As a company proprietor for over a decade, I depend on software application and automation to streamline operations and provide results. So when GoHighLevel emerged on the scene couple of years back, it absolutely caught my focus Figma To GoHighLevel.
The concept was appealing– an all-in-one client administration system with marketing, sales, and solution devices integrated with each other. As a business owner always aiming to streamline and scale my organization, it seemed like a dream come to life on paper. That wouldn’t desire a single option that does it all?
However in this extensive GoHighLevel review, I’ll take you inside my dreadful journey of trying (and stopping working) to change to this popular brand-new software program. You’ll learn:
If you’re taking into consideration whether GoHighLevel is right for your own business demands, ideally you can pick up from my agonizing errors and pumped up assumptions.
Spoiler: I do NOT advise GoHighLevel. If you need a CRM, begin with this list of best CRMs rather. I make use of Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re trying to find a sales, marketing, and task management choice to GoHighLevel, then below are a few we recommend.
Backstory: Why I Thought About Switching Over from Keap
To comprehend what attracted me to GoHighLevel to begin with, you require context regarding my previous arrangement. For over 5 years I had been happily counting on Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) to fulfill all my customer administration and automation needs.
I located Keap instinctive to utilize and it managed everything I required– CRM, email marketing, sales funnels, subscription sites, and customer support.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are designed to assist small companies keep their customers while adding new ones easily. Automate follow-ups with e-mails and texts, making sure leads and customers get the appropriate messages at the right time. Usage internet site and social media forms to improve lead follow-up, and manage your growth with very easy appointment organizing and lead tracking. Boost sales with automated estimating, invoicing, and payment handling, freeing up your time. With Keap, local business can conserve 10 hours per week and increase revenue by 39%. Begin with a 14-day free trial, no credit card required.
Why we like Keap
Keap offers an extensive customer connection administration (CRM) and marketing automation remedy tailored for small companies and business owners. We appreciate Keap’s concentrate on enhancing sales processes and nurturing customer partnerships through effective automation tools. The system’s all-in-one strategy integrates CRM, e-mail marketing, invoicing, and job monitoring, making it particularly attractive for companies seeking to settle their technology pile.
For the most part, it just functioned reliably with marginal hassle or upkeep required. My open and click-through rates were terrific (like 35% wonderful). Automations ran smoothly with no problems.
So why on earth was I attracted to uproot my entire functional foundation from a system that worked to attempt something unverified and untried?
In hindsight I can admit I got attracted by the alarm call of “glossy object disorder”. You know the feeling: when everybody’s speaking about a brand-new tool that will certainly transform your organization … The turf usually looks greener on the other side, and I questioned whether GoHighLevel might reduce friction factors that I would certainly learned to endure over the years with Keap.
I withstood at first, however a few even more disappointments led me to assume possibly it was time for a modification.
The Investment: Migrating My Agency to GoHighLevel
Previously this year I chose to take the plunge. I signed up for HighLevel’s Company plan at $297/month, spending significantly more than the $97/month starter price.
This had not been a decision I took lightly. I knew changing platforms was mosting likely to call for moving all my Keap data and essentially rebuilding my whole tech framework from the ground up using every one of the GoHighLevel integrations offered.
Right here’s a review of simply a few of the initiative called for:
- By hand exporting 20,000+ email customer 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, promos, and sales funnels all over again
- Learning an entirely international UX and user interface layout
Done in, I invested around 30-40 tiresome hours of setup work transitioning whatever over– as well as taking care of shed performance during the switch.
But inevitably, it was a calculated financial investment I was willing to make. I figured some short-term pain would repay with GoHighLevel offering a much better long-lasting solution for my business, Dripify. Oh exactly how wrong I was …
It just took me regarding a month of hands-on use to realize I had made a big blunder. The issues began piling up quickly, up until it reached a point I had to cut my losses and change back to Keap completely.
Let’s walk through the nightmarish troubles I came across.
Protection Issues & Lots of Bugs
Given GoHighLevel placed itself as an all-in-one automation system, I made sure to thoroughly recreate each and every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These consisted of sequences for onboarding brand-new email clients, onboarding new clients, automating follow-ups for webinar enrollments, sending event reminders, taking care of subscription expiries and a lot more.
Every little thing seemed to be operating fine … till suddenly it wasn’t. One morning, I woke up to find 171 entirely irrelevant e-mails had actually been sent to customers who should NOT have actually gotten them. This happened three days in a row, with a different set of 160 people daily.
I frantically attempted repairing and restoring the automation from the ground up. But the trouble continued.
When I desperately connected to their support team, they vaguely claimed “web server concerns” were at fault. But this description really did not make any sense, given that the mistakes proceeded occurring each morning like clockwork unrelated to any kind of downtime.
In my mind, this substantial failure was totally undesirable and simply really did not benefit my service. I have countless calls depending on my automated campaigns running smoothly.
So if GoHighLevel was going to be totally undependable, exactly how could I leave mission-critical workflows and delicate customer information to their innovation?
The unintuitive user interface just compounded these concerns …
Discouraging UX
Coming from Keap where whatever was smooth and intuitive, GoHighLevel’s learning curve felt steep and challenging.
Easy tasks like editing workflows included digging with menu systems that were all over the place. Secret settings were unexplainably spread in absolutely various sections. Moving in between features really felt disjointed or confusing.
I’ll tell you what I indicate by discussing their funnel builder as an example. There were 3 separate settings panels to handle overall, private, and item setups. Yet for some crazy reason, the web links to accessibility each of these core setups were expanded on contrary sides of the screen. What!?
As someone who values clean, thoughtful design, this seriously irritated me.
It reinforced that GoHighLevel still seemed like a work-in-progress as opposed to a refined item ready for prime-time usage. Their top priorities seemed focused on stuffing in every feature under the sun, with inadequate use as a second thought.
And speaking of features, I quickly realized the low price tag came with expensive compromises …
Deceptive Pricing Figma To GoHighLevel
One of GoHighLevel’s greatest marketing factors is the budget-friendly rate for accessibility to so many features. However I swiftly learned this economical base price was deceitful.
They nickle-and-dimed users with sporadic fees for core performance. Unexpectedly my bank card declarations had obscure $10 fees from GoHighLevel here and there.
As it turned out, you obtain charged every time you send an email through their web servers. So for high volume customers, this amounted to hundreds of dollars in unexpected costs.
Between these per-email costs and paying added for deliverability add-ons like Mailgun, my “cost effective” GoHighLevel subscription ended up setting you back substantially greater than my Keap plan.
The reduced sticker price was appealing, however just not reasonable in practice. This bait-and-switch left a poor preference in my mouth.
Email Fees Suffered
The final dealbreaker was seeing my meticulously nurtured e-mail open prices plummet practically overnight after switching over to GoHighLevel.
Previously, my target market involvement regularly struck 35-40% open rates in Keap month after month. Once I moved their records over to GoHighLevel, performance tanked quickly to a useless 9% open rate.
No matter how much I maximized my sending out practices or attempted every repairing method, I can hardly push open prices back right into the teenagers– still a 50%+ decrease from my previous benchmarks Figma To GoHighLevel.
Let me repeat: my exact same target market and emails suddenly had awful involvement. The only point I can assume that would be creating 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 costs, broken features, and dreadful user interface, I had ultimately reached my limit …
Why I Stop GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Simply 45 days after migrating my company to GoHighLevel, I knew I had actually made a huge blunder. The disadvantages significantly exceeded any advantages.
No software program is best, however the large volume of problems was beyond appropriate.
At the end of the day, software comes down to trust fund. If I can not trust it to handle important functions effectively or believe a vendor has my benefits in mind, after that it’s time to leave– even after investing considerable time, cash, and initiative moving.
So I made the difficult call to turn around course and return back to Keap completely just weeks after going all in on GoHighLevel. Allow’s explore what I gained from this fiasco.
Key Takeaways: What I Picked up from My GoHighLevel Blunder
My time with HighLevel can be summarized as a costly ill fortune. But in knowledge, it showed me a few crucial lessons:
- Stay with what works. Don’t disturb what’s functioning unless something is definitively far better across the board. Change brings risk.
- Vet declares extensively. Marketing buzz around new software program often covers bigger underlying problems. Deep due diligence is necessary.
- Pick simpleness over features. Properly designed devices ought to make your job life simpler, not a lot more complicated and untidy.
- Transparency builds trust fund. Nontransparent pricing, unethical reseller terms, and finger-pointing to avert problems ruins trust.
- Look for objective evaluations. Happy assistance assesses imply less if too much problems suggest poor overall functionality.
- Excellence is difficult. No single option can completely fulfill every special organization demand. Locate the least-bad fit.
- Advancement over transformation. Step-by-step renovations typically outweigh risky wholesale reinvention of what currently works fine.
Simply put, I discovered to be more cynical of “as well excellent to be true” marketing cases and less attracted by the appeal of glossy new things. The devices you utilize daily need to make trust with transparency and performance, not glossy advertising.