As an agency owner for over a decade, I rely upon software and automation to improve procedures and provide outcomes. So when GoHighLevel emerged on the scene few years back, it most definitely captured my attention GoHighLevel A2P Webinar.
The concept was appealing– an all-in-one client administration system with marketing, sales, and service devices integrated together. As an entrepreneur always looking to simplify and scale my service, it looked like a dream come to life on paper. Who would not want a solitary service that does it all?
Yet in this extensive GoHighLevel review, I’ll take you inside my disastrous journey of attempting (and falling short) to switch over to this popular brand-new software application. You’ll discover:
If you’re thinking about whether GoHighLevel is right for your very own organization demands, with any luck you can pick up from my excruciating blunders and blew up assumptions.
Looter: I do NOT suggest GoHighLevel. If you need a CRM, start with this list of ideal CRMs rather. I use Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re trying to find a sales, marketing, and project management option to GoHighLevel, after that below are a few we recommend.
Backstory: Why I Thought About Switching Over from Keap
To understand what attracted me to GoHighLevel in the first place, you require context regarding my previous configuration. For over 5 years I had actually been gladly depending on Keap (previously Infusionsoft) to fulfill all my customer administration and automation needs.
I located Keap intuitive to utilize and it took care of every little thing I needed– CRM, e-mail marketing, sales funnels, subscription websites, and customer support.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are developed to aid small companies maintain their customers while adding new ones easily. Automate follow-ups with emails and messages, ensuring leads and customers receive the best messages at the correct time. Usage website and social media sites types to streamline lead follow-up, and manage your development with easy appointment scheduling and lead tracking. Boost sales with automated quoting, invoicing, and repayment processing, freeing up your time. With Keap, local business can save 10 hours weekly and increase profits by 39%. Beginning with a 14-day free trial, no credit card required.
Why we like Keap
Keap uses a thorough client relationship monitoring (CRM) and marketing automation remedy tailored for small companies and entrepreneurs. We appreciate Keap’s focus on enhancing sales procedures and supporting consumer partnerships through effective automation devices. The platform’s all-in-one method integrates CRM, email marketing, invoicing, and task administration, making it especially eye-catching for businesses wanting to settle their tech pile.
Generally, it just functioned dependably with marginal difficulty or upkeep required. My open and click-through prices were excellent (like 35% great). Automations ran smoothly without any problems.
So why in the world was I lured to uproot my whole functional foundation from a system that functioned to try something unproven and untested?
In hindsight I can confess I got seduced by the siren call of “shiny item syndrome”. You recognize the feeling: when everyone’s speaking about a brand-new tool that will certainly reinvent your organization … The yard often looks greener on the other side, and I questioned whether GoHighLevel may decrease rubbing points that I ‘d discovered to tolerate throughout the years with Keap.
I resisted at first, however a few even more aggravations led me to believe perhaps it was time for a change.
The Investment: Moving My Firm to GoHighLevel
Earlier this year I determined to take the plunge. I signed up for HighLevel’s Company plan at $297/month, investing dramatically more than the $97/month starter expense.
This wasn’t a decision I ignored. I recognized switching systems was mosting likely to require migrating all my Keap information and essentially reconstructing my entire technology framework from square one utilizing all of the GoHighLevel integrations available.
Right here’s an overview of just some of the initiative needed:
- By hand exporting 20,000+ e-mail subscriber records
- Recreating loads of automations and workflows
- Relocating customer accounts, notes, and task information to the brand-new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe billing integration
- Setting up landing pages, coupons, and sales funnels around again
- Learning a totally international UX and user interface design
All in, I spent around 30-40 laborious hours of configuration job transitioning everything over– in addition to dealing with shed productivity throughout the button.
But eventually, it was a calculated investment I was willing to make. I figured some temporary pain would repay with GoHighLevel offering a better long-lasting remedy for my service, Dripify. Oh just how incorrect I was …
It only took me regarding a month of hands-on usage to understand I had made a big mistake. The concerns began accumulating swiftly, up until it got to a factor I needed to cut my losses and switch back to Keap entirely.
Allow’s go through the horrible troubles I encountered.
Security Issues & Lots of Bugs
Offered GoHighLevel placed itself as an all-in-one automation platform, I took care to meticulously recreate every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These included series for onboarding brand-new email clients, onboarding new customers, automating follow-ups for webinar enrollments, sending out occasion suggestions, managing membership expirations and much more.
Whatever seemed to be operating penalty … till unexpectedly it wasn’t. One early morning, I woke up to find 171 totally unnecessary e-mails had actually been sent out to customers who need to NOT have actually obtained them. This happened three days straight, with a various set of 160 individuals every day.
I anxiously tried troubleshooting and rebuilding the automation from the ground up. However the issue persisted.
When I frantically reached out to their assistance team, they vaguely asserted “web server concerns” were at fault. Yet this description really did not make any feeling, since the mistakes proceeded occurring each early morning like clockwork unconnected to any type of downtime.
In my mind, this enormous failure was totally inappropriate and simply really did not help my service. I have thousands of get in touches with counting on my automated campaigns running smoothly.
So if GoHighLevel was going to be totally undependable, just how could I hand over mission-critical workflows and delicate customer data to their modern technology?
The unintuitive user interface just worsened these issues …
Irritating UX
Originating from Keap where everything was smooth and instinctive, GoHighLevel’s learning contour really felt steep and complicated.
Simple tasks like editing workflows included digging with menu systems that were all over the place. Trick settings were unexplainably scattered in totally different areas. Moving between functions really felt disjointed or confusing.
I’ll inform you what I suggest by speaking about their funnel builder as an instance. There were 3 different setups panels to manage general, individual, and product configurations. Yet for some insane reason, the links to accessibility each of these core settings were expanded on contrary sides of the display. What!?
As someone who values clean, thoughtful style, this seriously frustrated me.
It reinforced that GoHighLevel still felt like a work-in-progress instead of a refined product ready for prime-time use. Their concerns seemed focused on stuffing in every feature imaginable, with poor usability as a second thought.
And speaking of features, I soon understood the low cost tag featured pricey concessions …
Deceptive Pricing GoHighLevel A2P Webinar
Among GoHighLevel’s most significant selling points is the cost effective rate for accessibility to a lot of features. However I rapidly discovered this economical base price was deceptive.
They nickle-and-dimed customers with erratic charges for core capability. Instantly my credit card statements had unclear $10 fees from GoHighLevel here and there.
As it turned out, you get charged every time you send an email with their web servers. So for high volume customers, this amounted to numerous bucks in unexpected costs.
In between these per-email costs and paying extra for deliverability add-ons like Mailgun, my “inexpensive” GoHighLevel subscription wound up costing dramatically greater than my Keap plan.
The reduced price tag was alluring, yet simply not realistic in practice. This bait-and-switch left a bad preference in my mouth.
Email Rates Suffered
The last dealbreaker was seeing my carefully nurtured email open prices drop virtually over night after switching to GoHighLevel.
Formerly, my target market engagement regularly struck 35-40% open rates in Keap month after month. But once I moved their records over to GoHighLevel, performance tanked instantly to a useless 9% open rate.
Despite just how much I enhanced my sending techniques or attempted every fixing method, I might hardly nudge open prices back right into the teenagers– still a 50%+ decline from my previous standards GoHighLevel A2P Webinar.
Let me repeat: my exact same target market and emails unexpectedly had awful engagement. The only thing I can believe that would be triggering this was whatever was occurring behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For an agency so depending on e-mail marketing, this was a big deal.
Between the debilitating deliverability issues, concealed charges, damaged features, and horrible interface, I had ultimately reached my restriction …
Why I Quit GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Just 45 days after moving my agency to GoHighLevel, I recognized I had made a huge mistake. The disadvantages drastically outweighed any advantages.
No software is perfect, however the sheer quantity of issues was beyond appropriate.
At the end of the day, software comes down to depend on. If I can’t trust it to take care of essential features capably or think a supplier has my benefits in mind, after that it’s time to leave– also after investing significant time, money, and initiative migrating.
So I made the challenging call to reverse course and return back to Keap totally just weeks after going done in on GoHighLevel. Let’s explore what I picked up from this ordeal.
Key Takeaways: What I Gained from My GoHighLevel Mistake
My time with HighLevel can be summarized as a pricey accident. Yet in knowledge, it taught me a couple of essential lessons:
- Adhere to what works. Do not disturb what’s functioning unless something is definitively much better across the board. Modification brings threat.
- Vet asserts thoroughly. Marketing buzz around new software program often obscures bigger underlying imperfections. Deep due diligence is essential.
- Choose simpleness over features. Properly designed tools should make your work life simpler, not more challenging and unpleasant.
- Transparency develops trust fund. Opaque pricing, shady reseller terms, and finger-pointing to evade issues destroys trust.
- Look for impartial testimonials. Happy assistance evaluates indicate much less if too much issues indicate bad overall usability.
- Excellence is difficult. No single solution can completely fulfill every distinct company need. Find the least-bad fit.
- Advancement over change. Step-by-step enhancements generally outweigh risky wholesale reinvention of what currently functions penalty.
In other words, I learned to be much more doubtful of “too great to be real” marketing insurance claims and much less attracted by the allure of shiny brand-new things. The tools you make use of daily ought to earn count on with transparency and performance, not slick advertising.