As a company owner for over a years, I rely on software application and automation to enhance procedures and supply outcomes. So when GoHighLevel emerged on the scene couple of years back, it most definitely captured my attention GoHighLevel Appointment Booking.
The idea was attractive– an all-in-one customer monitoring system with marketing, sales, and service devices integrated together. As an entrepreneur constantly looking to simplify and scale my company, it felt like a dream come to life theoretically. That wouldn’t desire a solitary service that does it all?
Yet in this in-depth GoHighLevel evaluation, I’ll take you inside my disastrous journey of trying (and failing) to switch over to this popular new software. You’ll discover:
If you’re thinking about whether GoHighLevel is right for your own business demands, ideally you can pick up from my excruciating errors and inflated assumptions.
Looter: I do NOT suggest GoHighLevel. If you need a CRM, start with this checklist of best CRMs rather. I make use of Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re looking for a sales, marketing, and project administration choice to GoHighLevel, after that below are a couple of we suggest.
Backstory: Why I Considered Switching from Keap
To understand what attracted me to GoHighLevel in the first place, you require context concerning my previous arrangement. For over 5 years I had been gladly relying on Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) to satisfy all my client management and automation demands.
I found Keap instinctive to utilize and it handled every little thing I needed– CRM, e-mail marketing, sales funnels, membership sites, and customer support.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are designed to aid small businesses maintain their customers while including new ones easily. Automate follow-ups with e-mails and messages, making certain leads and clients get the right messages at the correct time. Use site and social media sites kinds to simplify lead follow-up, and manage your development with very easy visit scheduling and lead monitoring. Boost sales with automated pricing estimate, invoicing, and settlement processing, freeing up your time. With Keap, local business can save 10 hours per week and increase earnings by 39%. Begin with a 14-day free trial, no charge card required.
Why we like Keap
Keap provides an extensive consumer connection management (CRM) and marketing automation service tailored for small companies and business owners. We appreciate Keap’s focus on enhancing sales processes and nurturing consumer relationships with effective automation tools. The system’s all-in-one technique integrates CRM, e-mail marketing, invoicing, and task administration, making it especially eye-catching for businesses wanting to combine their tech pile.
Generally, it just functioned dependably with marginal hassle or maintenance required. My open and click-through rates were wonderful (like 35% wonderful). Automations ran smoothly without concerns.
So why in the world was I lured to uproot my entire operational structure from a system that worked to try something unverified and untested?
In knowledge I can confess I obtained seduced by the siren phone call of “glossy item syndrome”. You know the sensation: when everybody’s speaking about a new tool that will certainly transform your organization … The turf often looks greener on the other side, and I questioned whether GoHighLevel might lower rubbing factors that I would certainly discovered to tolerate over the years with Keap.
I stood up to at first, but a couple of more aggravations led me to believe possibly it was time for an adjustment.
The Investment: Moving My Firm to GoHighLevel
Earlier this year I determined to start. I enrolled in HighLevel’s Firm plan at $297/month, spending significantly greater than the $97/month starter expense.
This wasn’t a choice I took lightly. I knew switching systems was mosting likely to require migrating all my Keap data and basically rebuilding my whole technology framework from the ground up using every one of the GoHighLevel integrations readily available.
Here’s an introduction of simply several of the initiative called for:
- By hand exporting 20,000+ e-mail subscriber records
- Recreating lots of automations and workflows
- Moving client profiles, notes, and task information to the brand-new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe invoicing integration
- Setting up landing pages, promotions, and sales funnels all over once more
- Learning an entirely foreign UX and interface design
All in, I invested around 30-40 tiresome hours of configuration work transitioning every little thing over– in addition to handling lost performance throughout the button.
However ultimately, it was a calculated investment I was willing to make. I figured some short-term discomfort would repay with GoHighLevel providing a much better long-term solution for my company, Dripify. Oh exactly how incorrect I was …
It just took me regarding a month of hands-on use to recognize I had actually made a big mistake. The issues started piling up promptly, till it reached a point I needed to reduce my losses and switch over back to Keap completely.
Let’s go through the horrible problems I came across.
Security Issues & Lots of Bugs
Offered GoHighLevel positioned itself as an all-in-one automation system, I took care to diligently recreate every workflow from my old Keap account.
These consisted of sequences for onboarding new email subscribers, onboarding brand-new clients, automating follow-ups for webinar enrollments, sending occasion reminders, handling membership expiries and a lot more.
Everything seemed to be functioning penalty … up until suddenly it wasn’t. One morning, I awoke to find 171 entirely unimportant e-mails had been sent to individuals that need to NOT have actually obtained them. This occurred three days straight, with a different set of 160 people daily.
I desperately attempted troubleshooting and reconstructing the automation from the ground up. But the issue persisted.
When I frantically connected to their support team, they slightly asserted “web server concerns” were at fault. However this explanation really did not make any kind of feeling, since the errors proceeded happening each morning like clockwork unrelated to any downtime.
In my mind, this huge failing was completely unacceptable and just didn’t help my business. I have countless calls depending on my automated campaigns running smoothly.
So if GoHighLevel was mosting likely to be absolutely undependable, exactly how could I turn over mission-critical workflows and delicate customer information to their modern technology?
The unintuitive user interface only intensified these problems …
Irritating UX
Coming from Keap where every little thing was smooth and intuitive, GoHighLevel’s learning curve felt steep and difficult.
Easy jobs like modifying workflows involved digging via menu systems that were all over the place. Trick settings were unexplainably spread in totally different sections. Moving in between functions really felt disjointed or confusing.
I’ll inform you what I suggest by talking about their funnel builder as an example. There were 3 different setups panels to manage overall, individual, and item arrangements. Yet for some insane factor, the links to access each of these core setups were expanded on opposite sides of the display. What!?
As a person that values clean, thoughtful style, this seriously frustrated me.
It enhanced that GoHighLevel still seemed like a work-in-progress rather than a polished product all set for prime-time use. Their priorities seemed concentrated on packing in every feature imaginable, with bad usability as an afterthought.
And talking features, I soon recognized the low cost tag featured pricey concessions …
Deceptive Pricing GoHighLevel Appointment Booking
One of GoHighLevel’s largest selling points is the inexpensive rate for accessibility to many features. But I swiftly learned this cheap base cost was deceitful.
They nickle-and-dimed individuals with erratic charges for core functionality. All of a sudden my bank card statements had vague $10 costs from GoHighLevel here and there.
As it turned out, you get billed whenever you send out an email with their servers. So for high volume users, this amounted to hundreds of bucks in unforeseen expenses.
Between these per-email charges and paying additional for deliverability attachments like Mailgun, my “budget-friendly” GoHighLevel membership ended up setting you back considerably MORE than my Keap plan.
The reduced price tag was appealing, but simply not sensible in practice. This bait-and-switch left a bad preference in my mouth.
Email Fees Suffered
The final dealbreaker was seeing my very carefully supported e-mail open prices plunge practically overnight after changing to GoHighLevel.
Formerly, my audience interaction continually hit 35-40% open rates in Keap month after month. But once I moved their records over to GoHighLevel, performance tanked instantly to a pitiful 9% open price.
Despite how much I enhanced my sending out methods or attempted every troubleshooting trick, I might barely nudge open rates back right into the teenagers– still a 50%+ decrease from my previous standards GoHighLevel Appointment Booking.
Let me repeat: my exact same audience and e-mails unexpectedly had horrible involvement. The only point I can assume that would be causing this was whatever was taking place 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 fees, busted features, and dreadful user interface, I had actually finally reached my restriction …
Why I Give up GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Simply 45 days after moving my agency to GoHighLevel, I understood I had made a massive error. The cons significantly outweighed any type of benefits.
No software is excellent, however the sheer volume of issues was beyond acceptable.
At the end of the day, software program comes down to trust. If I can not trust it to manage vital functions capably or think a vendor has my benefits in mind, after that it’s time to leave– also after investing considerable time, money, and effort migrating.
So I made the tough call to turn around program and return back to Keap totally just weeks after going done in on GoHighLevel. Allow’s explore what I picked up from this fiasco.
Secret Takeaways: What I Picked up from My GoHighLevel Blunder
My time with HighLevel can be summed up as an expensive misadventure. However in hindsight, it educated me a few essential lessons:
- Adhere to what works. Don’t distress what’s working unless something is definitively better across the board. Adjustment brings danger.
- Vet claims completely. Marketing buzz around new software usually obscures bigger underlying problems. Deep due diligence is crucial.
- Select simpleness over features. Properly designed tools ought to make your work life much easier, not much more complex and unpleasant.
- Transparency develops trust. Opaque pricing, questionable reseller terms, and finger-pointing to escape issues damages trust.
- Seek impartial evaluations. Satisfied assistance examines imply less if extreme concerns indicate poor total use.
- Excellence is impossible. No single remedy can perfectly fulfill every one-of-a-kind organization need. Locate the least-bad fit.
- Evolution over change. Incremental renovations typically outweigh high-risk wholesale reinvention of what already works fine.
In other words, I found out to be extra unconvinced of “also great to be real” marketing cases and less lured by the allure of glossy brand-new objects. The tools you utilize daily ought to earn trust fund with transparency and efficiency, not glossy advertising.