As an agency owner for over a decade, I count on software and automation to streamline procedures and provide results. So when GoHighLevel emerged on the scene couple of years back, it absolutely captured my focus GoHighLevel Spotlight Sessions.
The idea was enticing– an all-in-one client management platform with marketing, sales, and solution tools integrated together. As a business owner constantly looking to streamline and scale my company, it seemed like a desire come true theoretically. Who would not desire a solitary option that does it all?
Yet in this thorough GoHighLevel review, I’ll take you inside my tragic journey of trying (and failing) to change to this preferred new software program. You’ll learn:
If you’re thinking about whether GoHighLevel is right for your very own business demands, ideally you can pick up from my unpleasant errors and inflated assumptions.
Spoiler: I do NOT recommend GoHighLevel. If you need a CRM, start with this list of ideal CRMs rather. I utilize Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re seeking a sales, marketing, and task administration option to GoHighLevel, after that right here are a few we suggest.
Backstory: Why I Took Into Consideration Switching from Keap
To understand what attracted me to GoHighLevel to begin with, you need context concerning my previous setup. For over 5 years I had been gladly relying upon Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) to meet all my customer monitoring and automation demands.
I found Keap user-friendly to make use of and it took care of whatever I required– CRM, email marketing, sales funnels, subscription sites, and client assistance.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are designed to help small businesses maintain their customers while including new ones easily. Automate follow-ups with emails and texts, making sure leads and clients obtain the right messages at the right time. Use web site and social networks types to streamline lead follow-up, and manage your growth with simple visit organizing and lead monitoring. Boost sales with automated quoting, invoicing, and settlement handling, freeing up your time. With Keap, local business can save 10 hours weekly and increase profits by 39%. Beginning with a 14-day free trial, no charge card required.
Why we like Keap
Keap supplies a detailed customer connection management (CRM) and marketing automation service tailored for local business and business owners. We value Keap’s concentrate on enhancing sales processes and supporting consumer partnerships with effective automation tools. The platform’s all-in-one approach combines CRM, e-mail marketing, invoicing, and job management, making it particularly appealing for organizations wanting to settle their technology pile.
Generally, it just worked dependably with marginal difficulty or maintenance required. My open and click-through rates were great (like 35% great). Automations ran efficiently with no issues.
So why on earth was I tempted to uproot my entire operational foundation from a system that worked to try something unproven and untried?
In hindsight I can admit I obtained attracted by the alarm call of “glossy object syndrome”. You know the sensation: when everybody’s talking about a new tool that will certainly revolutionize your company … The grass typically looks greener beyond, and I questioned whether GoHighLevel could reduce friction points that I ‘d found out to tolerate throughout the years with Keap.
I resisted at first, but a couple of even more irritations led me to think possibly it was time for a change.
The Investment: Migrating My Agency to GoHighLevel
Earlier this year I chose to take the plunge. I registered for HighLevel’s Company plan at $297/month, investing substantially greater than the $97/month starter price.
This wasn’t a choice I ignored. I understood switching over platforms was mosting likely to require migrating all my Keap data and basically restoring my entire tech framework from scratch making use of every one of the GoHighLevel integrations readily available.
Here’s an introduction of just several of the initiative called for:
- Manually exporting 20,000+ email customer documents
- Recreating loads of automations and workflows
- Moving customer accounts, notes, and job data to the brand-new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe billing integration
- Establishing landing pages, discounts, and sales funnels all over once again
- Learning a totally foreign UX and interface design
All in, I spent around 30-40 tiresome hours of setup work transitioning whatever over– as well as handling lost productivity during the switch.
Yet ultimately, it was a calculated financial investment I wanted to make. I figured some temporary discomfort would certainly settle with GoHighLevel providing a better long-lasting service for my organization, Dripify. Oh how incorrect I was …
It just took me regarding a month of hands-on use to recognize I had actually made a big mistake. The problems began accumulating promptly, up until it got to a factor I needed to cut my losses and switch over back to Keap totally.
Allow’s walk through the nightmarish troubles I encountered.
Safety And Security Issues & Numerous Vermin
Given GoHighLevel positioned itself as an all-in-one automation platform, I made sure to diligently recreate each and every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These included series for onboarding new e-mail subscribers, onboarding new clients, automating follow-ups for webinar registrations, sending event suggestions, handling subscription expiries and far more.
Whatever seemed to be working penalty … until unexpectedly it had not been. One morning, I woke up to find 171 entirely irrelevant e-mails had been sent out to individuals who should NOT have actually received them. This occurred three days straight, with a different batch of 160 individuals each day.
I anxiously tried repairing and rebuilding the automation from square one. Yet the problem lingered.
When I seriously connected to their support group, they slightly claimed “server problems” were responsible. Yet this description didn’t make any type of feeling, given that the errors proceeded taking place each early morning like clockwork unrelated to any type of downtime.
In my mind, this massive failing was entirely unacceptable and simply really did not help my organization. I have thousands of contacts counting on my automated campaigns running smoothly.
So if GoHighLevel was going to be absolutely unstable, exactly how could I turn over mission-critical workflows and sensitive customer data to their technology?
The unintuitive user interface only worsened these concerns …
Discouraging UX
Coming from Keap where everything was smooth and instinctive, GoHighLevel’s learning contour felt steep and difficult.
Easy tasks like editing and enhancing workflows included excavating via menu systems that were all over the place. Trick settings were unexplainably spread in completely various sections. Moving in between functions really felt disjointed or confusing.
I’ll inform you what I mean by discussing their funnel builder as an example. There were 3 different settings panels to take care of total, specific, and item configurations. Yet for some insane factor, the links to gain access to each of these core settings were spread out on contrary sides of the screen. What!?
As someone who values tidy, thoughtful design, this seriously frustrated me.
It enhanced that GoHighLevel still seemed like a work-in-progress as opposed to a sleek item ready for prime-time usage. Their top priorities appeared focused on stuffing in every feature imaginable, with inadequate usability as a second thought.
And talking features, I soon understood the affordable price tag featured expensive compromises …
Deceptive Pricing GoHighLevel Spotlight Sessions
Among GoHighLevel’s greatest marketing factors is the budget friendly cost for accessibility to numerous features. However I quickly learned this affordable base expense was deceptive.
They nickle-and-dimed users with occasional charges for core functionality. Suddenly my credit card statements had unclear $10 costs from GoHighLevel occasionally.
As it turned out, you get billed each time you send out an e-mail with their web servers. So for high volume users, this amounted to hundreds of dollars in unanticipated expenses.
Between these per-email charges and paying additional for deliverability attachments like Mailgun, my “budget-friendly” GoHighLevel registration ended up setting you back considerably MORE than my Keap plan.
The reduced price tag was tempting, yet just not sensible in practice. This bait-and-switch left a poor preference in my mouth.
Email Fees Suffered
The last dealbreaker was seeing my very carefully nurtured email open rates plummet practically overnight after changing to GoHighLevel.
Formerly, my audience involvement continually struck 35-40% open rates in Keap month after month. Once I moved their documents over to GoHighLevel, performance tanked instantly to a useless 9% open rate.
Regardless of how much I enhanced my sending out methods or attempted every repairing technique, I could hardly nudge open prices back right into the teens– still a 50%+ decline from my previous standards GoHighLevel Spotlight Sessions.
Let me repeat: my exact same target market and e-mails instantly had dreadful interaction. The only point I might believe that would certainly be triggering this was whatever was taking place behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a company so depending on e-mail marketing, this was a big deal.
Between the debilitating deliverability concerns, concealed charges, busted features, and awful user interface, I had actually lastly reached my limit …
Why I Stop GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Just 45 days after migrating my firm to GoHighLevel, I knew I had actually made a massive blunder. The disadvantages significantly outweighed any type of advantages.
No software is excellent, however the large quantity of troubles was past acceptable.
At the end of the day, software application boils down to depend on. If I can’t trust it to handle important features properly or believe a supplier has my best interests in mind, then it’s time to walk away– even after investing significant time, money, and effort migrating.
So I made the difficult contact us to turn around program and return back to Keap totally simply weeks after going done in on GoHighLevel. Let’s discover what I picked up from this ordeal.
Trick Takeaways: What I Learned From My GoHighLevel Mistake
My time with HighLevel can be summarized as an expensive ill fortune. But in knowledge, it taught me a couple of essential lessons:
- Stick to what jobs. Do not disturb what’s working unless something is definitively much better across the board. Modification brings danger.
- Vet asserts completely. Marketing buzz around brand-new software program frequently obscures bigger underlying defects. Deep due persistance is necessary.
- Pick simpleness over features. Well-designed devices should make your work life less complicated, not much more difficult and unpleasant.
- Openness constructs trust fund. Nontransparent pricing, unethical reseller terms, and finger-pointing to avert issues destroys trust fund.
- Seek unbiased testimonials. Satisfied assistance reviews suggest much less if extreme issues indicate bad total use.
- Excellence is impossible. No solitary option can completely satisfy every unique organization requirement. Find the least-bad fit.
- Evolution over transformation. Incremental enhancements generally outweigh high-risk wholesale reinvention of what currently works fine.
In short, I found out to be a lot more skeptical of “as well great to be true” marketing cases and less tempted by the allure of glossy brand-new items. The tools you use daily ought to gain trust fund with openness and efficiency, not slick advertising.