As a company owner for over a decade, I rely upon software 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 Benefits.
The idea was attractive– an all-in-one client monitoring platform with marketing, sales, and service tools integrated together. As an entrepreneur constantly looking to streamline and scale my company, it appeared like a dream come to life on paper. Who wouldn’t desire a single service that does it all?
However in this in-depth GoHighLevel testimonial, I’ll take you inside my tragic trip of attempting (and falling short) to change to this preferred new software application. You’ll discover:
If you’re thinking about whether GoHighLevel is right for your very own organization needs, hopefully you can gain from my unpleasant errors and pumped up expectations.
Spoiler: I do NOT suggest GoHighLevel. If you require a CRM, begin with this listing of ideal CRMs instead. I utilize Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re trying to find a sales, marketing, and project administration option to GoHighLevel, then here are a couple of we recommend.
Backstory: Why I Took Into Consideration Switching Over from Keap
To comprehend what attracted me to GoHighLevel in the first place, you need context concerning my previous arrangement. For over 5 years I had actually been happily relying on Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) to satisfy all my customer administration and automation demands.
I found Keap intuitive to utilize and it handled every little thing I needed– CRM, e-mail marketing, sales funnels, membership websites, and client support.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are made to help small companies keep their clients while adding brand-new ones effortlessly. Automate follow-ups with emails and messages, guaranteeing leads and clients obtain the ideal messages at the correct time. Use website and social networks kinds to enhance lead follow-up, and manage your growth with easy visit organizing and lead tracking. Boost sales with automated quoting, invoicing, and settlement handling, maximizing your time. With Keap, small businesses can conserve 10 hours each week and increase revenue by 39%. Start with a 14-day free trial, no charge card required.
Why we like Keap
Keap offers an extensive customer partnership monitoring (CRM) and marketing automation service tailored for local business and business owners. We value Keap’s concentrate on enhancing sales processes and supporting client connections via effective automation tools. The system’s all-in-one method combines CRM, e-mail marketing, invoicing, and job administration, making it especially eye-catching for services seeking to settle their technology pile.
Essentially, it simply functioned dependably with marginal difficulty or upkeep required. My open and click-through prices were excellent (like 35% great). Automations ran efficiently with no issues.
So why in the world was I attracted to uproot my whole functional foundation from a system that functioned to try something unverified and untested?
In hindsight I can confess I obtained seduced by the siren call of “glossy object syndrome”. You recognize the sensation: when everyone’s speaking about a new tool that will revolutionize your business … The yard often looks greener on the other side, and I asked yourself whether GoHighLevel could minimize friction factors that I would certainly discovered to endure over the years with Keap.
I withstood initially, but a few more stress led me to assume possibly it was time for a modification.
The Investment: Moving My Firm to GoHighLevel
Earlier this year I decided to start. I registered for HighLevel’s Agency plan at $297/month, investing considerably more than the $97/month starter price.
This wasn’t a decision I took lightly. I knew switching over platforms was mosting likely to need migrating all my Keap information and basically restoring my entire technology framework from scratch making use of all of the GoHighLevel integrations offered.
Below’s an overview of just several of the effort called for:
- Manually exporting 20,000+ email subscriber records
- Recreating loads of automations and workflows
- Relocating client accounts, notes, and job data to the brand-new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe billing integration
- Setting up landing pages, coupons, and sales funnels around once again
- Learning a completely international UX and interface layout
Done in, I invested around 30-40 tedious hours of setup job transitioning everything over– as well as taking care of shed productivity throughout the button.
Yet eventually, it was a calculated financial investment I was willing to make. I figured some short-term discomfort would pay off with GoHighLevel giving a better lasting service for my company, Dripify. Oh exactly how wrong I was …
It only took me regarding a month of hands-on usage to recognize I had actually made a huge error. The issues started piling up rapidly, till it reached a point I had to reduce my losses and switch back to Keap entirely.
Allow’s walk through the nightmarish problems I experienced.
Safety And Security Issues & Lots of Vermin
Offered GoHighLevel positioned itself as an all-in-one automation platform, I made sure to carefully recreate each and every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These consisted of sequences for onboarding new e-mail subscribers, onboarding brand-new customers, automating follow-ups for webinar enrollments, sending out event reminders, taking care of subscription expirations and far more.
Every little thing seemed to be operating fine … until suddenly it had not been. One early morning, I awoke to discover 171 entirely pointless e-mails had actually been sent to individuals who need to NOT have actually gotten them. This occurred three days in a row, with a different set of 160 individuals daily.
I desperately attempted fixing and rebuilding the automation from square one. Yet the trouble continued.
When I desperately reached out to their assistance team, they slightly asserted “web server issues” were at fault. But this explanation didn’t make any feeling, given that the mistakes continued happening each morning like clockwork unassociated to any type of downtime.
In my mind, this huge failing was entirely unacceptable and simply really did not help my business. I have hundreds of get in touches with counting on my automated campaigns running efficiently.
So if GoHighLevel was mosting likely to be absolutely unstable, how could I hand over mission-critical workflows and sensitive client information to their modern technology?
The unintuitive interface only compounded these problems …
Discouraging UX
Originating from Keap where everything was smooth and instinctive, GoHighLevel’s learning curve felt steep and difficult.
Straightforward jobs like editing workflows entailed excavating with food selection systems that were all over the place. Trick settings were unexplainably spread in absolutely different sections. Moving in between functions felt disjointed or confusing.
I’ll tell you what I suggest by discussing their funnel builder as an instance. There were 3 different setups panels to manage total, specific, and product setups. Yet for some crazy reason, the links to gain access to each of these core settings were expanded on opposite sides of the screen. What!?
As someone that values clean, thoughtful design, this seriously irritated me.
It reinforced that GoHighLevel still seemed like a work-in-progress rather than a sleek item prepared for prime-time use. Their top priorities seemed focused on packing in every feature under the sun, with poor usability as an afterthought.
And talking features, I quickly understood the low cost tag came with expensive compromises …
Misleading Pricing GoHighLevel Benefits
Among GoHighLevel’s most significant selling points is the budget friendly rate for accessibility to a lot of features. However I promptly discovered this low-cost base price was deceitful.
They nickle-and-dimed users with occasional costs for core performance. Instantly my bank card declarations had vague $10 charges from GoHighLevel here and there.
As it ended up, you obtain charged each time you send an e-mail with their web servers. So for high quantity users, this added up to numerous bucks in unforeseen costs.
In between these per-email costs and paying extra for deliverability attachments like Mailgun, my “economical” GoHighLevel subscription ended up setting you back substantially greater than my Keap plan.
The reduced sticker price was alluring, yet just not practical in practice. This bait-and-switch left a negative taste in my mouth.
Email Rates Suffered
The last dealbreaker was seeing my carefully nurtured e-mail open prices plummet practically over night after switching over to GoHighLevel.
Previously, my audience involvement constantly struck 35-40% open prices in Keap month after month. But once I moved their records over to GoHighLevel, efficiency tanked instantaneously to a pitiful 9% open rate.
No matter how much I optimized my sending techniques or attempted every repairing method, I can hardly nudge open rates back right into the teenagers– still a 50%+ decline from my previous standards GoHighLevel Benefits.
Let me repeat: my exact same target market and e-mails instantly had terrible involvement. The only thing I can assume that would be causing this was whatever was happening behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a company so dependent on email marketing, this was a big deal.
In between the debilitating deliverability concerns, hidden fees, busted features, and terrible interface, I had finally reached my limit …
Why I Quit GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Just 45 days after migrating my agency to GoHighLevel, I understood I had actually made a huge error. The cons substantially exceeded any kind of benefits.
No software is excellent, yet the large volume of troubles was past acceptable.
At the end of the day, software application comes down to trust. If I can’t trust it to deal with important features competently or believe a supplier has my best interests in mind, then it’s time to walk away– also after investing considerable time, money, and effort moving.
So I made the tough phone call to turn around program and return back to Keap completely just weeks after going done in on GoHighLevel. Let’s discover what I learned from this debacle.
Secret Takeaways: What I Learned From My GoHighLevel Blunder
My time with HighLevel can be summed up as a costly accident. However in hindsight, it taught me a few essential lessons:
- Stay with what jobs. Do not distress what’s functioning unless something is definitively much better across the board. Modification brings threat.
- Vet declares thoroughly. Marketing buzz around new software usually covers bigger underlying flaws. Deep due persistance is crucial.
- Pick simplicity over features. Properly designed devices need to make your work life simpler, not more difficult and messy.
- Openness develops trust. Nontransparent pricing, shady reseller terms, and finger-pointing to evade troubles damages trust fund.
- Seek unbiased testimonials. Pleased support reviews suggest less if too much issues indicate poor overall use.
- Excellence is impossible. No solitary option can completely satisfy every special service demand. Discover the least-bad fit.
- Evolution over revolution. Step-by-step enhancements generally exceed dangerous wholesale reinvention of what currently functions fine.
In other words, I found out to be much more skeptical of “too good to be real” marketing insurance claims and much less tempted by the attraction of shiny new items. The tools you make use of daily need to earn trust through transparency and efficiency, not slick advertising.