As a company proprietor for over a years, I count on software program and automation to simplify procedures and supply results. So when GoHighLevel arised on the scene couple of years back, it most definitely captured my focus GoHighLevel Smart Webchat Widget.
The idea was appealing– an all-in-one customer monitoring platform with marketing, sales, and service tools incorporated with each other. As an entrepreneur constantly aiming to streamline and scale my organization, it looked like a desire come true on paper. Who would not desire a single service that does it all?
But in this comprehensive GoHighLevel evaluation, I’ll take you inside my tragic trip of trying (and falling short) to switch to this popular new software. You’ll learn:
If you’re thinking about whether GoHighLevel is right for your own company requirements, with any luck you can learn from my unpleasant blunders and pumped up expectations.
Looter: I do NOT suggest GoHighLevel. If you require a CRM, start with this listing of finest CRMs rather. I make use of Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re searching for a sales, marketing, and task monitoring alternative to GoHighLevel, then here are a few we suggest.
Backstory: Why I Took Into Consideration Switching from Keap
To comprehend what attracted me to GoHighLevel to begin with, you require context regarding my previous setup. For over 5 years I had been gladly relying upon Keap (previously Infusionsoft) to fulfill all my customer management and automation requirements.
I found Keap user-friendly to use and it handled everything I needed– CRM, email marketing, sales funnels, subscription sites, and client assistance.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are designed to assist local business keep their customers while adding brand-new ones effortlessly. Automate follow-ups with emails and messages, making sure leads and clients receive the ideal messages at the right time. Use website and social networks kinds to enhance lead follow-up, and manage your development with easy appointment scheduling and lead tracking. Boost sales with automated quoting, invoicing, and payment processing, liberating your time. With Keap, small companies can save 10 hours weekly and rise income by 39%. Begin with a 14-day free trial, no bank card needed.
Why we like Keap
Keap offers a detailed consumer partnership administration (CRM) and marketing automation remedy tailored for local business and business owners. We value Keap’s focus on simplifying sales procedures and nurturing consumer partnerships through effective automation tools. The system’s all-in-one method incorporates CRM, email marketing, invoicing, and task monitoring, making it particularly eye-catching for services seeking to settle their technology stack.
Generally, it just functioned dependably with minimal difficulty or maintenance called for. My open and click-through rates were great (like 35% terrific). Automations ran efficiently with no issues.
So why in the world was I attracted to uproot my whole operational foundation from a system that functioned to attempt something unverified and untried?
In knowledge I can admit I obtained seduced by the alarm telephone call of “glossy things disorder”. You recognize the sensation: when everybody’s discussing a brand-new device that will reinvent your service … The lawn commonly looks greener beyond, and I questioned whether GoHighLevel may lower rubbing points that I would certainly learned to endure over the years with Keap.
I withstood initially, yet a few even more aggravations led me to believe maybe it was time for a modification.
The Investment: Migrating My Agency to GoHighLevel
Earlier this year I decided to take the plunge. I enrolled in HighLevel’s Firm plan at $297/month, spending significantly greater than the $97/month starter price.
This had not been a choice I ignored. I knew changing platforms was going to require migrating all my Keap information and basically rebuilding my entire tech facilities from the ground up utilizing every one of the GoHighLevel integrations available.
Right here’s an introduction of simply some of the effort needed:
- Manually exporting 20,000+ email client records
- Recreating dozens of automations and workflows
- Relocating customer accounts, notes, and task data to the brand-new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe billing integration
- Establishing landing pages, promotions, and sales funnels around again
- Learning a totally international UX and interface style
All in, I invested around 30-40 tiresome hours of arrangement job transitioning every little thing over– not to mention dealing with shed efficiency throughout the switch.
However ultimately, it was a calculated financial investment I agreed to make. I figured some temporary pain would pay off with GoHighLevel supplying a far better lasting solution for my service, Dripify. Oh exactly how wrong I was …
It just took me regarding a month of hands-on usage to recognize I had actually made a big blunder. The problems began piling up rapidly, until it reached a factor I needed to cut my losses and change back to Keap entirely.
Allow’s go through the horrible problems I experienced.
Safety Issues & Lots of Vermin
Provided GoHighLevel positioned itself as an all-in-one automation platform, I made sure to diligently recreate every workflow from my old Keap account.
These included sequences for onboarding brand-new e-mail customers, onboarding brand-new customers, automating follow-ups for webinar enrollments, sending out event tips, handling subscription expirations and far more.
Whatever seemed to be functioning penalty … until suddenly it had not been. One morning, I woke up to discover 171 totally unimportant emails had been sent out to individuals that need to NOT have gotten them. This took place 3 days straight, with a various set of 160 people every day.
I anxiously tried fixing and reconstructing the automation from square one. Yet the trouble lingered.
When I desperately connected to their support group, they vaguely asserted “web server issues” were responsible. But this explanation really did not make any type of sense, because the mistakes proceeded taking place each early morning like clockwork unconnected to any kind of downtime.
In my mind, this massive failure was completely undesirable and simply really did not help my service. I have countless calls relying on my automated campaigns running efficiently.
So if GoHighLevel was mosting likely to be completely undependable, exactly how could I leave mission-critical workflows and sensitive client data to their innovation?
The unintuitive user interface just intensified these issues …
Aggravating UX
Coming from Keap where whatever was seamless and instinctive, GoHighLevel’s learning curve really felt steep and complex.
Easy jobs like editing and enhancing workflows included digging through food selection systems that were all over the place. Key setups were unexplainably spread in completely different areas. Moving in between functions felt disjointed or complex.
I’ll tell you what I imply by talking about their funnel builder as an example. There were 3 separate settings panels to take care of general, individual, and item arrangements. Yet for some insane reason, the links to access each of these core setups were spread out on opposite sides of the display. What!?
As someone who values clean, thoughtful style, this seriously frustrated me.
It strengthened that GoHighLevel still felt like a work-in-progress instead of a refined item all set for prime-time use. Their concerns seemed focused on stuffing in every feature imaginable, with bad use as an afterthought.
And speaking of features, I quickly realized the low cost tag featured costly compromises …
Deceptive Pricing GoHighLevel Smart Webchat Widget
One of GoHighLevel’s most significant selling points is the inexpensive cost for accessibility to a lot of features. However I quickly learned this inexpensive base cost was deceitful.
They nickle-and-dimed customers with erratic charges for core performance. Instantly my bank card declarations had vague $10 charges from GoHighLevel here and there.
As it ended up, you obtain billed each time you send out an email through their servers. So for high volume users, this amounted to numerous bucks in unexpected costs.
In between these per-email costs and paying extra for deliverability attachments like Mailgun, my “inexpensive” GoHighLevel subscription wound up setting you back dramatically greater than my Keap plan.
The reduced sticker price was alluring, but just not reasonable in practice. This bait-and-switch left a bad taste in my mouth.
Email Fees Suffered
The last dealbreaker was seeing my carefully nurtured email open prices plummet nearly overnight after switching over to GoHighLevel.
Previously, my audience involvement regularly struck 35-40% open rates in Keap month after month. But once I migrated their documents over to GoHighLevel, performance tanked instantaneously to a pitiful 9% open price.
Despite how much I optimized my sending techniques or attempted every fixing technique, I could hardly push open prices back into the teenagers– still a 50%+ decline from my previous criteria GoHighLevel Smart Webchat Widget.
Let me repeat: my exact same target market and e-mails all of a sudden had terrible engagement. The only point I can believe that would certainly be causing 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 debilitating deliverability problems, hidden costs, busted features, and horrible interface, I had lastly reached my limit …
Why I Give up GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Just 45 days after migrating my agency to GoHighLevel, I understood I had actually made a significant error. The disadvantages dramatically outweighed any type of benefits.
No software application is excellent, but the sheer volume of troubles was past acceptable.
At the end of the day, software comes down to depend on. If I can not trust it to take care of crucial functions competently or think a vendor has my best interests in mind, then it’s time to leave– also after spending significant time, money, and initiative migrating.
So I made the difficult phone call to reverse course and return back to Keap totally just weeks after going all in on GoHighLevel. Allow’s explore what I gained from this fiasco.
Trick Takeaways: What I Learned From My GoHighLevel Blunder
My time with HighLevel can be summed up as a costly ill fortune. Yet in hindsight, it showed me a few crucial lessons:
- Adhere to what works. Don’t disturb what’s working unless something is definitively better across the board. Adjustment brings threat.
- Vet claims completely. Marketing buzz around brand-new software commonly covers bigger underlying defects. Deep due diligence is vital.
- Pick simplicity over features. Properly designed tools ought to make your work life easier, not much more challenging and unpleasant.
- Transparency constructs trust. Nontransparent pricing, questionable reseller terms, and finger-pointing to evade issues ruins trust fund.
- Look for unbiased testimonials. Pleased assistance examines suggest less if too much issues imply bad total usability.
- Excellence is difficult. No single remedy can flawlessly fulfill every unique organization demand. Find the least-bad fit.
- Advancement over transformation. Incremental enhancements normally outweigh high-risk wholesale reinvention of what already works fine.
In other words, I learned to be a lot more doubtful of “also great to be real” marketing claims and much less attracted by the appeal of glossy brand-new items. The tools you utilize daily ought to gain trust fund with openness and efficiency, not slick advertising.