As an agency proprietor for over a years, I depend on software program and automation to improve procedures and deliver outcomes. So when GoHighLevel emerged on the scene few years back, it certainly captured my interest Does GoHighLevel Integrate with Zapier.
The concept was attractive– an all-in-one customer monitoring platform with marketing, sales, and solution tools incorporated with each other. As a business owner constantly looking to streamline and scale my service, it looked like a dream come to life theoretically. That would not desire a solitary solution that does it all?
However in this extensive GoHighLevel evaluation, I’ll take you inside my tragic trip of trying (and stopping working) to switch to this prominent brand-new software. You’ll find out:
If you’re considering whether GoHighLevel is right for your very own business needs, ideally you can learn from my uncomfortable blunders and pumped up assumptions.
Looter: I do NOT advise GoHighLevel. If you need a CRM, begin with this list of ideal CRMs rather. I make use of Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re trying to find a sales, marketing, and project monitoring choice to GoHighLevel, then right here are a couple of we suggest.
Backstory: Why I Considered Switching Over from Keap
To comprehend what attracted me to GoHighLevel in the first place, you require context about my previous configuration. For over 5 years I had been gladly depending on Keap (previously Infusionsoft) to meet all my customer administration and automation requirements.
I located Keap intuitive to utilize and it handled everything I required– CRM, e-mail marketing, sales funnels, membership sites, and customer assistance.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are created to assist small companies keep their customers while adding new ones easily. Automate follow-ups with emails and texts, making sure leads and customers receive the right messages at the right time. Use site and social networks types to simplify lead follow-up, and manage your development with simple appointment scheduling and lead tracking. Boost sales with automated quoting, invoicing, and repayment processing, maximizing your time. With Keap, small businesses can conserve 10 hours each week and rise profits by 39%. Begin with a 14-day free trial, no bank card called for.
Why we like Keap
Keap provides a detailed customer relationship management (CRM) and marketing automation solution tailored for small businesses and business owners. We value Keap’s concentrate on enhancing sales processes and nurturing client connections with effective automation tools. The platform’s all-in-one technique combines CRM, e-mail marketing, invoicing, and job monitoring, making it specifically appealing for businesses seeking to consolidate their tech stack.
Essentially, it simply worked reliably with minimal fuss or upkeep required. My open and click-through prices were great (like 35% great). Automations ran smoothly with no issues.
So why in the world was I lured to uproot my entire functional foundation from a system that functioned to attempt something unproven and untested?
In knowledge I can confess I got seduced by the siren call of “glossy things disorder”. You understand the sensation: when every person’s discussing a new tool that will certainly transform your organization … The yard frequently looks greener on the other side, and I wondered whether GoHighLevel could minimize rubbing factors that I ‘d discovered to endure over the years with Keap.
I resisted initially, but a couple of even more disappointments led me to think possibly it was time for a modification.
The Investment: Migrating My Company to GoHighLevel
Previously this year I made a decision to take the plunge. I signed up for HighLevel’s Company plan at $297/month, spending substantially more than the $97/month starter expense.
This had not been a decision I took lightly. I understood switching platforms was mosting likely to require migrating all my Keap data and basically reconstructing my entire tech facilities from square one using all of the GoHighLevel integrations offered.
Here’s a review of simply a few of the effort required:
- By hand exporting 20,000+ e-mail subscriber records
- Recreating loads of automations and workflows
- Relocating client accounts, notes, and task data to the brand-new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe invoicing integration
- Setting up landing pages, promotions, and sales funnels all over once again
- Learning an entirely international UX and user interface layout
Done in, I invested around 30-40 tedious hours of configuration work transitioning whatever over– and also taking care of lost efficiency throughout the switch.
Yet eventually, it was a calculated financial investment I was willing to make. I figured some short-term pain would certainly pay off with GoHighLevel supplying a far better long-term remedy for my organization, Dripify. Oh exactly how wrong I was …
It only took me about a month of hands-on usage to recognize I had actually made a big error. The issues started piling up swiftly, until it reached a factor I had to reduce my losses and switch back to Keap completely.
Let’s go through the nightmarish troubles I experienced.
Protection Issues & Lots of Vermin
Offered GoHighLevel placed itself as an all-in-one automation platform, I made sure to thoroughly recreate every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These consisted of sequences for onboarding new e-mail customers, onboarding brand-new clients, automating follow-ups for webinar enrollments, sending occasion pointers, handling membership expiries and far more.
Whatever appeared to be operating fine … until unexpectedly it had not been. One morning, I awoke to locate 171 totally irrelevant e-mails had been sent to users that must NOT have obtained them. This took place three days straight, with a various set of 160 individuals each day.
I anxiously tried troubleshooting and rebuilding the automation from square one. But the trouble lingered.
When I seriously reached out to their assistance team, they slightly asserted “server issues” were at fault. But this explanation didn’t make any kind of feeling, since the errors continued occurring each early morning like clockwork unassociated to any type of downtime.
In my mind, this massive failure was entirely unacceptable and simply really did not work for my business. I have thousands of get in touches with relying on my automated campaigns running smoothly.
So if GoHighLevel was going to be entirely unreliable, how could I turn over mission-critical workflows and delicate client data to their innovation?
The unintuitive interface only intensified these problems …
Irritating UX
Originating from Keap where everything was smooth and user-friendly, GoHighLevel’s learning curve felt high and challenging.
Straightforward tasks like modifying workflows involved digging with menu systems that were all over the place. Trick setups were unexplainably spread in completely different sections. Moving between features really felt disjointed or complex.
I’ll inform you what I imply by talking about their funnel builder as an instance. There were 3 different setups panels to manage total, private, and product setups. Yet for some crazy reason, the web links to accessibility each of these core setups were spread out on opposite sides of the screen. What!?
As someone that values tidy, thoughtful style, this seriously irritated me.
It enhanced that GoHighLevel still felt like a work-in-progress as opposed to a polished item ready for prime-time use. Their top priorities seemed concentrated on packing in every feature imaginable, with poor functionality as an afterthought.
And speaking of features, I soon recognized the low price tag featured pricey concessions …
Deceptive Pricing Does GoHighLevel Integrate with Zapier
One of GoHighLevel’s largest selling factors is the economical rate for access to numerous features. However I quickly learned this inexpensive base expense was misleading.
They nickle-and-dimed users with erratic fees for core capability. Suddenly my credit card statements had vague $10 costs from GoHighLevel here and there.
As it ended up, you get billed every single time you send out an email with their servers. So for high volume individuals, this added up to thousands of dollars in unforeseen prices.
In between these per-email charges and paying extra for deliverability attachments like Mailgun, my “budget friendly” GoHighLevel membership ended up setting you back substantially MORE than my Keap plan.
The reduced sticker price was appealing, however just not reasonable in practice. This bait-and-switch left a poor taste in my mouth.
Email Fees Suffered
The final dealbreaker was seeing my thoroughly supported e-mail open prices plummet practically overnight after switching over to GoHighLevel.
Formerly, my target market engagement constantly struck 35-40% open rates in Keap month after month. But once I moved their documents over to GoHighLevel, efficiency tanked quickly to a pathetic 9% open rate.
No matter just how much I maximized my sending out methods or tried every repairing trick, I might hardly nudge open rates back into the teens– still a 50%+ decrease from my previous benchmarks Does GoHighLevel Integrate with Zapier.
Let me repeat: my exact same target market and e-mails all of a sudden had dreadful interaction. The only thing I might assume that would certainly be creating this was whatever was taking place behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For an agency so dependent on e-mail marketing, this was a big deal.
Between the debilitating deliverability concerns, hidden costs, damaged features, and horrible user 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 error. The cons drastically outweighed any kind of advantages.
No software is perfect, but the sheer quantity of troubles was past acceptable.
At the end of the day, software comes down to depend on. If I can not trust it to handle vital features competently or believe a vendor has my best interests in mind, after that it’s time to leave– even after spending substantial time, money, and initiative moving.
So I made the tough phone call to turn around training course and return back to Keap completely just weeks after going done in on GoHighLevel. Let’s explore what I learned from this debacle.
Trick Takeaways: What I Learned From My GoHighLevel Error
My time with HighLevel can be summed up as an expensive accident. However in hindsight, it instructed me a few key lessons:
- Stay with what jobs. Do not upset what’s functioning unless something is definitively far better across the board. Change brings threat.
- Veterinarian asserts completely. Marketing hype around new software program usually obscures bigger underlying problems. Deep due persistance is vital.
- Choose simpleness over features. Well-designed tools should make your work life simpler, not a lot more complicated and messy.
- Openness develops depend on. Opaque pricing, dubious reseller terms, and finger-pointing to escape troubles ruins trust.
- Seek unbiased reviews. Happy assistance assesses mean less if excessive concerns suggest inadequate total functionality.
- Excellence is difficult. No single option can completely fulfill every special business demand. Discover the least-bad fit.
- Advancement over change. Step-by-step renovations normally surpass dangerous wholesale reinvention of what currently functions penalty.
In other words, I learned to be more cynical of “too excellent to be true” marketing insurance claims and less tempted by the attraction of glossy new objects. The tools you use daily need to gain trust via openness and performance, not glossy advertising.