As a company owner for over a years, I rely upon software application and automation to simplify operations and provide results. So when GoHighLevel emerged on the scene few years back, it most definitely caught my focus GoHighLevel Billing.
The concept was attractive– an all-in-one client monitoring platform with marketing, sales, and solution tools integrated with each other. As an entrepreneur always wanting to simplify and scale my service, it looked like a desire become a reality theoretically. That would not want a solitary remedy that does it all?
However in this thorough GoHighLevel testimonial, I’ll take you inside my disastrous trip of trying (and failing) to change to this popular brand-new software application. You’ll learn:
If you’re thinking about whether GoHighLevel is right for your own organization demands, with any luck you can pick up from my unpleasant errors and blew up expectations.
Looter: I do NOT advise GoHighLevel. If you require a CRM, start with this listing of best CRMs rather. I make use of Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re looking for a sales, marketing, and task monitoring option to GoHighLevel, then right here are a couple of we recommend.
Backstory: Why I Took Into Consideration Switching Over from Keap
To understand what attracted me to GoHighLevel to begin with, you need context regarding my previous configuration. For over 5 years I had actually been gladly relying on Keap (previously Infusionsoft) to satisfy all my client administration and automation requirements.
I located Keap intuitive to make use of and it dealt with everything I required– CRM, e-mail marketing, sales funnels, membership websites, and client assistance.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are designed to help small companies keep their customers while including brand-new ones effortlessly. Automate follow-ups with emails and messages, ensuring leads and customers obtain the ideal messages at the right time. Use website and social media forms to simplify lead follow-up, and handle your development with easy visit scheduling and lead tracking. Boost sales with automated estimating, invoicing, and repayment handling, maximizing your time. With Keap, small companies can save 10 hours per week and rise revenue by 39%. Begin with a 14-day free trial, no charge card called for.
Why we like Keap
Keap supplies a detailed client partnership administration (CRM) and marketing automation option tailored for small businesses and business owners. We appreciate Keap’s focus on simplifying sales procedures and supporting customer connections with effective automation devices. The system’s all-in-one method incorporates CRM, e-mail marketing, invoicing, and task management, making it especially attractive for services aiming to combine their technology pile.
Essentially, it simply functioned reliably with minimal difficulty or upkeep called for. My open and click-through rates were great (like 35% excellent). Automations ran efficiently with no problems.
So why in the world was I lured to uproot my whole functional structure from a system that worked to attempt something unverified and untried?
In knowledge I can confess I got attracted by the alarm call of “glossy things syndrome”. You know the sensation: when everybody’s discussing a brand-new tool that will change your service … The yard typically looks greener on the other side, and I asked yourself whether GoHighLevel might lower rubbing points that I would certainly learned to tolerate for many years with Keap.
I stood up to in the beginning, however a couple of even more frustrations led me to think possibly it was time for a change.
The Investment: Moving My Agency to GoHighLevel
Previously this year I chose to take the plunge. I registered for HighLevel’s Firm plan at $297/month, investing substantially greater than the $97/month starter cost.
This wasn’t a choice I took lightly. I recognized switching platforms was going to require migrating all my Keap information and essentially rebuilding my entire tech facilities from the ground up utilizing every one of the GoHighLevel integrations available.
Below’s an introduction of just a few of the effort needed:
- By hand exporting 20,000+ email customer documents
- Recreating dozens of automations and workflows
- Relocating customer accounts, notes, and project data to the new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe payment integration
- Setting up landing pages, promotions, and sales funnels all over once more
- Learning a completely foreign UX and interface style
All in, I invested around 30-40 laborious hours of arrangement job transitioning whatever over– in addition to dealing with shed efficiency during the switch.
Yet eventually, it was a computed financial investment I wanted to make. I figured some short-term pain would pay off with GoHighLevel providing a far better long-lasting service for my service, Dripify. Oh just how wrong I was …
It just took me regarding a month of hands-on usage to understand I had actually made a large error. The issues started accumulating promptly, till it reached a point I needed to reduce my losses and switch over back to Keap completely.
Let’s go through the nightmarish issues I encountered.
Protection Issues & Numerous Bugs
Provided GoHighLevel positioned itself as an all-in-one automation system, I made sure to carefully recreate each and every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These consisted of sequences for onboarding brand-new e-mail clients, onboarding brand-new customers, automating follow-ups for webinar registrations, sending occasion reminders, handling subscription expirations and much more.
Every little thing seemed to be functioning fine … till suddenly it wasn’t. One early morning, I awoke to locate 171 entirely irrelevant e-mails had actually been sent to individuals that need to NOT have actually obtained them. This occurred 3 days straight, with a different set of 160 people daily.
I hysterically attempted repairing and restoring the automation from square one. However the trouble persisted.
When I seriously connected to their assistance group, they slightly claimed “web server concerns” were at fault. But this explanation really did not make any type of feeling, considering that the errors proceeded happening each early morning like clockwork unconnected to any kind of downtime.
In my mind, this large failure was completely unacceptable and just really did not work for my company. I have thousands of get in touches with depending on my automated campaigns running efficiently.
So if GoHighLevel was going to be completely undependable, just how could I leave mission-critical workflows and sensitive customer data to their innovation?
The unintuitive user interface just compounded these issues …
Frustrating UX
Coming from Keap where everything was smooth and intuitive, GoHighLevel’s learning contour really felt high and complex.
Basic tasks like editing and enhancing workflows included excavating via menu systems that were all over the place. Secret setups were unexplainably scattered in entirely different sections. Moving in between features really felt disjointed or complex.
I’ll inform you what I mean by talking about their funnel builder as an example. There were 3 different setups panels to handle general, specific, and product setups. Yet for some insane factor, the links to gain access to each of these core settings were spread out on opposite sides of the display. What!?
As someone that values tidy, thoughtful layout, this seriously frustrated me.
It enhanced that GoHighLevel still felt like a work-in-progress rather than a sleek item all set for prime-time use. Their priorities seemed focused on cramming in every feature under the sun, with bad use as an afterthought.
And speaking of features, I soon realized the low cost tag included costly concessions …
Misleading Pricing GoHighLevel Billing
Among GoHighLevel’s most significant selling points is the affordable rate for access to many features. Yet I quickly discovered this economical base cost was misleading.
They nickle-and-dimed customers with occasional costs for core capability. Suddenly my bank card statements had unclear $10 fees from GoHighLevel occasionally.
As it ended up, you obtain billed every time you send out an e-mail via their web servers. So for high volume individuals, this added up to numerous bucks in unforeseen costs.
In between these per-email costs and paying extra for deliverability add-ons like Mailgun, my “budget friendly” GoHighLevel membership ended up setting you back dramatically MORE than my Keap plan.
The low price tag was appealing, yet simply not sensible in practice. This bait-and-switch left a poor taste in my mouth.
Email Rates Suffered
The final dealbreaker was seeing my meticulously supported e-mail open prices drop virtually over night after switching to GoHighLevel.
Formerly, my target market involvement consistently hit 35-40% open prices in Keap month after month. But once I moved their documents over to GoHighLevel, efficiency tanked promptly to a useless 9% open rate.
No matter how much I enhanced my sending techniques or tried every fixing method, I might barely push open rates back into the teens– still a 50%+ decrease from my previous criteria GoHighLevel Billing.
Let me repeat: my exact same audience and e-mails suddenly had awful engagement. The only point I can believe that would be triggering this was whatever was happening behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a firm so depending on email marketing, this was a big deal.
Between the debilitating deliverability issues, concealed fees, broken features, and horrible user interface, I had actually finally reached my limit …
Why I Stop GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Just 45 days after migrating my company to GoHighLevel, I understood I had actually made a significant error. The cons considerably exceeded any kind of advantages.
No software is perfect, however the sheer volume of issues was past acceptable.
At the end of the day, software application comes down to count on. If I can not trust it to handle essential functions capably or think a supplier has my benefits in mind, after that it’s time to walk away– even after spending considerable time, money, and effort migrating.
So I made the tough contact us to turn around training course and return back to Keap completely simply weeks after going all in on GoHighLevel. Let’s discover what I gained from this debacle.
Secret Takeaways: What I Learned From My GoHighLevel Blunder
My time with HighLevel can be summed up as a pricey ill fortune. But in hindsight, it taught me a few vital lessons:
- Stay with what works. Do not disturb what’s functioning unless something is definitively far better across the board. Change brings danger.
- Veterinarian asserts completely. Marketing buzz around new software often obscures bigger underlying problems. Deep due persistance is vital.
- Choose simpleness over features. Properly designed devices need to make your job life simpler, not more challenging and messy.
- Openness builds trust fund. Opaque pricing, shady reseller terms, and finger-pointing to avert issues destroys trust.
- Look for impartial reviews. Delighted assistance evaluates suggest less if extreme problems imply poor overall usability.
- Excellence is difficult. No single solution can completely satisfy every unique company demand. Locate the least-bad fit.
- Evolution over revolution. Step-by-step renovations typically exceed high-risk wholesale reinvention of what currently works penalty.
Basically, I learned to be a lot more unconvinced of “as well good to be true” marketing cases and less lured by the allure of glossy brand-new things. The tools you use daily need to gain count on via openness and efficiency, not glossy advertising.