As a company proprietor for over a decade, I count on software program and automation to enhance operations and supply outcomes. So when GoHighLevel emerged on the scene couple of years back, it definitely captured my focus GoHighLevel Website Builder.
The idea was enticing– an all-in-one client administration platform with marketing, sales, and service devices incorporated together. As an entrepreneur always seeking to streamline and scale my organization, it seemed like a dream become a reality theoretically. That would not desire a solitary service that does it all?
But in this in-depth GoHighLevel testimonial, I’ll take you inside my dreadful journey of attempting (and stopping working) to switch to this preferred new software application. You’ll learn:
If you’re considering whether GoHighLevel is right for your own service demands, hopefully you can pick up from my agonizing blunders and pumped up assumptions.
Looter: I do NOT advise GoHighLevel. If you require a CRM, start with this listing of ideal CRMs instead. I use Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re looking for a sales, marketing, and task monitoring option to GoHighLevel, then here are a couple of we advise.
Backstory: Why I Considered Switching from Keap
To comprehend what attracted me to GoHighLevel in the first place, you require context regarding my previous setup. For over 5 years I had been gladly relying on Keap (previously Infusionsoft) to meet all my customer administration and automation requirements.
I located Keap user-friendly to make use of and it handled whatever I needed– CRM, e-mail marketing, sales funnels, subscription sites, and customer support.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are created to assist small companies keep their customers while adding brand-new ones easily. Automate follow-ups with emails and messages, guaranteeing leads and customers receive the ideal messages at the right time. Use internet site and social media sites types to streamline lead follow-up, and manage your development with very easy consultation organizing and lead monitoring. Boost sales with automated estimating, invoicing, and repayment processing, liberating your time. With Keap, local business can save 10 hours per week and boost income by 39%. Start with a 14-day free trial, no charge card required.
Why we like Keap
Keap provides a comprehensive client relationship administration (CRM) and marketing automation service tailored for small companies and entrepreneurs. We appreciate Keap’s concentrate on simplifying sales procedures and nurturing consumer partnerships via powerful automation tools. The platform’s all-in-one method integrates CRM, e-mail marketing, invoicing, and job monitoring, making it especially attractive for organizations aiming to combine their technology pile.
For the most part, it just worked accurately with minimal difficulty or maintenance required. My open and click-through prices were excellent (like 35% excellent). Automations ran efficiently with no concerns.
So why in the world was I attracted to uproot my entire functional foundation from a system that functioned to attempt something unverified and untried?
In hindsight I can admit I obtained attracted by the siren call of “glossy item disorder”. You understand the feeling: when every person’s speaking about a new tool that will certainly change your company … The lawn frequently looks greener on the other side, and I wondered whether GoHighLevel could decrease rubbing points that I would certainly discovered to endure throughout the years with Keap.
I resisted at first, but a few even more aggravations led me to think possibly it was time for a modification.
The Financial investment: Migrating My Agency to GoHighLevel
Previously this year I chose to take the plunge. I enrolled in HighLevel’s Company plan at $297/month, spending substantially more than the $97/month starter price.
This wasn’t a decision I took lightly. I knew switching systems was mosting likely to call for moving all my Keap information and basically rebuilding my whole tech facilities from the ground up utilizing every one of the GoHighLevel integrations readily available.
Here’s a summary of just a few of the effort called for:
- Manually exporting 20,000+ email client documents
- Recreating lots of automations and workflows
- Relocating customer accounts, notes, and project data to the brand-new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe billing integration
- Establishing landing pages, promotions, and sales funnels around again
- Learning a completely international UX and interface layout
Done in, I spent around 30-40 tiresome hours of configuration job transitioning every little thing over– not to mention handling shed performance during the switch.
But inevitably, it was a calculated financial investment I agreed to make. I figured some short-term discomfort would certainly repay with GoHighLevel giving a much better long-term option for my service, Dripify. Oh how wrong I was …
It just took me regarding a month of hands-on use to understand I had made a big mistake. The issues started piling up promptly, until it reached a factor I needed to cut my losses and switch back to Keap entirely.
Allow’s walk through the nightmarish troubles I encountered.
Security Issues & Many Bugs
Given GoHighLevel positioned itself as an all-in-one automation platform, I took care to thoroughly recreate every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These included sequences for onboarding new email clients, onboarding brand-new clients, automating follow-ups for webinar enrollments, sending occasion suggestions, taking care of membership expirations and a lot more.
Whatever seemed to be working penalty … up until suddenly it wasn’t. One early morning, I woke up to locate 171 totally irrelevant emails had been sent to customers that ought to NOT have actually gotten them. This happened three days in a row, with a various batch of 160 people every day.
I frantically attempted troubleshooting and rebuilding the automation from scratch. But the trouble continued.
When I frantically reached out to their assistance group, they vaguely asserted “server problems” were responsible. But this description really did not make any kind of sense, given that the mistakes continued happening each morning like clockwork unrelated to any kind of downtime.
In my mind, this enormous failing was entirely inappropriate and simply really did not work for my business. I have hundreds of calls depending on my automated campaigns running efficiently.
So if GoHighLevel was going to be absolutely undependable, how could I hand over mission-critical workflows and delicate client information to their technology?
The unintuitive interface just intensified these problems …
Frustrating UX
Coming from Keap where every little thing was smooth and user-friendly, GoHighLevel’s learning curve felt steep and complex.
Straightforward tasks like editing workflows entailed digging with food selection systems that were all over the place. Key setups were unexplainably spread in entirely different areas. Moving between functions felt disjointed or confusing.
I’ll inform you what I imply by speaking about their funnel builder as an example. There were 3 different settings panels to handle general, specific, and product configurations. Yet for some crazy factor, the links to accessibility each of these core settings were spread out on opposite sides of the display. What!?
As somebody who values tidy, thoughtful design, this seriously upset me.
It enhanced that GoHighLevel still seemed like a work-in-progress instead of a polished item prepared for prime-time use. Their top priorities seemed focused on stuffing in every feature under the sun, with inadequate use as an afterthought.
And speaking of features, I quickly recognized the low cost tag featured expensive compromises …
Deceptive Pricing GoHighLevel Website Builder
Among GoHighLevel’s biggest selling points is the affordable price for accessibility to numerous features. But I quickly learned this economical base expense was misleading.
They nickle-and-dimed individuals with sporadic fees for core performance. Instantly my credit card declarations had vague $10 charges from GoHighLevel here and there.
As it turned out, you get billed every single time you send an e-mail with their servers. So for high quantity customers, this amounted to thousands of bucks in unforeseen prices.
In between these per-email charges and paying extra for deliverability add-ons like Mailgun, my “economical” GoHighLevel subscription ended up setting you back dramatically greater than my Keap plan.
The low price tag was appealing, but simply not reasonable in practice. This bait-and-switch left a negative preference in my mouth.
Email Rates Suffered
The last dealbreaker was seeing my thoroughly supported e-mail open prices drop nearly overnight after changing to GoHighLevel.
Previously, my target market 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 worthless 9% open rate.
Despite how much I maximized my sending methods or tried every troubleshooting technique, I could barely nudge open rates back right into the teens– still a 50%+ decline from my previous standards GoHighLevel Website Builder.
Let me repeat: my exact same target market and e-mails all of a sudden had awful involvement. The only point I can believe that would certainly be causing this was whatever was occurring behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For an agency so based on email marketing, this was a big deal.
In between the debilitating deliverability issues, concealed fees, busted features, and awful user interface, I had actually ultimately reached my limit …
Why I Give up GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Just 45 days after moving my firm to GoHighLevel, I recognized I had actually made a substantial blunder. The disadvantages substantially outweighed any advantages.
No software program is ideal, but the sheer volume of problems was past appropriate.
At the end of the day, software boils down to count on. If I can’t trust it to manage crucial functions competently or think a vendor has my benefits in mind, then it’s time to leave– even after spending significant time, cash, and effort moving.
So I made the challenging phone call to reverse course and return back to Keap completely simply weeks after going all in on GoHighLevel. Let’s explore what I learned from this debacle.
Trick Takeaways: What I Picked up from My GoHighLevel Blunder
My time with HighLevel can be summarized as an expensive accident. But in hindsight, it instructed me a couple of vital lessons:
- Adhere to what jobs. Don’t distress what’s functioning unless something is definitively far better across the board. Modification brings danger.
- Veterinarian asserts thoroughly. Marketing buzz around brand-new software commonly obscures bigger underlying defects. Deep due diligence is important.
- Pick simpleness over features. Properly designed devices ought to make your job life less complicated, not more difficult and messy.
- Transparency constructs depend on. Opaque pricing, unethical reseller terms, and finger-pointing to avert troubles ruins trust.
- Seek honest testimonials. Pleased assistance examines indicate much less if extreme issues indicate bad total usability.
- Excellence is impossible. No solitary option can flawlessly satisfy every one-of-a-kind company requirement. Locate the least-bad fit.
- Development over change. Step-by-step enhancements commonly exceed high-risk wholesale reinvention of what currently works penalty.
Simply put, I learned to be a lot more cynical of “also excellent to be real” marketing insurance claims and less lured by the allure of glossy brand-new things. The tools you make use of daily should make trust fund through transparency and efficiency, not slick advertising.