As an agency owner for over a decade, I count on software and automation to streamline procedures and provide results. So when GoHighLevel emerged on the scene few years back, it certainly captured my attention GoHighLevel Call Tracking.
The concept was appealing– an all-in-one client management system with marketing, sales, and service devices incorporated with each other. As an entrepreneur constantly aiming to simplify and scale my service, it appeared like a desire come true on paper. Who wouldn’t desire a solitary remedy that does it all?
But in this in-depth GoHighLevel review, I’ll take you inside my dreadful journey of attempting (and stopping working) to switch over to this popular brand-new software application. You’ll find out:
If you’re taking into consideration whether GoHighLevel is right for your very own business needs, with any luck you can learn from my excruciating errors and inflated assumptions.
Looter: I do NOT advise GoHighLevel. If you require a CRM, begin with this checklist of best CRMs rather. I utilize Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re searching for a sales, marketing, and project management choice to GoHighLevel, then below are a couple of we suggest.
Backstory: Why I Considered Switching from Keap
To recognize what attracted me to GoHighLevel to begin with, you require context regarding my previous arrangement. For over 5 years I had actually been happily relying upon Keap (previously Infusionsoft) to meet all my client monitoring and automation needs.
I discovered Keap user-friendly to utilize and it took care of whatever I required– CRM, e-mail marketing, sales funnels, membership sites, and client support.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are made to assist local business maintain their clients while adding new ones easily. Automate follow-ups with e-mails and texts, ensuring leads and clients receive the ideal messages at the correct time. Use website and social networks forms to enhance lead follow-up, and manage your development with simple visit scheduling and lead monitoring. Boost sales with automated pricing estimate, invoicing, and settlement handling, freeing up your time. With Keap, small businesses can conserve 10 hours per week and increase earnings by 39%. Beginning with a 14-day free trial, no credit card needed.
Why we like Keap
Keap supplies an extensive client partnership management (CRM) and marketing automation option customized for local business and business owners. We appreciate Keap’s focus on streamlining sales procedures and nurturing consumer relationships with effective automation devices. The system’s all-in-one method combines CRM, email marketing, invoicing, and task monitoring, making it particularly eye-catching for companies wanting to settle their technology pile.
For the most part, it just worked reliably with marginal fuss or maintenance needed. My open and click-through prices were wonderful (like 35% wonderful). Automations ran smoothly without problems.
So why on earth was I tempted to uproot my entire functional foundation from a system that worked to attempt something unverified and untried?
In knowledge I can admit I got attracted by the siren call of “shiny item disorder”. You recognize the feeling: when everyone’s speaking about a new tool that will change your service … The yard typically looks greener on the other side, and I wondered whether GoHighLevel could lower rubbing factors that I ‘d found out to tolerate over the years with Keap.
I resisted in the beginning, however a few even more irritations led me to think possibly it was time for a change.
The Financial investment: Moving My Firm to GoHighLevel
Previously this year I determined to take the plunge. I enrolled in HighLevel’s Agency plan at $297/month, spending significantly greater than the $97/month starter price.
This wasn’t a decision I ignored. I recognized switching systems was mosting likely to require moving all my Keap information and essentially restoring my whole technology facilities from square one utilizing every one of the GoHighLevel integrations offered.
Here’s an introduction of just some of the effort required:
- Manually exporting 20,000+ e-mail subscriber documents
- Recreating lots of automations and workflows
- Relocating customer profiles, notes, and project data to the new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe payment integration
- Establishing landing pages, promos, and sales funnels all over once again
- Learning a totally international UX and user interface design
All in, I invested around 30-40 tiresome hours of setup work transitioning every little thing over– in addition to dealing with lost performance throughout the switch.
But ultimately, it was a calculated investment I wanted to make. I figured some short-term discomfort would repay with GoHighLevel giving a much better long-term option for my service, Dripify. Oh how wrong I was …
It only took me concerning a month of hands-on usage to recognize I had actually made a large blunder. The concerns started piling up promptly, until it got to a point I had to reduce my losses and switch back to Keap entirely.
Let’s go through the horrible troubles I ran into.
Safety Issues & Lots of Vermin
Provided GoHighLevel positioned itself as an all-in-one automation platform, I took care to thoroughly recreate each and every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These consisted of series for onboarding brand-new email customers, onboarding new clients, automating follow-ups for webinar registrations, sending event reminders, handling subscription expiries and much more.
Everything appeared to be operating penalty … till unexpectedly it wasn’t. One early morning, I awoke to find 171 completely unnecessary emails had actually been sent to individuals who should NOT have obtained them. This took place three days in a row, with a different set of 160 people each day.
I anxiously tried fixing and reconstructing the automation from scratch. Yet the issue lingered.
When I seriously connected to their assistance group, they slightly claimed “web server concerns” were responsible. Yet this explanation really did not make any kind of feeling, considering that the mistakes proceeded taking place each early morning like clockwork unconnected to any kind of downtime.
In my mind, this enormous failure was completely inappropriate and simply didn’t help my organization. I have thousands of contacts relying upon my automated campaigns running smoothly.
So if GoHighLevel was going to be totally undependable, exactly how could I entrust mission-critical workflows and sensitive client data to their modern technology?
The unintuitive user interface only worsened these concerns …
Discouraging UX
Originating from Keap where whatever was smooth and instinctive, GoHighLevel’s learning curve really felt steep and difficult.
Easy jobs like modifying workflows involved excavating with menu systems that were all over the place. Key setups were unexplainably spread in absolutely different sections. Relocating between features really felt disjointed or confusing.
I’ll tell you what I imply by discussing their funnel builder as an example. There were 3 different settings panels to take care of total, specific, and product setups. Yet for some crazy reason, the web links to gain access to each of these core setups were expanded on opposite sides of the display. What!?
As a person who values clean, thoughtful design, this seriously frustrated me.
It reinforced that GoHighLevel still felt like a work-in-progress as opposed to a polished product prepared for prime-time use. Their priorities seemed concentrated on cramming in every feature under the sun, with bad usability as a second thought.
And talking features, I quickly recognized the affordable price tag featured expensive concessions …
Deceptive Pricing GoHighLevel Call Tracking
One of GoHighLevel’s most significant selling factors is the inexpensive cost for access to many features. However I rapidly learned this low-cost base price was deceitful.
They nickle-and-dimed customers with sporadic charges for core functionality. Instantly my credit card statements had obscure $10 costs from GoHighLevel occasionally.
As it ended up, you get billed every time you send out an e-mail through their web servers. So for high quantity individuals, this amounted to hundreds of bucks in unexpected costs.
Between these per-email costs and paying added for deliverability add-ons like Mailgun, my “inexpensive” GoHighLevel subscription ended up setting you back dramatically MORE than my Keap plan.
The low sticker price was appealing, but just not realistic in practice. This bait-and-switch left a bad taste in my mouth.
Email Rates Suffered
The final dealbreaker was seeing my thoroughly supported e-mail open rates plunge nearly over night after changing to GoHighLevel.
Previously, my audience involvement continually struck 35-40% open prices in Keap month after month. Once I moved their documents over to GoHighLevel, efficiency tanked instantaneously to a worthless 9% open price.
Despite how much I optimized my sending out techniques or tried every troubleshooting trick, I can barely nudge open rates back right into the teenagers– still a 50%+ decline from my previous standards GoHighLevel Call Tracking.
Let me repeat: my exact same audience and e-mails instantly had horrible interaction. The only thing I might think that would be creating this was whatever was taking place behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a company so based on email marketing, this was a big deal.
Between the crippling deliverability issues, concealed charges, busted features, and horrible user interface, I had finally reached my restriction …
Why I Quit GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Just 45 days after moving my agency to GoHighLevel, I recognized I had made a big mistake. The disadvantages substantially exceeded any advantages.
No software is ideal, but the sheer volume of issues was beyond appropriate.
At the end of the day, software boils down to trust fund. If I can not trust it to deal with vital features capably or believe a vendor has my best interests in mind, then it’s time to walk away– also after investing significant time, cash, and initiative migrating.
So I made the tough phone call to reverse program and return back to Keap totally simply weeks after going done in on GoHighLevel. Let’s discover what I picked up from this ordeal.
Trick Takeaways: What I Learned From My GoHighLevel Error
My time with HighLevel can be summed up as an expensive misadventure. However in knowledge, it taught me a couple of essential lessons:
- Stick to what jobs. Do not disturb what’s functioning unless something is definitively better across the board. Change brings danger.
- Vet declares completely. Marketing buzz around new software frequently covers bigger underlying imperfections. Deep due persistance is crucial.
- Select simplicity over features. Properly designed tools need to make your work life simpler, not a lot more complex and messy.
- Openness constructs count on. Opaque pricing, shady reseller terms, and finger-pointing to avert problems destroys trust.
- Seek objective testimonials. Pleased assistance examines indicate less if too much problems suggest poor overall use.
- Perfection is difficult. No single option can flawlessly satisfy every one-of-a-kind company requirement. Locate the least-bad fit.
- Advancement over transformation. Step-by-step renovations usually outweigh risky wholesale reinvention of what currently works penalty.
Basically, I learned to be a lot more cynical of “also great to be true” marketing insurance claims and much less tempted by the appeal of glossy brand-new things. The devices you utilize daily need to earn count on through transparency and performance, not slick advertising.