As a company proprietor for over a decade, I depend on software and automation to enhance operations and supply results. So when GoHighLevel arised on the scene few years back, it definitely caught my attention GoHighLevel Automatic Taxes.
The concept was appealing– an all-in-one client monitoring platform with marketing, sales, and service tools integrated together. As an entrepreneur constantly aiming to simplify and scale my business, it looked like a desire come to life on paper. Who wouldn’t want a single remedy that does it all?
However in this comprehensive GoHighLevel evaluation, I’ll take you inside my devastating journey of trying (and falling short) to change to this preferred brand-new software. You’ll learn:
If you’re thinking about whether GoHighLevel is right for your own organization needs, hopefully you can pick up from my unpleasant errors and pumped up expectations.
Looter: I do NOT advise GoHighLevel. If you require a CRM, start with this list of ideal CRMs instead. I utilize Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re trying to find a sales, marketing, and project monitoring choice to GoHighLevel, after that below are a couple of we recommend.
Backstory: Why I Thought About Switching Over from Keap
To understand what attracted me to GoHighLevel to begin with, you require context regarding my previous setup. For over 5 years I had been gladly counting on Keap (previously Infusionsoft) to fulfill all my customer monitoring and automation requirements.
I discovered Keap intuitive to utilize and it handled everything I needed– CRM, e-mail marketing, sales funnels, subscription websites, and customer assistance.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are designed to assist small companies keep their clients while including brand-new ones effortlessly. Automate follow-ups with e-mails and texts, ensuring leads and clients get the right messages at the right time. Usage internet site and social media forms to simplify lead follow-up, and manage your growth with simple appointment scheduling and lead tracking. Boost sales with automated estimating, invoicing, and repayment processing, liberating your time. With Keap, local business can save 10 hours per week and increase earnings by 39%. Beginning with a 14-day free trial, no charge card needed.
Why we like Keap
Keap provides a thorough consumer connection management (CRM) and marketing automation service tailored for small companies and entrepreneurs. We value Keap’s focus on simplifying sales processes and nurturing consumer partnerships via effective automation tools. The platform’s all-in-one strategy integrates CRM, email marketing, invoicing, and task monitoring, making it especially attractive for organizations wanting to combine their technology stack.
For the most part, it simply worked dependably with minimal hassle or maintenance called for. My open and click-through prices were great (like 35% terrific). Automations ran smoothly without any concerns.
So why in the world was I tempted to uproot my whole operational structure from a system that worked to try something unproven and untested?
In hindsight I can admit I obtained seduced by the alarm phone call of “shiny item disorder”. You understand the feeling: when everyone’s talking about a brand-new tool that will certainly reinvent your business … The grass often looks greener on the other side, and I questioned whether GoHighLevel might lower friction points that I ‘d learned to endure over the years with Keap.
I resisted in the beginning, however a few even more irritations led me to believe possibly it was time for a modification.
The Investment: Moving My Agency to GoHighLevel
Earlier this year I decided to take the plunge. I enrolled in HighLevel’s Firm plan at $297/month, spending substantially more than the $97/month starter price.
This had not been a choice I ignored. I recognized switching platforms was mosting likely to require moving all my Keap data and basically restoring my whole tech framework from square one utilizing all of the GoHighLevel integrations offered.
Below’s a review of just several of the effort required:
- Manually exporting 20,000+ e-mail customer records
- Recreating dozens of automations and workflows
- Relocating customer profiles, notes, and task data to the new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe billing integration
- Setting up landing pages, promotions, and sales funnels throughout once more
- Learning a completely foreign UX and user interface design
All in, I spent around 30-40 tiresome hours of setup job transitioning every little thing over– in addition to dealing with shed productivity throughout the switch.
Yet eventually, it was a calculated financial investment I was willing to make. I figured some temporary discomfort would repay with GoHighLevel supplying a much better lasting remedy for my business, Dripify. Oh exactly how incorrect I was …
It only took me about a month of hands-on usage to realize I had actually made a large blunder. The problems began piling up rapidly, till it got to a point I had to cut my losses and change back to Keap entirely.
Allow’s walk through the nightmarish problems I experienced.
Security Issues & Many Vermin
Offered GoHighLevel placed itself as an all-in-one automation system, I took care to thoroughly recreate each and every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These consisted of sequences for onboarding brand-new e-mail customers, onboarding brand-new clients, automating follow-ups for webinar registrations, sending out occasion reminders, handling membership expiries and far more.
Every little thing appeared to be working fine … until unexpectedly it wasn’t. One early morning, I awoke to find 171 totally unnecessary e-mails had been sent to individuals who ought to NOT have obtained them. This happened three days in a row, with a various batch of 160 individuals daily.
I frantically attempted troubleshooting and restoring the automation from the ground up. However the issue lingered.
When I frantically reached out to their support team, they vaguely claimed “server issues” were to blame. However this description didn’t make any type of sense, since the errors proceeded taking place each morning like clockwork unassociated to any kind of downtime.
In my mind, this huge failure was entirely inappropriate and just really did not benefit my company. I have hundreds of get in touches with relying on my automated campaigns running efficiently.
So if GoHighLevel was mosting likely to be completely unstable, exactly how could I leave mission-critical workflows and sensitive customer information to their modern technology?
The unintuitive interface only worsened these problems …
Irritating UX
Originating from Keap where every little thing was smooth and instinctive, GoHighLevel’s learning contour really felt steep and difficult.
Easy jobs like modifying workflows involved excavating via menu systems that were all over the place. Key settings were unexplainably spread in completely different sections. Relocating in between features felt disjointed or complicated.
I’ll inform you what I imply by discussing their funnel builder as an instance. There were 3 separate settings panels to manage overall, specific, and product arrangements. Yet for some insane reason, the web links to access each of these core setups were expanded on opposite sides of the screen. What!?
As somebody that values clean, thoughtful style, this seriously frustrated me.
It strengthened that GoHighLevel still seemed like a work-in-progress instead of a sleek product all set for prime-time usage. Their concerns seemed concentrated on stuffing in every feature under the sun, with bad functionality as a second thought.
And speaking of features, I soon understood the small cost tag featured expensive compromises …
Misleading Pricing GoHighLevel Automatic Taxes
One of GoHighLevel’s biggest selling points is the economical price for accessibility to many features. But I quickly learned this inexpensive base expense was deceptive.
They nickle-and-dimed customers with occasional costs for core performance. All of a sudden my bank card declarations had obscure $10 costs from GoHighLevel here and there.
As it turned out, you get billed whenever you send out an e-mail via their servers. So for high volume customers, this amounted to numerous dollars in unexpected expenses.
In between these per-email charges and paying extra for deliverability add-ons like Mailgun, my “budget friendly” GoHighLevel membership ended up setting you back significantly greater than my Keap plan.
The reduced price tag was tempting, but simply not reasonable in practice. This bait-and-switch left a negative taste in my mouth.
Email Rates Suffered
The last dealbreaker was seeing my very carefully supported e-mail open prices drop virtually over night after changing to GoHighLevel.
Previously, my target market involvement consistently struck 35-40% open prices in Keap month after month. But once I moved their documents over to GoHighLevel, efficiency tanked quickly to a useless 9% open price.
No matter how much I optimized my sending out practices or tried every fixing trick, I can barely push open rates back right into the teenagers– still a 50%+ decline from my previous criteria GoHighLevel Automatic Taxes.
Let me repeat: my exact same audience and e-mails unexpectedly had horrible involvement. The only thing I could assume that would be causing this was whatever was occurring behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a company so based on e-mail marketing, this was a big deal.
In between the crippling deliverability problems, concealed fees, busted features, and terrible interface, I had actually finally reached my restriction …
Why I Stop GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Simply 45 days after moving my agency to GoHighLevel, I recognized I had actually made a big error. The disadvantages drastically exceeded any kind of benefits.
No software application is ideal, but the sheer quantity of troubles was beyond appropriate.
At the end of the day, software boils down to depend on. If I can’t trust it to handle essential functions effectively or think a vendor has my best interests in mind, then it’s time to leave– also after investing substantial time, cash, and initiative migrating.
So I made the difficult call to reverse program and return back to Keap completely just weeks after going done in on GoHighLevel. Allow’s discover what I learned from this fiasco.
Trick Takeaways: What I Learned From My GoHighLevel Mistake
My time with HighLevel can be summarized as a costly accident. But in knowledge, it educated me a few essential lessons:
- Adhere to what jobs. Do not distress what’s working unless something is definitively better across the board. Modification brings threat.
- Veterinarian asserts extensively. Marketing buzz around new software often covers bigger underlying defects. Deep due persistance is necessary.
- Choose simplicity over features. Properly designed devices should make your work life simpler, not a lot more complex and untidy.
- Transparency develops depend on. Opaque pricing, unethical reseller terms, and finger-pointing to escape issues destroys count on.
- Seek objective reviews. Pleased support examines suggest less if extreme concerns indicate bad general functionality.
- Excellence is difficult. No single remedy can perfectly satisfy every one-of-a-kind service requirement. Locate the least-bad fit.
- Advancement over change. Incremental enhancements usually exceed high-risk wholesale reinvention of what currently functions fine.
In other words, I discovered to be extra cynical of “also excellent to be true” marketing claims and less lured by the attraction of glossy brand-new things. The devices you use daily should make trust through transparency and efficiency, not glossy advertising.