As an agency proprietor for over a decade, I rely on software application and automation to enhance procedures and provide results. So when GoHighLevel arised on the scene few years back, it certainly caught my interest GoHighLevel Social Media.
The concept was enticing– an all-in-one customer monitoring system with marketing, sales, and solution devices incorporated with each other. As a business owner always looking to simplify and scale my company, it appeared like a dream happened theoretically. Who would not desire a single option that does it all?
However in this in-depth GoHighLevel review, I’ll take you inside my tragic trip of trying (and failing) to switch over to this preferred new software program. You’ll discover:
If you’re taking into consideration whether GoHighLevel is right for your own business needs, hopefully you can pick up from my painful errors and blew up expectations.
Looter: I do NOT recommend GoHighLevel. If you require a CRM, begin with this list of finest CRMs rather. I use Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re looking for a sales, marketing, and job management alternative to GoHighLevel, after that right here are a couple of we suggest.
Backstory: Why I Considered Switching from Keap
To recognize what attracted me to GoHighLevel to begin with, you require context about my previous configuration. For over 5 years I had been happily depending on Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) to fulfill all my client monitoring and automation requirements.
I discovered Keap instinctive to utilize and it managed every little thing I needed– CRM, e-mail marketing, sales funnels, subscription sites, and client assistance.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are developed to aid local business maintain their clients while adding brand-new ones easily. Automate follow-ups with emails and texts, ensuring leads and customers get the appropriate messages at the right time. Usage website and social networks forms to enhance lead follow-up, and handle your growth with very easy consultation organizing and lead tracking. Boost sales with automated estimating, invoicing, and repayment handling, liberating your time. With Keap, small companies can save 10 hours weekly and rise earnings by 39%. Beginning with a 14-day free trial, no bank card needed.
Why we like Keap
Keap offers an extensive customer relationship monitoring (CRM) and marketing automation remedy tailored for small businesses and entrepreneurs. We value Keap’s concentrate on enhancing sales processes and supporting consumer connections via effective automation devices. The system’s all-in-one strategy integrates CRM, e-mail marketing, invoicing, and job monitoring, making it specifically attractive for organizations looking to settle their technology pile.
Generally, it just functioned dependably with marginal fuss or upkeep required. My open and click-through prices were wonderful (like 35% excellent). Automations ran smoothly with no issues.
So why in the world was I lured to uproot my whole functional foundation from a system that functioned to attempt something unproven and untested?
In knowledge I can confess I got attracted by the siren call of “glossy item disorder”. You know the feeling: when every person’s speaking about a brand-new tool that will certainly change your organization … The turf usually looks greener beyond, and I wondered whether GoHighLevel could reduce rubbing factors that I would certainly discovered to endure over the years with Keap.
I withstood initially, yet a few even more frustrations led me to assume perhaps it was time for a modification.
The Investment: Migrating My Firm to GoHighLevel
Earlier this year I decided to take the plunge. I signed up for HighLevel’s Agency plan at $297/month, spending dramatically greater than the $97/month starter expense.
This wasn’t a decision I took lightly. I knew changing systems was mosting likely to need migrating all my Keap information and basically rebuilding my entire tech facilities from the ground up using all of the GoHighLevel integrations available.
Below’s a review of simply a few of the effort needed:
- Manually exporting 20,000+ email customer documents
- Recreating dozens of automations and workflows
- Moving customer profiles, notes, and project information to the new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe billing integration
- Establishing landing pages, promotions, and sales funnels all over once more
- Learning a totally international UX and interface style
All in, I spent around 30-40 tiresome hours of arrangement job transitioning whatever over– as well as taking care of lost performance during the switch.
However eventually, it was a computed investment I agreed to make. I figured some temporary pain would repay with GoHighLevel providing a far better long-lasting remedy for my company, Dripify. Oh how wrong I was …
It only took me concerning a month of hands-on use to understand I had actually made a large blunder. The concerns started accumulating rapidly, until it got to a factor I had to reduce my losses and change back to Keap completely.
Allow’s go through the nightmarish issues I ran into.
Safety Issues & Many Bugs
Provided GoHighLevel placed itself as an all-in-one automation system, I made sure to diligently recreate every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These consisted of sequences for onboarding new e-mail clients, onboarding new clients, automating follow-ups for webinar enrollments, sending out event tips, managing membership expiries and a lot more.
Everything appeared to be functioning penalty … up until all of a sudden it had not been. One morning, I woke up to locate 171 totally unnecessary emails had been sent out to individuals that should NOT have actually received them. This occurred three days straight, with a different batch of 160 individuals each day.
I desperately attempted repairing and restoring the automation from the ground up. But the issue persisted.
When I desperately connected to their support team, they slightly asserted “server problems” were at fault. But this explanation really did not make any kind of sense, considering that the mistakes proceeded occurring each early morning like clockwork unassociated to any downtime.
In my mind, this substantial failure was completely unacceptable and just didn’t help my service. I have thousands of get in touches with relying on my automated campaigns running efficiently.
So if GoHighLevel was mosting likely to be completely unstable, how could I entrust mission-critical workflows and delicate client data to their modern technology?
The unintuitive interface only worsened these problems …
Frustrating UX
Coming from Keap where every little thing was smooth and user-friendly, GoHighLevel’s learning curve felt high and difficult.
Easy tasks like editing and enhancing workflows involved digging through food selection systems that were all over the place. Trick settings were unexplainably scattered in absolutely various sections. Moving between features felt disjointed or confusing.
I’ll tell you what I mean by speaking about their funnel builder as an instance. There were 3 different settings panels to take care of total, private, and item setups. Yet for some insane factor, the web links to gain access to each of these core setups were spread out on opposite sides of the screen. What!?
As someone that values tidy, thoughtful design, this seriously upset me.
It reinforced that GoHighLevel still seemed like a work-in-progress as opposed to a polished product all set for prime-time use. Their concerns appeared concentrated on stuffing in every feature under the sun, with inadequate usability as an afterthought.
And speaking of features, I soon recognized the affordable price tag came with costly concessions …
Deceptive Pricing GoHighLevel Social Media
One of GoHighLevel’s greatest selling points is the budget friendly cost for accessibility to numerous features. Yet I rapidly learned this cheap base cost was misleading.
They nickle-and-dimed customers with sporadic charges for core functionality. Suddenly my charge card statements had unclear $10 fees from GoHighLevel here and there.
As it turned out, you get charged every single time you send out an email with their servers. So for high volume customers, this amounted to thousands of dollars in unanticipated expenses.
In between these per-email charges and paying extra for deliverability add-ons like Mailgun, my “economical” GoHighLevel membership ended up costing considerably MORE than my Keap plan.
The low price tag was alluring, but simply not realistic in practice. This bait-and-switch left a bad preference in my mouth.
Email Rates Suffered
The final dealbreaker was seeing my carefully nurtured email open rates plunge almost overnight after switching over to GoHighLevel.
Formerly, my audience interaction consistently hit 35-40% open prices in Keap month after month. Once I migrated their documents over to GoHighLevel, efficiency tanked quickly to a useless 9% open price.
Despite just how much I maximized my sending out techniques or tried every troubleshooting technique, I might hardly nudge open prices back right into the teenagers– still a 50%+ decrease from my previous benchmarks GoHighLevel Social Media.
Let me repeat: my exact same audience and e-mails all of a sudden had horrible engagement. The only thing I might assume that would be causing this was whatever was happening behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a company so dependent on email marketing, this was a big deal.
Between the crippling deliverability issues, concealed charges, broken features, and awful interface, I had finally reached my restriction …
Why I Quit GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Just 45 days after migrating my agency to GoHighLevel, I recognized I had actually made a huge mistake. The cons dramatically exceeded any advantages.
No software is ideal, however the sheer quantity of troubles was past appropriate.
At the end of the day, software application comes down to count on. If I can’t trust it to deal with crucial functions capably or think a supplier has my benefits in mind, after that it’s time to walk away– even after spending substantial time, money, and initiative moving.
So I made the tough call to reverse program and return back to Keap completely simply weeks after going all in on GoHighLevel. Allow’s discover what I gained from this debacle.
Trick Takeaways: What I Gained from My GoHighLevel Blunder
My time with HighLevel can be summed up as a costly accident. But in knowledge, it educated me a couple of crucial lessons:
- Stay with what jobs. Do not distress what’s working unless something is definitively better across the board. Adjustment brings danger.
- Vet declares extensively. Marketing buzz around new software program usually covers larger underlying problems. Deep due diligence is essential.
- Select simpleness over features. Properly designed devices need to make your work life easier, not extra complex and untidy.
- Transparency builds count on. Nontransparent pricing, shady reseller terms, and finger-pointing to evade problems ruins depend on.
- Look for unbiased testimonials. Satisfied support examines suggest much less if too much issues imply bad general usability.
- Excellence is difficult. No solitary solution can completely fulfill every special company demand. Discover the least-bad fit.
- Development over revolution. Step-by-step renovations usually exceed risky wholesale reinvention of what currently works penalty.
In short, I found out to be a lot more hesitant of “also great to be real” marketing claims and much less attracted by the attraction of glossy new items. The tools you use daily ought to gain depend on with transparency and efficiency, not slick advertising.