As a company proprietor for over a years, I rely upon software application and automation to simplify procedures and deliver results. So when GoHighLevel arised on the scene few years back, it definitely captured my focus GoHighLevel CallRail.
The concept was appealing– an all-in-one customer monitoring system with marketing, sales, and service devices incorporated with each other. As a business owner always aiming to streamline and scale my service, it felt like a desire happened theoretically. Who would not desire a single service that does it all?
Yet in this thorough GoHighLevel review, I’ll take you inside my disastrous journey of trying (and falling short) to switch to this popular new software. You’ll find out:
If you’re considering whether GoHighLevel is right for your own service demands, ideally you can learn from my unpleasant mistakes and pumped up expectations.
Spoiler: I do NOT recommend GoHighLevel. If you need a CRM, begin with this listing of best CRMs instead. I utilize Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re trying to find a sales, marketing, and task administration choice to GoHighLevel, after that right here are a few we suggest.
Backstory: Why I Thought About Switching from Keap
To understand what attracted me to GoHighLevel in the first place, you need context concerning my previous arrangement. For over 5 years I had been gladly counting on Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) to meet all my customer management and automation demands.
I found Keap instinctive to utilize and it managed every little thing I required– CRM, email marketing, sales funnels, membership sites, and customer support.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are created to help small companies maintain their customers while including new ones easily. Automate follow-ups with emails and messages, making sure leads and clients obtain the right messages at the correct time. Usage site and social media types to simplify lead follow-up, and handle your growth with easy consultation scheduling and lead tracking. Boost sales with automated estimating, invoicing, and repayment processing, freeing up your time. With Keap, small companies can save 10 hours each week and rise revenue by 39%. Begin with a 14-day free trial, no bank card needed.
Why we like Keap
Keap provides a comprehensive client connection management (CRM) and marketing automation solution customized for local business and business owners. We appreciate Keap’s focus on enhancing sales processes and nurturing customer connections with effective automation devices. The system’s all-in-one method integrates CRM, email marketing, invoicing, and job administration, making it especially attractive for organizations looking to consolidate their tech pile.
Generally, it simply functioned dependably with marginal difficulty or upkeep called for. My open and click-through prices were terrific (like 35% terrific). Automations ran smoothly without problems.
So why in the world was I attracted to uproot my entire operational structure from a system that functioned to try something unproven and untried?
In hindsight I can confess I got seduced by the siren telephone call of “shiny things disorder”. You recognize the sensation: when everyone’s discussing a brand-new device that will transform your company … The yard usually looks greener on the other side, and I wondered whether GoHighLevel may decrease friction factors that I ‘d discovered to tolerate throughout the years with Keap.
I stood up to initially, yet a few even more disappointments led me to think maybe it was time for a modification.
The Financial investment: Moving My Firm to GoHighLevel
Previously this year I chose to start. I enrolled in HighLevel’s Firm plan at $297/month, spending significantly more than the $97/month starter price.
This wasn’t a decision I ignored. I knew switching platforms was going to call for migrating all my Keap information and basically restoring my whole technology facilities from scratch making use of all of the GoHighLevel integrations readily available.
Below’s a review of just several of the initiative called for:
- Manually exporting 20,000+ e-mail client records
- Recreating dozens of automations and workflows
- Moving client profiles, notes, and job data to the new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe billing integration
- Establishing landing pages, promos, and sales funnels all over again
- Learning a totally foreign UX and user interface style
All in, I invested around 30-40 tedious hours of configuration work transitioning everything over– in addition to handling shed efficiency throughout the button.
However ultimately, it was a computed investment I agreed to make. I figured some temporary pain would settle with GoHighLevel providing a far better long-lasting solution for my business, Dripify. Oh exactly how wrong I was …
It just took me regarding a month of hands-on usage to realize I had actually made a big mistake. The problems began accumulating promptly, till it reached a point I had to reduce my losses and switch back to Keap completely.
Allow’s walk through the nightmarish issues I came across.
Protection Issues & Several Vermin
Provided GoHighLevel placed itself as an all-in-one automation platform, I made sure to carefully recreate each and every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These included series for onboarding brand-new e-mail customers, onboarding brand-new clients, automating follow-ups for webinar registrations, sending out occasion reminders, taking care of membership expirations and far more.
Everything seemed to be functioning fine … until all of a sudden it wasn’t. One early morning, I awoke to locate 171 totally unnecessary e-mails had been sent out to customers that must NOT have received them. This happened three days in a row, with a various batch of 160 individuals daily.
I anxiously tried troubleshooting and reconstructing the automation from the ground up. But the problem continued.
When I desperately connected to their assistance team, they slightly asserted “server concerns” were responsible. Yet this explanation didn’t make any type of feeling, since the mistakes continued occurring each early morning like clockwork unconnected to any downtime.
In my mind, this enormous failure was entirely undesirable and just really did not benefit my business. I have countless get in touches with depending on my automated campaigns running efficiently.
So if GoHighLevel was going to be entirely unreliable, just how could I leave mission-critical workflows and sensitive customer data to their innovation?
The unintuitive user interface just intensified these problems …
Irritating UX
Coming from Keap where whatever was seamless and user-friendly, GoHighLevel’s learning curve really felt steep and complicated.
Basic tasks like editing and enhancing workflows involved digging via food selection systems that were all over the place. Trick setups were unexplainably spread in entirely different areas. Moving in between functions felt disjointed or complex.
I’ll inform you what I suggest by discussing their funnel builder as an instance. There were 3 different setups panels to manage overall, specific, and item setups. Yet for some insane factor, the web links to gain access to each of these core settings were expanded on opposite sides of the screen. What!?
As someone who values tidy, thoughtful design, this seriously frustrated me.
It reinforced that GoHighLevel still seemed like a work-in-progress as opposed to a polished item ready for prime-time use. Their top priorities appeared concentrated on cramming in every feature under the sun, with inadequate use as a second thought.
And talking features, I soon recognized the low cost tag featured expensive compromises …
Deceptive Pricing GoHighLevel CallRail
One of GoHighLevel’s most significant marketing points is the inexpensive cost for access to so many features. But I promptly discovered this affordable base price was deceptive.
They nickle-and-dimed customers with occasional fees for core performance. Suddenly my credit card declarations had vague $10 charges from GoHighLevel here and there.
As it ended up, you get billed every single time you send an email with their web servers. So for high volume individuals, this added up to hundreds of bucks in unanticipated prices.
In between these per-email fees and paying extra for deliverability attachments like Mailgun, my “affordable” GoHighLevel membership ended up setting you back significantly greater than my Keap plan.
The reduced price tag was appealing, however just not realistic in practice. This bait-and-switch left a negative preference in my mouth.
Email Rates Suffered
The last dealbreaker was seeing my carefully supported email open rates plunge practically over night after switching to GoHighLevel.
Formerly, my audience interaction constantly hit 35-40% open prices in Keap month after month. Once I moved their documents over to GoHighLevel, efficiency tanked promptly to a pitiful 9% open rate.
No matter how much I maximized my sending out methods or tried every repairing trick, I might barely push open prices back right into the teenagers– still a 50%+ decrease from my previous criteria GoHighLevel CallRail.
Let me repeat: my exact same target market and emails instantly had horrible engagement. The only point I could assume that would certainly be triggering 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 crippling deliverability issues, hidden costs, busted features, and terrible interface, I had ultimately reached my restriction …
Why I Give up GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Just 45 days after moving my agency to GoHighLevel, I recognized I had made a substantial mistake. The disadvantages substantially outweighed any type of benefits.
No software application is perfect, but the sheer quantity of issues was beyond appropriate.
At the end of the day, software boils down to trust. If I can’t trust it to take care of important features competently or believe a supplier has my benefits in mind, then it’s time to walk away– even after investing considerable time, money, and initiative migrating.
So I made the hard call to reverse program and return back to Keap entirely simply weeks after going all in on GoHighLevel. Let’s explore what I gained from this debacle.
Key Takeaways: What I Gained from My GoHighLevel Error
My time with HighLevel can be summed up as a pricey accident. Yet in knowledge, it educated me a few crucial lessons:
- Stick to what works. Don’t upset what’s functioning unless something is definitively better across the board. Change brings threat.
- Vet asserts extensively. Marketing buzz around brand-new software application typically obscures bigger underlying imperfections. Deep due persistance is important.
- Choose simplicity over features. Well-designed devices should make your work life less complicated, not much more complex and untidy.
- Openness develops count on. Opaque pricing, shady reseller terms, and finger-pointing to evade issues destroys depend on.
- Look for objective testimonials. Pleased assistance assesses indicate much less if extreme problems imply poor overall usability.
- Excellence is impossible. No single service can flawlessly satisfy every special company requirement. Find the least-bad fit.
- Advancement over revolution. Incremental enhancements normally exceed high-risk wholesale reinvention of what already functions fine.
Simply put, I discovered to be much more unconvinced of “also good to be real” marketing insurance claims and much less lured by the allure of glossy new items. The tools you make use of daily must gain count on with openness and performance, not glossy advertising.