As a company proprietor for over a years, I depend on software and automation to enhance procedures and supply outcomes. So when GoHighLevel emerged on the scene few years back, it certainly captured my focus GoHighLevel Two Way Gmail Sync.
The concept was attractive– an all-in-one customer monitoring system with marketing, sales, and solution tools integrated with each other. As an entrepreneur constantly looking to streamline and scale my company, it felt like a desire become a reality theoretically. That wouldn’t want a single solution that does it all?
However in this extensive GoHighLevel testimonial, I’ll take you inside my disastrous journey of attempting (and falling short) to switch to this preferred brand-new software. You’ll discover:
If you’re thinking about whether GoHighLevel is right for your very own service requirements, ideally you can gain from my excruciating errors and pumped up assumptions.
Looter: I do NOT recommend GoHighLevel. If you need a CRM, start with this listing of finest CRMs instead. I utilize Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re trying to find a sales, marketing, and task management alternative to GoHighLevel, after that here are a few we suggest.
Backstory: Why I Considered Switching Over from Keap
To comprehend what attracted me to GoHighLevel in the first place, you require context concerning my previous arrangement. For over 5 years I had been gladly relying on Keap (previously Infusionsoft) to fulfill all my customer monitoring and automation demands.
I located Keap instinctive to use and it handled every little thing I needed– CRM, e-mail marketing, sales funnels, membership websites, and customer assistance.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are developed to help small businesses keep their customers while including new ones easily. Automate follow-ups with emails and messages, ensuring leads and clients receive the best messages at the correct time. Usage site and social media sites forms to simplify lead follow-up, and handle your growth with easy appointment scheduling and lead tracking. Boost sales with automated pricing estimate, invoicing, and settlement handling, liberating your time. With Keap, small companies can save 10 hours each week and boost income by 39%. Begin with a 14-day free trial, no credit card required.
Why we like Keap
Keap supplies a detailed client partnership administration (CRM) and marketing automation option customized for local business and business owners. We value Keap’s concentrate on enhancing sales procedures and nurturing consumer connections through effective automation tools. The system’s all-in-one technique combines CRM, email marketing, invoicing, and task monitoring, making it specifically attractive for services looking to combine their technology pile.
Generally, it simply worked reliably with very little hassle or maintenance required. My open and click-through rates were great (like 35% excellent). Automations ran efficiently without any problems.
So why on earth was I attracted to uproot my entire operational foundation from a system that functioned to attempt something unverified and untried?
In knowledge I can confess I got seduced by the alarm telephone call of “shiny item disorder”. You know the feeling: when everyone’s speaking about a brand-new device that will certainly revolutionize your company … The grass usually looks greener on the other side, and I wondered whether GoHighLevel might decrease friction factors that I ‘d learned to tolerate for many years with Keap.
I withstood in the beginning, yet a few more stress led me to believe maybe it was time for a change.
The Investment: Moving My Agency to GoHighLevel
Previously this year I chose to start. I signed up for HighLevel’s Agency plan at $297/month, investing substantially greater than the $97/month starter price.
This had not been a choice I ignored. I recognized switching platforms was going to require migrating all my Keap data and essentially reconstructing my entire tech infrastructure from square one making use of every one of the GoHighLevel integrations offered.
Here’s an overview of just some of the effort required:
- Manually exporting 20,000+ e-mail client documents
- Recreating dozens of automations and workflows
- Relocating customer accounts, notes, and job data to the brand-new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe invoicing integration
- Establishing landing pages, discounts, and sales funnels around once more
- Learning an entirely foreign UX and interface style
Done in, I invested around 30-40 laborious hours of setup job transitioning whatever over– in addition to handling shed performance during the button.
Yet eventually, it was a computed financial investment I was willing to make. I figured some temporary pain would repay with GoHighLevel providing a much better long-term service for my service, Dripify. Oh just how wrong I was …
It just took me regarding a month of hands-on usage to recognize I had actually made a large error. The issues started accumulating rapidly, up until it got to a factor I needed to reduce my losses and switch back to Keap entirely.
Let’s go through the horrible troubles I came across.
Safety And Security Issues & Many Bugs
Given GoHighLevel positioned itself as an all-in-one automation system, I took care to carefully recreate every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These included sequences for onboarding brand-new e-mail customers, onboarding new clients, automating follow-ups for webinar enrollments, sending event pointers, handling subscription expirations and much more.
Every little thing appeared to be operating fine … up until suddenly it had not been. One morning, I woke up to discover 171 entirely pointless emails had been sent out to customers who must NOT have received them. This happened 3 days straight, with a different batch of 160 people each day.
I frantically tried repairing and restoring the automation from the ground up. However the issue persisted.
When I seriously connected to their assistance group, they vaguely asserted “web server concerns” were to blame. However this explanation really did not make any feeling, since the mistakes continued happening each early morning like clockwork unassociated to any type of downtime.
In my mind, this massive failure was totally inappropriate and simply really did not help my service. I have thousands of get in touches with relying on my automated campaigns running smoothly.
So if GoHighLevel was mosting likely to be completely unstable, how could I hand over mission-critical workflows and sensitive client information to their technology?
The unintuitive user interface only worsened these issues …
Frustrating UX
Coming from Keap where every little thing was smooth and intuitive, GoHighLevel’s learning contour felt steep and complicated.
Easy jobs like editing workflows entailed digging via food selection systems that were all over the place. Trick settings were unexplainably scattered in entirely different areas. Moving between functions felt disjointed or complex.
I’ll tell you what I indicate by talking about their funnel builder as an instance. There were 3 different setups panels to manage total, individual, and item arrangements. Yet for some insane reason, the web links to accessibility each of these core setups were expanded on contrary sides of the display. What!?
As somebody who values tidy, thoughtful design, this seriously upset me.
It reinforced that GoHighLevel still felt like a work-in-progress rather than a refined product ready for prime-time usage. Their top priorities seemed concentrated on stuffing in every feature under the sun, with poor functionality as a second thought.
And speaking of features, I quickly realized the low cost tag came with expensive concessions …
Deceptive Pricing GoHighLevel Two Way Gmail Sync
Among GoHighLevel’s most significant selling factors is the cost effective cost for access to a lot of features. But I rapidly discovered this low-cost base cost was deceptive.
They nickle-and-dimed individuals with sporadic fees for core performance. Unexpectedly my credit card statements had obscure $10 fees from GoHighLevel occasionally.
As it turned out, you obtain billed whenever you send an e-mail via their web servers. So for high volume individuals, this amounted to thousands of bucks in unanticipated prices.
Between these per-email charges and paying extra for deliverability attachments like Mailgun, my “budget-friendly” GoHighLevel registration ended up costing dramatically MORE than my Keap plan.
The reduced sticker price was tempting, but simply not sensible in practice. This bait-and-switch left a poor preference in my mouth.
Email Fees Suffered
The last dealbreaker was seeing my carefully supported e-mail open rates plummet practically over night after switching over to GoHighLevel.
Previously, my audience engagement constantly hit 35-40% open rates in Keap month after month. Once I migrated their documents over to GoHighLevel, efficiency tanked quickly to a useless 9% open price.
Regardless of how much I maximized my sending practices or tried every troubleshooting technique, I could hardly push open rates back right into the teenagers– still a 50%+ decline from my previous standards GoHighLevel Two Way Gmail Sync.
Let me repeat: my exact same target market and emails all of a sudden had awful interaction. The only point I can think that would certainly be triggering this was whatever was taking place behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a company so based on email marketing, this was a big deal.
In between the debilitating deliverability issues, concealed fees, busted features, and awful interface, I had actually lastly reached my limitation …
Why I Quit GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Just 45 days after moving my agency to GoHighLevel, I understood I had actually made a big mistake. The cons dramatically surpassed any benefits.
No software program is best, however the large quantity of problems was past acceptable.
At the end of the day, software comes down to trust. If I can’t trust it to deal with critical functions capably or think a supplier has my best interests in mind, after that it’s time to leave– also after investing considerable time, money, and effort migrating.
So I made the challenging call to turn around program and return back to Keap entirely simply weeks after going all in on GoHighLevel. Let’s explore what I gained from this fiasco.
Secret Takeaways: What I Gained from My GoHighLevel Error
My time with HighLevel can be summarized as a costly ill fortune. However in knowledge, it taught me a few crucial lessons:
- Stick to what jobs. Do not disturb what’s functioning unless something is definitively far better across the board. Adjustment brings danger.
- Vet declares completely. Marketing hype around brand-new software commonly covers larger underlying defects. Deep due diligence is crucial.
- Choose simpleness over features. Well-designed tools need to make your job life much easier, not much more complex and untidy.
- Transparency builds depend on. Opaque pricing, shady reseller terms, and finger-pointing to escape troubles ruins count on.
- Look for impartial evaluations. Pleased support evaluates indicate less if excessive issues indicate bad overall use.
- Excellence is impossible. No solitary option can flawlessly satisfy every special business requirement. Locate the least-bad fit.
- Evolution over transformation. Incremental improvements generally outweigh dangerous wholesale reinvention of what already works penalty.
Simply put, I found out to be a lot more unconvinced of “also good to be true” marketing cases and much less lured by the attraction of shiny brand-new items. The tools you utilize daily must make depend on with transparency and efficiency, not slick advertising.