As a firm proprietor for over a years, I rely on software program and automation to enhance procedures and supply results. So when GoHighLevel emerged on the scene few years back, it definitely captured my attention GoHighLevel Booking.
The idea was attractive– an all-in-one client monitoring system with marketing, sales, and service devices integrated together. As an entrepreneur always wanting to simplify and scale my company, it felt like a desire come true on paper. Who would not want a single remedy that does it all?
Yet in this extensive GoHighLevel review, I’ll take you inside my disastrous journey of trying (and stopping working) to switch over to this popular brand-new software. You’ll find out:
If you’re thinking about whether GoHighLevel is right for your very own company needs, ideally you can gain from my painful errors and blew up assumptions.
Spoiler: I do NOT suggest GoHighLevel. If you require a CRM, start with this listing of finest CRMs instead. I make use of Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re looking for a sales, marketing, and job monitoring alternative to GoHighLevel, after that here are a few we advise.
Backstory: Why I Thought About Switching Over from Keap
To recognize what attracted me to GoHighLevel to begin with, you need context regarding my previous arrangement. For over 5 years I had been happily counting on Keap (previously Infusionsoft) to fulfill all my customer administration and automation demands.
I discovered Keap intuitive to utilize and it dealt with everything I needed– CRM, email marketing, sales funnels, membership sites, and customer support.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are made to aid small businesses maintain their clients while adding brand-new ones easily. Automate follow-ups with e-mails and messages, making sure leads and customers get the appropriate messages at the right time. Use web site and social networks kinds to improve 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, liberating your time. With Keap, small companies can conserve 10 hours each week and increase earnings by 39%. Begin with a 14-day free trial, no bank card needed.
Why we like Keap
Keap offers an extensive consumer connection management (CRM) and marketing automation option tailored for small businesses and business owners. We appreciate Keap’s concentrate on simplifying sales procedures and supporting client partnerships via powerful automation devices. The system’s all-in-one strategy integrates CRM, e-mail marketing, invoicing, and task management, making it especially appealing for companies wanting to consolidate their technology stack.
For the most part, it just worked accurately with marginal fuss or upkeep needed. My open and click-through rates were excellent (like 35% fantastic). Automations ran smoothly with no problems.
So why in the world was I lured to uproot my entire functional foundation from a system that functioned to attempt something unproven and untried?
In hindsight I can confess I got seduced by the siren phone call of “glossy things syndrome”. You know the sensation: when everyone’s speaking about a brand-new tool that will certainly reinvent your business … The turf commonly looks greener beyond, and I asked yourself whether GoHighLevel might lower friction points that I ‘d found out to tolerate for many years with Keap.
I stood up to in the beginning, yet a few even more frustrations led me to assume perhaps it was time for a change.
The Financial investment: Moving My Firm to GoHighLevel
Previously this year I decided to start. I signed up for HighLevel’s Company plan at $297/month, spending significantly more than the $97/month starter expense.
This had not been a choice I took lightly. I understood switching over platforms was going to require moving all my Keap data and basically rebuilding my entire technology infrastructure from scratch utilizing every one of the GoHighLevel integrations readily available.
Here’s a review of just several of the effort called for:
- Manually exporting 20,000+ email customer documents
- Recreating dozens of automations and workflows
- Relocating client profiles, notes, and project information to the brand-new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe invoicing integration
- Setting up landing pages, discounts, and sales funnels all over once more
- Learning an entirely international UX and interface style
Done in, I spent around 30-40 tiresome hours of arrangement job transitioning whatever over– not to mention taking care of lost performance throughout the switch.
Yet eventually, it was a calculated investment I wanted to make. I figured some temporary discomfort would repay with GoHighLevel offering a much better lasting solution for my organization, Dripify. Oh how wrong I was …
It only took me concerning a month of hands-on usage to recognize I had actually made a huge error. The problems began accumulating promptly, until it reached a factor I needed to reduce my losses and change back to Keap entirely.
Allow’s walk through the nightmarish issues I came across.
Security Issues & Several Bugs
Given GoHighLevel positioned itself as an all-in-one automation system, I made sure to diligently recreate each and every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These consisted of sequences for onboarding brand-new email customers, onboarding new clients, automating follow-ups for webinar registrations, sending occasion pointers, managing subscription expiries and a lot more.
Whatever seemed to be working penalty … till unexpectedly it wasn’t. One early morning, I woke up to discover 171 completely unnecessary e-mails had been sent to users who ought to NOT have actually gotten them. This took place three days in a row, with a various set of 160 people every day.
I hysterically tried troubleshooting and rebuilding the automation from square one. Yet the problem continued.
When I frantically reached out to their support team, they slightly claimed “web server issues” were to blame. However this description didn’t make any sense, because the mistakes continued taking place each early morning like clockwork unrelated to any kind of downtime.
In my mind, this huge failing was completely inappropriate and just didn’t work for my business. I have hundreds of get in touches with relying upon my automated campaigns running efficiently.
So if GoHighLevel was mosting likely to be totally unreliable, just how could I entrust mission-critical workflows and delicate customer data to their innovation?
The unintuitive user interface only worsened these issues …
Discouraging UX
Coming from Keap where everything was smooth and instinctive, GoHighLevel’s learning curve really felt steep and difficult.
Basic tasks like editing and enhancing workflows involved digging with food selection systems that were all over the place. Key settings were unexplainably spread in completely different areas. Relocating in between features felt disjointed or complicated.
I’ll inform you what I imply by talking about their funnel builder as an instance. There were 3 different settings panels to handle total, specific, and product configurations. Yet for some insane factor, the links to gain access to each of these core setups were expanded on opposite sides of the display. What!?
As a person that values clean, thoughtful style, this seriously upset me.
It enhanced that GoHighLevel still felt like a work-in-progress rather than a refined item prepared for prime-time use. Their top priorities appeared concentrated on cramming in every feature under the sun, with bad usability as an afterthought.
And talking features, I quickly recognized the small cost tag came with expensive concessions …
Misleading Pricing GoHighLevel Booking
Among GoHighLevel’s largest marketing points is the affordable cost for access to a lot of features. Yet I quickly learned this economical base price was deceptive.
They nickle-and-dimed customers with erratic costs for core performance. Suddenly my bank card declarations had obscure $10 fees from GoHighLevel occasionally.
As it turned out, you get billed every time you send out an e-mail via their web servers. So for high volume customers, this amounted to thousands of bucks in unforeseen prices.
Between these per-email fees and paying extra for deliverability add-ons like Mailgun, my “budget-friendly” GoHighLevel membership wound up costing dramatically MORE than my Keap plan.
The reduced price tag was alluring, yet simply not reasonable in practice. This bait-and-switch left a negative taste in my mouth.
Email Rates Suffered
The final dealbreaker was seeing my carefully supported e-mail open rates drop almost overnight after switching to GoHighLevel.
Formerly, my target market involvement regularly hit 35-40% open prices in Keap month after month. Once I migrated their documents over to GoHighLevel, performance tanked immediately to a pathetic 9% open price.
Regardless of how much I maximized my sending practices or tried every repairing technique, I can barely push open rates back right into the teenagers– still a 50%+ decline from my previous standards GoHighLevel Booking.
Let me repeat: my exact same target market and e-mails all of a sudden had horrible interaction. The only point I can believe that would certainly be creating this was whatever was occurring behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a firm so depending on e-mail marketing, this was a big deal.
In between the crippling deliverability concerns, concealed costs, busted features, and awful interface, I had ultimately reached my restriction …
Why I Stop GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Simply 45 days after moving my agency to GoHighLevel, I knew I had made a significant error. The cons considerably surpassed any type of advantages.
No software program is perfect, however the large quantity of issues was beyond appropriate.
At the end of the day, software program boils down to trust. If I can not trust it to manage crucial functions effectively or believe a vendor has my best interests in mind, after that it’s time to leave– also after investing considerable time, money, and effort migrating.
So I made the difficult phone call to turn around course and return back to Keap entirely simply weeks after going done in on GoHighLevel. Allow’s discover what I gained from this debacle.
Secret Takeaways: What I Gained from My GoHighLevel Blunder
My time with HighLevel can be summed up as a costly misadventure. However in knowledge, it showed me a few crucial lessons:
- Stick to what jobs. Do not upset what’s working unless something is definitively better across the board. Change brings risk.
- Vet claims thoroughly. Marketing buzz around new software application commonly covers bigger underlying imperfections. Deep due persistance is necessary.
- Pick simpleness over features. Well-designed tools need to make your work life much easier, not extra complex and messy.
- Openness builds depend on. Opaque pricing, shady reseller terms, and finger-pointing to evade problems damages trust fund.
- Seek impartial evaluations. Happy assistance evaluates suggest less if excessive problems suggest inadequate overall functionality.
- Perfection is impossible. No single service can flawlessly fulfill every unique organization demand. Locate the least-bad fit.
- Evolution over revolution. Step-by-step enhancements typically outweigh high-risk wholesale reinvention of what already functions penalty.
In short, I found out to be much more cynical of “as well good to be real” marketing insurance claims and much less attracted by the attraction of glossy brand-new items. The tools you utilize daily must gain depend on through openness and performance, not glossy advertising.