As a company owner for over a years, I depend on software program and automation to simplify operations and supply results. So when GoHighLevel emerged on the scene few years back, it most definitely caught my attention GoHighLevel Branded Desktop App.
The idea was enticing– an all-in-one customer management system with marketing, sales, and solution tools incorporated with each other. As a business owner constantly wanting to simplify and scale my service, it seemed like a dream come to life theoretically. Who would not desire a single service that does it all?
However in this thorough GoHighLevel evaluation, I’ll take you inside my dreadful journey of trying (and stopping working) to switch over to this popular new software program. You’ll learn:
If you’re taking into consideration whether GoHighLevel is right for your own business demands, ideally you can pick up from my excruciating blunders and inflated expectations.
Spoiler: I do NOT advise GoHighLevel. If you require a CRM, start with this checklist of ideal 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 right here are a couple of we advise.
Backstory: Why I Considered Changing from Keap
To recognize what attracted me to GoHighLevel in the first place, you need context concerning my previous configuration. For over 5 years I had actually been gladly depending on Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) to fulfill all my client administration and automation requirements.
I found Keap intuitive to utilize and it managed whatever I required– CRM, e-mail marketing, sales funnels, subscription sites, and client assistance.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are designed to help small businesses maintain their clients while adding brand-new ones easily. Automate follow-ups with e-mails and messages, ensuring leads and clients get the appropriate messages at the right time. Use site and social media kinds to enhance lead follow-up, and manage your development with very easy appointment scheduling and lead tracking. Boost sales with automated pricing quote, invoicing, and repayment processing, liberating your time. With Keap, small companies can conserve 10 hours weekly and rise profits by 39%. Beginning with a 14-day free trial, no charge card required.
Why we like Keap
Keap supplies a detailed consumer connection management (CRM) and marketing automation remedy customized for local business and business owners. We value Keap’s focus on streamlining sales procedures and supporting client partnerships through effective automation tools. The system’s all-in-one approach incorporates CRM, email marketing, invoicing, and task monitoring, making it particularly attractive for businesses looking to combine their tech pile.
Generally, it just functioned reliably with minimal difficulty or upkeep required. My open and click-through rates were fantastic (like 35% great). Automations ran efficiently without any concerns.
So why in the world was I lured to uproot my entire operational foundation from a system that worked to try something unproven and untried?
In hindsight I can confess I got seduced by the siren call of “shiny item disorder”. You understand the sensation: when every person’s speaking about a new tool that will transform your service … The yard usually looks greener beyond, and I asked yourself whether GoHighLevel may reduce rubbing factors that I ‘d learned to tolerate over the years with Keap.
I resisted initially, yet a few more irritations led me to assume maybe it was time for an adjustment.
The Financial investment: Migrating My Firm to GoHighLevel
Previously this year I determined to start. I registered for HighLevel’s Company plan at $297/month, investing significantly more than the $97/month starter cost.
This wasn’t a decision I ignored. I recognized switching over systems was going to require migrating all my Keap data and basically rebuilding my whole tech framework from the ground up making use of every one of the GoHighLevel integrations offered.
Here’s an overview of simply several of the initiative needed:
- Manually exporting 20,000+ email subscriber records
- Recreating dozens of automations and workflows
- Relocating customer accounts, notes, and project information to the brand-new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe billing integration
- Setting up landing pages, promotions, and sales funnels all over again
- Learning a totally international UX and interface design
All in, I invested around 30-40 tedious hours of arrangement work transitioning everything over– not to mention managing lost productivity during the button.
However ultimately, it was a computed investment I agreed to make. I figured some temporary discomfort would pay off with GoHighLevel providing a far better lasting option for my company, Dripify. Oh how wrong I was …
It only took me about a month of hands-on usage to realize I had made a big mistake. The problems began accumulating promptly, until it got to a point I had to reduce my losses and switch over back to Keap entirely.
Let’s go through the nightmarish issues I ran into.
Protection Issues & Many Vermin
Offered GoHighLevel positioned itself as an all-in-one automation system, I made sure to thoroughly recreate every workflow from my old Keap account.
These consisted of series for onboarding brand-new email subscribers, onboarding brand-new customers, automating follow-ups for webinar enrollments, sending out occasion suggestions, handling membership expirations and much more.
Every little thing appeared to be functioning penalty … till instantly it had not been. One early morning, I awoke to locate 171 entirely irrelevant emails had actually been sent to customers that should NOT have actually received them. This occurred 3 days in a row, with a various batch of 160 people each day.
I frantically attempted repairing and rebuilding the automation from the ground up. But the trouble continued.
When I frantically reached out to their support group, they vaguely asserted “server problems” were responsible. But this explanation didn’t make any sense, considering that the errors continued happening each early morning like clockwork unrelated to any kind of downtime.
In my mind, this huge failing was entirely undesirable and simply really did not help my organization. I have countless calls depending on my automated campaigns running smoothly.
So if GoHighLevel was mosting likely to be entirely unstable, how could I hand over mission-critical workflows and sensitive customer data to their modern technology?
The unintuitive interface only compounded these problems …
Aggravating UX
Coming from Keap where every little thing was seamless and user-friendly, GoHighLevel’s learning curve felt steep and complex.
Straightforward jobs like editing and enhancing workflows entailed excavating with food selection systems that were all over the place. Trick setups were unexplainably spread in totally various sections. Moving in between features felt disjointed or complicated.
I’ll tell you what I mean by discussing their funnel builder as an instance. There were 3 different settings panels to take care of total, specific, and product setups. Yet for some insane reason, the web links to access each of these core settings were expanded on contrary sides of the screen. What!?
As somebody who values clean, thoughtful design, this seriously annoyed me.
It enhanced that GoHighLevel still felt like a work-in-progress instead of a refined item prepared for prime-time usage. Their priorities seemed concentrated on cramming in every feature under the sun, with inadequate use as an afterthought.
And speaking of features, I quickly recognized the affordable price tag featured costly concessions …
Deceptive Pricing GoHighLevel Branded Desktop App
One of GoHighLevel’s greatest selling factors is the affordable price for accessibility to a lot of features. But I quickly discovered this inexpensive base expense was deceitful.
They nickle-and-dimed individuals with erratic costs for core functionality. Unexpectedly my charge card statements had unclear $10 charges from GoHighLevel occasionally.
As it ended up, you obtain charged each time you send an e-mail with their web servers. So for high quantity individuals, this amounted to hundreds of bucks in unforeseen costs.
Between these per-email costs and paying additional for deliverability add-ons like Mailgun, my “cost effective” GoHighLevel registration wound up costing dramatically greater than my Keap plan.
The reduced sticker price was alluring, yet simply not practical in practice. This bait-and-switch left a negative taste in my mouth.
Email Rates Suffered
The final dealbreaker was seeing my meticulously nurtured e-mail open prices drop nearly overnight after switching to GoHighLevel.
Previously, my target market involvement constantly hit 35-40% open rates in Keap month after month. But once I moved their documents over to GoHighLevel, efficiency tanked instantaneously to a pathetic 9% open rate.
Despite how much I maximized my sending out techniques or tried every fixing method, I can hardly push open rates back into the teens– still a 50%+ decline from my previous standards GoHighLevel Branded Desktop App.
Let me repeat: my exact same audience and e-mails all of a sudden had terrible involvement. The only point I might believe that would be creating 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 concerns, hidden charges, broken features, and horrible user interface, I had actually finally reached my limit …
Why I Give up GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Just 45 days after migrating my company to GoHighLevel, I knew I had made a significant blunder. The cons dramatically surpassed any type of benefits.
No software application is perfect, however the sheer volume of problems was past acceptable.
At the end of the day, software application boils down to trust fund. If I can’t trust it to take care of important functions capably or believe a vendor has my best interests in mind, after that it’s time to walk away– also after spending considerable time, money, and initiative migrating.
So I made the challenging contact us to reverse program and return back to Keap totally just weeks after going all in on GoHighLevel. Let’s explore what I picked up from this ordeal.
Trick Takeaways: What I Gained from My GoHighLevel Error
My time with HighLevel can be summed up as a costly misadventure. But in hindsight, it showed me a couple of essential lessons:
- Stay with what works. Don’t upset what’s functioning unless something is definitively far better across the board. Modification brings threat.
- Veterinarian claims thoroughly. Marketing hype around new software usually obscures larger underlying problems. Deep due diligence is crucial.
- Select simplicity over features. Well-designed devices need to make your job life less complicated, not much more complicated and messy.
- Openness develops count on. Nontransparent pricing, dubious reseller terms, and finger-pointing to escape issues destroys depend on.
- Look for honest testimonials. Happy assistance examines indicate much less if excessive concerns suggest bad general functionality.
- Perfection is impossible. No solitary service can flawlessly fulfill every one-of-a-kind service demand. Find the least-bad fit.
- Advancement over transformation. Step-by-step improvements normally surpass high-risk wholesale reinvention of what already functions fine.
In short, I discovered to be a lot more doubtful of “too good to be true” marketing claims and less attracted by the attraction of shiny brand-new objects. The devices you use daily need to earn trust fund with openness and performance, not slick advertising.