As a firm owner for over a decade, I count on software program and automation to enhance operations and provide outcomes. So when GoHighLevel emerged on the scene couple of years back, it most definitely captured my attention GoHighLevel Awards.
The concept was attractive– an all-in-one customer administration system with marketing, sales, and service tools incorporated with each other. As an entrepreneur constantly looking to simplify and scale my company, it looked like a desire happened theoretically. That wouldn’t want a solitary solution that does it all?
However in this thorough GoHighLevel evaluation, I’ll take you inside my devastating trip of trying (and stopping working) to switch to this preferred brand-new software program. You’ll learn:
If you’re taking into consideration whether GoHighLevel is right for your very own organization requirements, with any luck you can learn from my excruciating errors and inflated assumptions.
Looter: I do NOT recommend GoHighLevel. If you need a CRM, begin with this checklist of ideal CRMs instead. I make use of Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re trying to find a sales, marketing, and project monitoring choice to GoHighLevel, then here are a couple of we advise.
Backstory: Why I Thought About Switching from Keap
To understand what attracted me to GoHighLevel to begin with, you need context concerning my previous arrangement. For over 5 years I had been happily relying on Keap (previously Infusionsoft) to fulfill all my client administration and automation demands.
I located Keap instinctive to make use of and it dealt with everything I required– CRM, e-mail marketing, sales funnels, subscription websites, and client assistance.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are developed to aid small businesses keep their clients while adding new ones easily. Automate follow-ups with e-mails and messages, making certain leads and customers obtain the appropriate messages at the correct time. Usage internet site and social media forms to enhance lead follow-up, and handle your growth with simple appointment scheduling and lead tracking. Boost sales with automated pricing estimate, invoicing, and payment processing, maximizing your time. With Keap, local business can save 10 hours each week and boost income by 39%. Begin with a 14-day free trial, no credit card required.
Why we like Keap
Keap offers a comprehensive consumer partnership monitoring (CRM) and marketing automation solution customized for local business and entrepreneurs. We appreciate Keap’s focus on simplifying sales processes and nurturing client partnerships with powerful automation tools. The system’s all-in-one approach integrates CRM, email marketing, invoicing, and task administration, making it especially eye-catching for services aiming to settle their tech stack.
Generally, it just worked reliably with very little hassle or upkeep needed. My open and click-through rates were wonderful (like 35% terrific). Automations ran efficiently with no issues.
So why in the world was I lured to uproot my whole operational foundation from a system that worked to attempt something unproven and untested?
In knowledge I can admit I obtained attracted by the siren call of “shiny object disorder”. You know the feeling: when everybody’s discussing a brand-new tool that will revolutionize your organization … The grass commonly looks greener on the other side, and I wondered whether GoHighLevel may minimize rubbing points that I ‘d discovered to tolerate for many years with Keap.
I withstood in the beginning, yet a few even more aggravations led me to believe perhaps it was time for a modification.
The Financial investment: Moving My Firm to GoHighLevel
Earlier this year I determined to start. I registered for HighLevel’s Firm plan at $297/month, investing dramatically more than the $97/month starter expense.
This had not been a choice I took lightly. I understood switching over systems was going to require moving all my Keap data and basically restoring my whole tech facilities from the ground up making use of all of the GoHighLevel integrations available.
Right here’s an introduction of just a few of the initiative required:
- By hand exporting 20,000+ e-mail customer documents
- Recreating loads of automations and workflows
- Relocating customer accounts, notes, and job information to the brand-new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe payment integration
- Establishing landing pages, coupons, and sales funnels around once again
- Learning a completely foreign UX and user interface design
Done in, I spent around 30-40 laborious hours of arrangement job transitioning whatever over– not to mention taking care of lost efficiency throughout the switch.
However ultimately, it was a calculated investment I wanted to make. I figured some short-term discomfort would pay off with GoHighLevel offering a far better lasting service for my company, Dripify. Oh just how incorrect I was …
It just took me regarding a month of hands-on usage to understand I had made a big mistake. The issues began piling up promptly, up until it got to a point I needed to reduce my losses and change back to Keap totally.
Allow’s go through the nightmarish problems I experienced.
Safety Issues & Many Bugs
Offered GoHighLevel placed itself as an all-in-one automation system, I made sure to diligently recreate every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These consisted of series for onboarding new e-mail clients, onboarding new customers, automating follow-ups for webinar registrations, sending out event reminders, handling subscription expirations and far more.
Everything appeared to be operating penalty … till suddenly it wasn’t. One early morning, I woke up to locate 171 totally unimportant e-mails had actually been sent out to individuals who should NOT have gotten them. This happened 3 days in a row, with a different set of 160 individuals daily.
I hysterically tried repairing and reconstructing the automation from square one. Yet the issue lingered.
When I seriously reached out to their support group, they vaguely asserted “web server problems” were responsible. But this explanation didn’t make any feeling, considering that the errors continued occurring each early morning like clockwork unconnected to any downtime.
In my mind, this huge failure was totally inappropriate and simply really did not work for my business. I have countless contacts counting on my automated campaigns running efficiently.
So if GoHighLevel was going to be absolutely unreliable, how could I entrust mission-critical workflows and delicate client data to their technology?
The unintuitive user interface just intensified these issues …
Aggravating UX
Originating from Keap where everything was seamless and user-friendly, GoHighLevel’s learning curve felt steep and complicated.
Basic tasks like editing and enhancing workflows involved digging with food selection systems that were all over the place. Secret setups were unexplainably scattered in totally various areas. Relocating between features felt disjointed or complex.
I’ll inform you what I suggest by speaking about their funnel builder as an instance. There were 3 separate settings panels to take care of overall, individual, and product setups. Yet for some crazy reason, the web links to access each of these core settings were spread out on contrary sides of the screen. What!?
As a person who values clean, thoughtful design, this seriously upset me.
It reinforced that GoHighLevel still felt like a work-in-progress as opposed to a polished item all set for prime-time use. Their priorities appeared focused on packing in every feature imaginable, with poor usability as an afterthought.
And speaking of features, I quickly understood the low cost tag came with expensive compromises …
Misleading Pricing GoHighLevel Awards
Among GoHighLevel’s biggest marketing points is the budget-friendly price for access to many features. Yet I quickly discovered this low-cost base cost was deceitful.
They nickle-and-dimed customers with sporadic costs for core performance. Suddenly my charge card declarations had obscure $10 fees from GoHighLevel here and there.
As it turned out, you get charged every single time you send an email with their servers. So for high quantity users, this added up to numerous dollars in unanticipated prices.
Between these per-email costs and paying added for deliverability add-ons like Mailgun, my “affordable” GoHighLevel registration ended up costing dramatically MORE than my Keap plan.
The low price tag was appealing, yet simply not realistic in practice. This bait-and-switch left a negative preference in my mouth.
Email Fees Suffered
The final dealbreaker was seeing my thoroughly supported email open rates drop practically overnight after switching over to GoHighLevel.
Formerly, my target market involvement consistently hit 35-40% open prices in Keap month after month. But once I migrated their records over to GoHighLevel, efficiency tanked instantaneously to a pathetic 9% open price.
No matter how much I maximized my sending out methods or attempted every troubleshooting method, I might barely nudge open rates back into the teenagers– still a 50%+ decline from my previous benchmarks GoHighLevel Awards.
Let me repeat: my exact same target market and e-mails suddenly had terrible engagement. The only thing I could assume that would be causing this was whatever was occurring behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For an agency so based on email marketing, this was a big deal.
Between the crippling deliverability problems, concealed fees, damaged features, and awful interface, I had lastly reached my limitation …
Why I Give up GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Simply 45 days after migrating my agency to GoHighLevel, I understood I had actually made a substantial error. The disadvantages dramatically outweighed any kind of benefits.
No software program is excellent, yet the large quantity of problems was past acceptable.
At the end of the day, software program boils down to count on. If I can’t trust it to manage crucial functions competently or think a supplier has my best interests in mind, after that it’s time to leave– also after spending significant time, cash, and initiative migrating.
So I made the tough call to reverse course and return back to Keap totally just weeks after going all in on GoHighLevel. Allow’s explore what I learned from this fiasco.
Key Takeaways: What I Gained from My GoHighLevel Blunder
My time with HighLevel can be summarized as a pricey misadventure. However in knowledge, it showed me a couple of key lessons:
- Stick to what jobs. Do not distress what’s functioning unless something is definitively better across the board. Adjustment brings threat.
- Veterinarian claims extensively. Marketing buzz around brand-new software program often covers bigger underlying flaws. Deep due persistance is essential.
- Choose simpleness over features. Properly designed tools must make your job life much easier, not much more complex and untidy.
- Transparency develops depend on. Nontransparent pricing, unethical reseller terms, and finger-pointing to evade issues destroys count on.
- Look for objective testimonials. Pleased assistance examines mean much less if excessive problems imply bad total functionality.
- Perfection is impossible. No solitary solution can completely meet every distinct service requirement. Discover the least-bad fit.
- Advancement over revolution. Incremental enhancements usually exceed high-risk wholesale reinvention of what already functions fine.
In other words, I found out to be much more doubtful of “too excellent to be true” marketing insurance claims and much less tempted by the allure of glossy new items. The tools you utilize daily should make trust fund via openness and performance, not glossy advertising.