As a firm owner for over a decade, I count on software application and automation to streamline procedures and deliver outcomes. So when GoHighLevel arised on the scene few years back, it absolutely captured my interest GoHighLevel Bulk Requests.
The concept was attractive– an all-in-one customer administration system with marketing, sales, and service devices incorporated together. As an entrepreneur always looking to simplify and scale my company, it seemed like a desire happened theoretically. Who wouldn’t want a solitary remedy that does it all?
Yet in this in-depth GoHighLevel testimonial, I’ll take you inside my devastating journey of attempting (and failing) to change to this popular brand-new software. You’ll find out:
If you’re considering whether GoHighLevel is right for your own organization demands, hopefully you can learn from my painful blunders and inflated assumptions.
Looter: I do NOT recommend 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 trying to find a sales, marketing, and task management alternative to GoHighLevel, after that right here are a few we suggest.
Backstory: Why I Took Into Consideration Switching Over from Keap
To understand what attracted me to GoHighLevel in the first place, you require context concerning my previous setup. For over 5 years I had been happily counting on Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) to satisfy all my customer monitoring and automation requirements.
I located Keap intuitive to utilize and it managed every little thing I needed– CRM, e-mail marketing, sales funnels, subscription sites, and client assistance.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are designed to assist local business keep their customers while including new ones easily. Automate follow-ups with emails and texts, ensuring leads and clients obtain the right messages at the right time. Use website and social networks forms to enhance lead follow-up, and handle your growth with easy consultation scheduling and lead monitoring. Boost sales with automated pricing estimate, invoicing, and payment processing, freeing up your time. With Keap, local business can save 10 hours weekly and increase revenue by 39%. Start with a 14-day free trial, no bank card called for.
Why we like Keap
Keap provides an extensive consumer partnership monitoring (CRM) and marketing automation service tailored for small businesses and business owners. We appreciate Keap’s concentrate on improving sales processes and nurturing client relationships via powerful automation devices. The platform’s all-in-one method combines CRM, email marketing, invoicing, and job monitoring, making it particularly attractive for companies aiming to settle their tech pile.
Generally, it simply worked dependably with marginal hassle or maintenance needed. My open and click-through rates were wonderful (like 35% terrific). Automations ran efficiently without any problems.
So why on earth was I lured to uproot my whole functional foundation from a system that functioned to attempt something unverified and untried?
In hindsight I can confess I obtained seduced by the alarm telephone call of “glossy object syndrome”. You know the feeling: when everybody’s speaking about a brand-new device that will certainly revolutionize your organization … The turf usually looks greener on the other side, and I wondered whether GoHighLevel may minimize friction factors that I would certainly found out to endure for many years with Keap.
I withstood initially, but a couple of even more stress led me to believe possibly it was time for a modification.
The Financial investment: Moving My Agency to GoHighLevel
Previously this year I determined to start. I signed up for HighLevel’s Firm plan at $297/month, investing significantly greater than the $97/month starter cost.
This wasn’t a choice I ignored. I recognized switching platforms was going to call for moving all my Keap information and basically restoring my whole tech framework from square one utilizing every one of the GoHighLevel integrations available.
Below’s a summary of simply some of the effort needed:
- Manually exporting 20,000+ email customer documents
- Recreating dozens of automations and workflows
- Relocating client accounts, notes, and job data to the brand-new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe billing integration
- Establishing landing pages, coupons, and sales funnels throughout once more
- Learning an entirely foreign UX and user interface layout
All in, I invested around 30-40 tedious hours of setup work transitioning whatever over– and also taking care of lost efficiency throughout the switch.
Yet inevitably, it was a computed financial investment I agreed to make. I figured some temporary pain would repay with GoHighLevel giving a much better lasting solution for my service, Dripify. Oh how wrong I was …
It just took me about a month of hands-on usage to recognize I had made a large error. The issues began accumulating promptly, until it got to a factor I had to reduce my losses and switch over back to Keap totally.
Allow’s walk through the nightmarish troubles I experienced.
Protection Issues & Many Vermin
Given GoHighLevel placed itself as an all-in-one automation system, I took care to diligently recreate every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These consisted of series for onboarding brand-new e-mail subscribers, onboarding new clients, automating follow-ups for webinar registrations, sending out event tips, taking care of membership expiries and a lot more.
Whatever seemed to be functioning penalty … till unexpectedly it had not been. One early morning, I woke up to locate 171 completely unimportant emails had actually been sent out to users who ought to NOT have gotten them. This took place 3 days in a row, with a different set of 160 people every day.
I hysterically attempted troubleshooting and restoring the automation from scratch. However the trouble persisted.
When I frantically connected to their assistance team, they vaguely asserted “server concerns” were responsible. However this description really did not make any sense, because the errors continued taking place each early morning like clockwork unrelated to any kind of downtime.
In my mind, this massive failure was totally inappropriate and simply didn’t benefit my business. I have countless calls relying on my automated campaigns running efficiently.
So if GoHighLevel was mosting likely to be absolutely undependable, how could I delegate mission-critical workflows and sensitive client information to their innovation?
The unintuitive user interface only worsened these problems …
Discouraging UX
Coming from Keap where everything was smooth and user-friendly, GoHighLevel’s learning contour felt high and challenging.
Simple tasks like editing and enhancing workflows entailed digging through food selection systems that were all over the place. Trick setups were unexplainably scattered in completely various sections. Relocating in between features really felt disjointed or complex.
I’ll inform you what I suggest by talking about their funnel builder as an example. There were 3 different settings panels to handle overall, private, and product arrangements. Yet for some crazy factor, the web links to access each of these core setups were expanded on contrary sides of the display. What!?
As somebody who values tidy, thoughtful style, this seriously frustrated me.
It strengthened that GoHighLevel still seemed like a work-in-progress rather than a refined item all set for prime-time use. Their concerns seemed concentrated on packing in every feature imaginable, with poor usability as a second thought.
And talking features, I quickly recognized the low cost tag featured pricey concessions …
Deceptive Pricing GoHighLevel Bulk Requests
Among GoHighLevel’s most significant selling factors is the budget friendly cost for accessibility to so many features. However I quickly discovered this cheap base price was deceitful.
They nickle-and-dimed individuals with erratic charges for core functionality. Suddenly my credit card statements had unclear $10 charges from GoHighLevel here and there.
As it ended up, you obtain billed every single time you send an e-mail through their web servers. So for high volume users, this added up to hundreds of bucks in unforeseen expenses.
In between these per-email fees and paying additional for deliverability add-ons like Mailgun, my “cost effective” GoHighLevel registration ended up costing dramatically greater than my Keap plan.
The reduced price tag was tempting, but just not sensible in practice. This bait-and-switch left a poor taste in my mouth.
Email Rates Suffered
The last dealbreaker was seeing my carefully nurtured e-mail open prices plunge virtually over night after changing to GoHighLevel.
Previously, my audience engagement regularly struck 35-40% open prices in Keap month after month. But once I moved their records over to GoHighLevel, performance tanked instantly to a pathetic 9% open rate.
Regardless of how much I enhanced my sending practices or attempted every repairing method, I could barely push open prices back right into the teens– still a 50%+ decrease from my previous criteria GoHighLevel Bulk Requests.
Let me repeat: my exact same target market and emails instantly had awful involvement. The only point I might believe that would be causing this was whatever was taking place behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a firm so based on e-mail marketing, this was a big deal.
Between the debilitating deliverability problems, concealed fees, broken features, and terrible interface, I had lastly reached my limit …
Why I Stop GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Simply 45 days after migrating my company to GoHighLevel, I knew I had actually made a big error. The cons drastically exceeded any benefits.
No software program is best, however the large volume of problems was beyond acceptable.
At the end of the day, software application boils down to count on. If I can not trust it to take care of critical features competently or think a supplier has my best interests in mind, then it’s time to walk away– even after investing significant time, money, and initiative moving.
So I made the hard phone call to reverse training course and return back to Keap entirely just weeks after going done in on GoHighLevel. Allow’s explore what I picked up from this debacle.
Key Takeaways: What I Gained from My GoHighLevel Blunder
My time with HighLevel can be summarized as a costly misadventure. However in hindsight, it instructed me a couple of vital lessons:
- Stay with what jobs. Do not distress what’s working unless something is definitively far better across the board. Change brings risk.
- Veterinarian claims thoroughly. Marketing buzz around brand-new software application usually obscures bigger underlying defects. Deep due persistance is important.
- Select simpleness over features. Properly designed devices ought to make your job life much easier, not much more complicated and unpleasant.
- Transparency builds depend on. Nontransparent pricing, dubious reseller terms, and finger-pointing to escape problems damages count on.
- Seek honest testimonials. Delighted support reviews imply much less if excessive issues imply bad total use.
- Perfection is impossible. No solitary solution can flawlessly meet every one-of-a-kind service need. Find the least-bad fit.
- Evolution over transformation. Incremental renovations generally exceed dangerous wholesale reinvention of what already works penalty.
Basically, I learned to be much more doubtful of “also excellent to be true” marketing cases and much less attracted by the appeal of glossy brand-new objects. The tools you use daily should make trust fund with transparency and efficiency, not slick advertising.