As a company proprietor for over a decade, I rely on software application and automation to enhance operations and supply outcomes. So when GoHighLevel emerged on the scene couple of years back, it absolutely captured my attention Best Deal on GoHighLevel.
The concept was attractive– an all-in-one client management platform with marketing, sales, and service devices integrated with each other. As an entrepreneur always seeking to simplify and scale my organization, it appeared like a desire become a reality on paper. That wouldn’t want a single solution that does it all?
But in this thorough GoHighLevel testimonial, I’ll take you inside my devastating journey of attempting (and stopping working) to change to this preferred new software. You’ll learn:
If you’re thinking about whether GoHighLevel is right for your very own company demands, hopefully you can gain from my painful errors and pumped up expectations.
Looter: I do NOT suggest GoHighLevel. If you require a CRM, begin with this checklist of ideal CRMs instead. I utilize Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re looking for a sales, marketing, and project monitoring choice to GoHighLevel, then here are a couple of we suggest.
Backstory: Why I Thought About Switching from Keap
To recognize what attracted me to GoHighLevel in the first place, you need context concerning my previous setup. For over 5 years I had been happily relying on Keap (previously Infusionsoft) to meet all my client administration and automation demands.
I located Keap user-friendly to utilize and it handled every little thing I required– CRM, e-mail marketing, sales funnels, membership websites, and customer support.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are designed to assist small businesses keep their customers while including brand-new ones easily. Automate follow-ups with emails and texts, ensuring leads and clients receive the right messages at the right time. Use website and social media forms to streamline lead follow-up, and manage your growth with very easy appointment organizing and lead monitoring. Boost sales with automated pricing quote, invoicing, and payment processing, freeing up your time. With Keap, small companies can save 10 hours each week and boost income by 39%. Start with a 14-day free trial, no credit card called for.
Why we like Keap
Keap supplies a comprehensive client partnership monitoring (CRM) and marketing automation service tailored for local business and business owners. We value Keap’s concentrate on streamlining sales procedures and nurturing client partnerships with effective automation devices. The system’s all-in-one method incorporates CRM, e-mail marketing, invoicing, and job monitoring, making it especially eye-catching for services aiming to consolidate their technology pile.
Generally, it simply worked dependably with marginal difficulty or upkeep needed. My open and click-through prices were wonderful (like 35% terrific). Automations ran smoothly without any issues.
So why on earth was I tempted to uproot my whole functional foundation from a system that worked to attempt something unverified and untested?
In hindsight I can confess I got attracted by the alarm phone call of “glossy things syndrome”. You know the sensation: when everyone’s talking about a new device that will certainly change your company … The lawn usually looks greener on the other side, and I questioned whether GoHighLevel may reduce friction factors that I would certainly found out to endure throughout the years with Keap.
I withstood at first, but a few more frustrations led me to think perhaps it was time for a change.
The Financial investment: Migrating My Company to GoHighLevel
Previously this year I chose to start. I enrolled in HighLevel’s Firm plan at $297/month, investing considerably more than the $97/month starter price.
This had not been a choice I took lightly. I knew switching over systems was going to call for migrating all my Keap information and essentially rebuilding my whole tech framework from square one using all of the GoHighLevel integrations available.
Right here’s an overview of simply several of the initiative needed:
- Manually exporting 20,000+ email subscriber records
- Recreating loads of automations and workflows
- Relocating client accounts, notes, and task data to the new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe payment integration
- Establishing landing pages, coupons, and sales funnels throughout again
- Learning a completely foreign UX and interface style
All in, I spent around 30-40 laborious hours of setup work transitioning everything over– in addition to taking care of lost productivity throughout the switch.
But eventually, it was a computed investment I agreed to make. I figured some short-term pain would repay with GoHighLevel giving a far better long-lasting service for my company, Dripify. Oh just how incorrect I was …
It just took me concerning a month of hands-on usage to understand I had actually made a big error. The issues started piling up promptly, till it reached a point I had to reduce my losses and change back to Keap totally.
Allow’s go through the nightmarish problems I encountered.
Protection Issues & Lots of Bugs
Provided GoHighLevel placed itself as an all-in-one automation system, I took care to thoroughly recreate every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These included sequences for onboarding brand-new email subscribers, onboarding new customers, automating follow-ups for webinar enrollments, sending out occasion tips, taking care of membership expirations and much more.
Every little thing appeared to be operating fine … till instantly it wasn’t. One morning, I woke up to discover 171 totally unnecessary emails had actually been sent out to individuals who must NOT have actually obtained them. This took place 3 days in a row, with a different batch of 160 people each day.
I hysterically attempted troubleshooting and restoring the automation from square one. But the issue lingered.
When I frantically reached out to their assistance team, they slightly asserted “web server issues” were at fault. Yet this explanation didn’t make any kind of feeling, because the errors continued taking place each early morning like clockwork unrelated to any downtime.
In my mind, this enormous failure was completely undesirable and just really did not help my organization. I have hundreds of contacts counting on my automated campaigns running efficiently.
So if GoHighLevel was going to be absolutely unstable, how could I hand over mission-critical workflows and sensitive client information to their technology?
The unintuitive user interface only worsened these issues …
Irritating UX
Coming from Keap where everything was seamless and user-friendly, GoHighLevel’s learning curve felt high and difficult.
Basic jobs like editing workflows involved excavating with menu systems that were all over the place. Key settings were unexplainably scattered in absolutely different sections. Relocating in between functions felt disjointed or complex.
I’ll inform you what I imply by speaking about their funnel builder as an instance. There were 3 separate setups panels to manage total, private, and item setups. Yet for some crazy reason, the links to gain access to each of these core settings were expanded on contrary sides of the display. What!?
As somebody that values clean, thoughtful layout, this seriously annoyed me.
It reinforced that GoHighLevel still seemed like a work-in-progress rather than a sleek product ready for prime-time usage. Their top priorities seemed focused on stuffing in every feature under the sun, with inadequate usability as a second thought.
And talking features, I quickly realized the small cost tag came with costly compromises …
Misleading Pricing Best Deal on GoHighLevel
Among GoHighLevel’s largest marketing factors is the budget friendly price for access to numerous features. But I promptly discovered this inexpensive base expense was deceitful.
They nickle-and-dimed customers with erratic costs for core capability. Unexpectedly my bank card declarations had unclear $10 fees from GoHighLevel here and there.
As it turned out, you get billed each time you send out an email with their web servers. So for high quantity individuals, this added up to numerous dollars in unexpected expenses.
In between these per-email costs and paying extra for deliverability add-ons like Mailgun, my “economical” GoHighLevel registration wound up setting you back substantially greater than my Keap plan.
The low price tag was alluring, yet simply not sensible in practice. This bait-and-switch left a negative preference in my mouth.
Email Fees Suffered
The final dealbreaker was seeing my carefully supported e-mail open prices drop nearly overnight after changing to GoHighLevel.
Formerly, my audience involvement constantly hit 35-40% open rates in Keap month after month. But once I moved their records over to GoHighLevel, performance tanked immediately to a worthless 9% open rate.
Regardless of just how much I optimized my sending out practices or attempted every fixing technique, I could hardly push open prices back right into the teens– still a 50%+ decline from my previous benchmarks Best Deal on GoHighLevel.
Let me repeat: my exact same target market and emails all of a sudden had awful involvement. The only thing I can believe that would certainly be triggering this was whatever was taking place behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For an agency so dependent on email marketing, this was a big deal.
Between the crippling deliverability concerns, hidden charges, busted features, and dreadful interface, I had actually finally reached my limit …
Why I Quit GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Just 45 days after migrating my firm to GoHighLevel, I recognized I had actually made a big mistake. The cons drastically surpassed any kind of advantages.
No software is excellent, but the sheer quantity of problems was past appropriate.
At the end of the day, software program comes down to trust. If I can’t trust it to manage essential functions competently or believe a supplier has my best interests in mind, after that it’s time to walk away– also after investing considerable time, cash, and initiative migrating.
So I made the challenging contact us to turn around program and return back to Keap entirely simply weeks after going done in on GoHighLevel. Let’s discover what I picked up from this ordeal.
Secret Takeaways: What I Learned From My GoHighLevel Mistake
My time with HighLevel can be summed up as an expensive accident. But in hindsight, it instructed me a couple of key lessons:
- Stick to what jobs. Do not disturb what’s functioning unless something is definitively much better across the board. Change brings danger.
- Veterinarian claims extensively. Marketing buzz around brand-new software application frequently covers larger underlying defects. Deep due persistance is essential.
- Choose simplicity over features. Properly designed devices should make your work life less complicated, not a lot more complex and untidy.
- Transparency builds depend on. Nontransparent pricing, shady reseller terms, and finger-pointing to escape troubles ruins trust fund.
- Look for objective evaluations. Pleased assistance evaluates suggest less if extreme problems imply poor general functionality.
- Perfection is difficult. No single solution can flawlessly satisfy every special company requirement. Find the least-bad fit.
- Advancement over transformation. Incremental enhancements usually exceed high-risk wholesale reinvention of what already functions penalty.
Simply put, I discovered to be much more doubtful of “as well excellent to be real” marketing cases and less lured by the allure of shiny new objects. The devices you make use of daily need to gain count on with openness and performance, not slick advertising.