As a firm owner for over a decade, I depend on software program and automation to simplify operations and provide outcomes. So when GoHighLevel arised on the scene few years back, it most definitely caught my interest GoHighLevel Security and Compliance.
The idea was appealing– an all-in-one client administration system with marketing, sales, and service tools integrated together. As a business owner constantly seeking to streamline and scale my organization, it felt like a desire become a reality on paper. That wouldn’t desire a solitary solution that does it all?
But in this comprehensive GoHighLevel testimonial, I’ll take you inside my tragic trip of trying (and failing) to change to this prominent brand-new software. You’ll find out:
If you’re considering whether GoHighLevel is right for your very own business requirements, hopefully you can pick up from my excruciating errors and blew up assumptions.
Spoiler: I do NOT suggest GoHighLevel. If you require a CRM, start with this checklist of finest CRMs instead. I use Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re searching for a sales, marketing, and project administration alternative to GoHighLevel, then right here are a couple of we recommend.
Backstory: Why I Considered Changing from Keap
To understand what attracted me to GoHighLevel to begin with, you require context regarding my previous setup. For over 5 years I had been happily depending on Keap (previously Infusionsoft) to meet all my client monitoring and automation requirements.
I found Keap intuitive to use and it dealt with every little thing I required– CRM, email marketing, sales funnels, membership websites, and client assistance.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are designed to help small businesses maintain their customers while adding new ones easily. Automate follow-ups with e-mails and messages, guaranteeing leads and clients receive the appropriate messages at the right time. Use internet site and social media kinds to simplify lead follow-up, and manage your development with simple visit scheduling and lead tracking. Boost sales with automated estimating, invoicing, and repayment handling, freeing up your time. With Keap, small businesses can conserve 10 hours per week and rise earnings by 39%. Beginning with a 14-day free trial, no credit card required.
Why we like Keap
Keap uses a thorough client connection management (CRM) and marketing automation option customized for small businesses and entrepreneurs. We appreciate Keap’s concentrate on improving sales procedures and nurturing customer connections via powerful automation devices. The system’s all-in-one approach integrates CRM, email marketing, invoicing, and job administration, making it especially eye-catching for services seeking to consolidate their technology pile.
For the most part, it just functioned reliably with marginal fuss or maintenance required. My open and click-through rates were wonderful (like 35% excellent). Automations ran efficiently with no issues.
So why on earth was I tempted to uproot my whole operational foundation from a system that worked to attempt something unproven and untried?
In knowledge I can admit I obtained attracted by the siren telephone call of “glossy object disorder”. You understand the feeling: when everyone’s discussing a new device that will certainly change your company … The grass usually looks greener on the other side, and I asked yourself whether GoHighLevel might decrease rubbing points that I would certainly discovered to endure throughout the years with Keap.
I resisted at first, however a couple of even more frustrations led me to think maybe it was time for a change.
The Financial investment: Migrating My Agency to GoHighLevel
Previously this year I chose to start. I registered for HighLevel’s Firm plan at $297/month, investing considerably greater than the $97/month starter expense.
This wasn’t a choice I ignored. I knew switching over systems was mosting likely to need moving all my Keap information and basically restoring my entire technology infrastructure from square one making use of all of the GoHighLevel integrations available.
Right here’s a review of simply several of the effort needed:
- Manually exporting 20,000+ email subscriber records
- Recreating lots of automations and workflows
- Moving customer accounts, notes, and project information to the brand-new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe invoicing integration
- Establishing landing pages, promos, and sales funnels around once again
- Learning an entirely international UX and user interface design
Done in, I invested around 30-40 tedious hours of configuration job transitioning everything over– and also dealing with shed efficiency during the button.
However ultimately, it was a calculated investment I was willing to make. I figured some short-term discomfort would certainly pay off with GoHighLevel offering a far better lasting service for my service, Dripify. Oh exactly how wrong I was …
It just took me concerning a month of hands-on use to realize I had made a large mistake. The issues started accumulating rapidly, till it reached a point I had to cut my losses and switch over back to Keap entirely.
Let’s go through the nightmarish issues I encountered.
Safety Issues & Lots of Vermin
Provided GoHighLevel positioned itself as an all-in-one automation system, I took care to thoroughly recreate each and every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These consisted of series for onboarding new email clients, onboarding brand-new customers, automating follow-ups for webinar registrations, sending out occasion tips, taking care of membership expiries and far more.
Every little thing appeared to be operating fine … up until instantly it had not been. One morning, I awoke to discover 171 totally irrelevant e-mails had actually been sent to individuals that ought to NOT have received them. This happened 3 days straight, with a different batch of 160 individuals each day.
I hysterically attempted troubleshooting and restoring the automation from square one. Yet the trouble persisted.
When I frantically reached out to their assistance team, they slightly asserted “web server concerns” were at fault. Yet this description didn’t make any sense, considering that the mistakes continued happening each morning like clockwork unrelated to any kind of downtime.
In my mind, this huge failure was entirely undesirable and just didn’t help my company. I have countless contacts counting on my automated campaigns running efficiently.
So if GoHighLevel was mosting likely to be totally unstable, just how could I turn over mission-critical workflows and sensitive client data to their innovation?
The unintuitive user interface just intensified these concerns …
Frustrating UX
Originating from Keap where every little thing was smooth and intuitive, GoHighLevel’s learning contour felt steep and difficult.
Straightforward jobs like editing workflows entailed excavating via food selection systems that were all over the place. Trick setups were unexplainably spread in absolutely various areas. Relocating between functions really felt disjointed or confusing.
I’ll tell you what I mean by talking about their funnel builder as an instance. There were 3 different setups panels to take care of general, specific, and product setups. Yet for some crazy factor, the web links to gain access to each of these core setups were expanded on opposite sides of the display. What!?
As somebody that values clean, thoughtful style, this seriously annoyed me.
It enhanced that GoHighLevel still felt like a work-in-progress instead of a refined item ready for prime-time usage. Their top priorities seemed concentrated on stuffing in every feature under the sun, with bad usability as a second thought.
And talking features, I quickly recognized the affordable price tag included pricey compromises …
Deceptive Pricing GoHighLevel Security and Compliance
One of GoHighLevel’s most significant marketing factors is the economical price for access to many features. However I rapidly discovered this inexpensive base price was misleading.
They nickle-and-dimed individuals with erratic fees for core performance. Suddenly my bank card declarations had vague $10 costs from GoHighLevel occasionally.
As it turned out, you obtain charged every single time you send out an e-mail through their web servers. So for high quantity users, this amounted to thousands of bucks in unforeseen prices.
In between these per-email costs and paying added for deliverability attachments like Mailgun, my “cost effective” GoHighLevel subscription wound up setting you back substantially MORE than my Keap plan.
The low price tag was alluring, yet simply not practical in practice. This bait-and-switch left a negative taste in my mouth.
Email Fees Suffered
The last dealbreaker was seeing my thoroughly nurtured e-mail open rates plunge almost overnight after changing to GoHighLevel.
Formerly, my audience interaction regularly hit 35-40% open prices in Keap month after month. But once I moved their records over to GoHighLevel, efficiency tanked quickly to a pathetic 9% open rate.
Despite how much I maximized my sending out techniques or attempted every fixing technique, I might hardly push open rates back into the teenagers– still a 50%+ decrease from my previous standards GoHighLevel Security and Compliance.
Let me repeat: my exact same target market and e-mails unexpectedly had awful engagement. The only thing I might believe that would be triggering this was whatever was taking place behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a firm so dependent on e-mail marketing, this was a big deal.
In between the debilitating deliverability issues, concealed fees, broken features, and dreadful interface, I had ultimately reached my limit …
Why I Stop GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Just 45 days after migrating my firm to GoHighLevel, I understood I had actually made a significant blunder. The disadvantages dramatically surpassed any benefits.
No software program is best, but the large volume of problems was past acceptable.
At the end of the day, software boils down to depend on. If I can not trust it to handle critical functions capably or think a vendor has my best interests in mind, after that it’s time to walk away– also after spending substantial time, money, and effort migrating.
So I made the hard phone call to reverse training course and return back to Keap entirely simply weeks after going done in on GoHighLevel. Let’s explore what I picked up from this fiasco.
Key Takeaways: What I Picked up from My GoHighLevel Blunder
My time with HighLevel can be summarized as an expensive accident. However in knowledge, it instructed me a couple of crucial lessons:
- Stay with what works. Do not disturb what’s working unless something is definitively much better across the board. Change brings danger.
- Veterinarian asserts completely. Marketing hype around brand-new software application typically covers bigger underlying flaws. Deep due persistance is crucial.
- Select simpleness over features. Properly designed tools ought to make your work life simpler, not much more difficult and unpleasant.
- Transparency builds trust. Nontransparent pricing, questionable reseller terms, and finger-pointing to escape issues destroys trust.
- Look for unbiased reviews. Satisfied assistance evaluates imply less if too much concerns suggest poor total usability.
- Excellence is impossible. No single service can completely satisfy every one-of-a-kind company requirement. Find the least-bad fit.
- Evolution over revolution. Incremental improvements typically exceed high-risk wholesale reinvention of what already functions fine.
Basically, I discovered to be more skeptical of “too good to be true” marketing cases and much less tempted by the allure of glossy new objects. The devices you utilize daily need to earn count on via openness and performance, not slick advertising.