innovation?
The unintuitive interface just intensified these concerns …
Irritating UX
Coming from Keap where everything was seamless and intuitive, GoHighLevel’s learning curve felt high and difficult.
Easy tasks like editing and enhancing workflows involved digging via food selection systems that were all over the place. Trick settings were unexplainably scattered in absolutely different sections. Moving between functions felt disjointed or complicated.
I’ll tell you what I imply by discussing their funnel builder as an example. There were 3 different setups panels to take care of overall, individual, and item arrangements. Yet for some crazy reason, the web links to access each of these core settings were expanded on contrary sides of the screen. What!?
As a person who values tidy, thoughtful style, this seriously upset me.
It enhanced that GoHighLevel still seemed like a work-in-progress rather than a polished product prepared for prime-time usage. Their concerns seemed concentrated on stuffing in every feature imaginable, with inadequate functionality as a second thought.
And speaking of features, I quickly realized the low price tag included costly compromises …
Misleading Pricing GoHighLevel Real Estate Snapshot
Among GoHighLevel’s greatest marketing points is the budget-friendly rate for accessibility to a lot of features. Yet I rapidly learned this cheap base price was deceptive.
They nickle-and-dimed users with occasional charges for core functionality. All of a sudden my bank card declarations had unclear $10 charges from GoHighLevel here and there.
As it turned out, you get charged every single time you send out an e-mail with their web servers. So for high volume individuals, this added up to thousands of dollars in unanticipated expenses.
In between these per-email fees and paying additional for deliverability attachments like Mailgun, my “budget friendly” GoHighLevel subscription wound up setting you back significantly MORE than my Keap plan.
The reduced sticker price was tempting, yet simply not sensible in practice. This bait-and-switch left a bad taste in my mouth.
Email Rates Suffered
The final dealbreaker was seeing my very carefully nurtured email open rates plummet nearly over night after switching to GoHighLevel.
Formerly, my target market involvement consistently hit 35-40% open prices in Keap month after month. Once I moved their records over to GoHighLevel, performance tanked promptly to a pathetic 9% open price.
Despite how much I optimized my sending techniques or tried every fixing trick, I can hardly nudge open prices back into the teenagers– still a 50%+ decline from my previous benchmarks GoHighLevel Real Estate Snapshot.
Let me repeat: my exact same audience and emails suddenly had terrible interaction. The only thing I might believe that would be creating this was whatever was occurring behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For an agency so dependent on e-mail marketing, this was a big deal.
In between the crippling deliverability issues, concealed charges, damaged features, and horrible interface, I had lastly reached my limitation …
Why I Stop GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Simply 45 days after migrating my agency to GoHighLevel, I recognized I had actually made a significant mistake. The disadvantages drastically surpassed any benefits.
No software application is best, but the large volume of problems was past appropriate.
At the end of the day, software comes down to count on. If I can not trust it to handle essential functions properly or think a vendor has my benefits in mind, after that it’s time to leave– even after investing considerable time, money, and effort migrating.
So I made the tough phone call to turn around training course and return back to Keap totally simply weeks after going all in on GoHighLevel. Allow’s discover what I learned from this fiasco.
Key Takeaways: What I Learned From My GoHighLevel Mistake
My time with HighLevel can be summarized as an expensive accident. Yet in hindsight, it taught me a couple of crucial lessons:
- Stay with what jobs. Do not upset what’s functioning unless something is definitively far better across the board. Adjustment brings threat.
- Veterinarian claims extensively. Marketing hype around brand-new software application usually covers larger underlying imperfections. Deep due persistance is necessary.
- Select simplicity over features. Well-designed devices need to make your work life simpler, not much more difficult and untidy.
- Openness constructs count on. Opaque pricing, questionable reseller terms, and finger-pointing to evade issues destroys count on.
- Look for impartial reviews. Satisfied assistance reviews mean less if excessive problems indicate bad overall functionality.
- Excellence is impossible. No single solution can completely meet every unique service need. Locate the least-bad fit.
- Development over transformation. Incremental enhancements typically surpass risky wholesale reinvention of what already works penalty.
In other words, I learned to be more unconvinced of “too good to be true” marketing claims and much less lured by the attraction of glossy new things. The devices you utilize daily should gain depend on via openness and performance, not slick advertising.