As an agency proprietor for over a years, I rely on software and automation to improve operations and supply results. So when GoHighLevel emerged on the scene few years back, it certainly caught my interest GoHighLevel Chatbot.
The idea was enticing– an all-in-one customer administration system with marketing, sales, and service tools incorporated together. As an entrepreneur always aiming to simplify and scale my service, it seemed like a dream become a reality on paper. That would not want a solitary remedy that does it all?
Yet in this extensive GoHighLevel review, I’ll take you inside my devastating journey of attempting (and stopping working) to switch to this popular brand-new software application. You’ll find out:
If you’re considering whether GoHighLevel is right for your own business requirements, hopefully you can pick up from my painful mistakes and pumped up expectations.
Looter: I do NOT advise GoHighLevel. If you require a CRM, begin with this checklist of finest CRMs rather. I make use of Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re searching for a sales, marketing, and task administration option to GoHighLevel, after that here are a few we suggest.
Backstory: Why I Took Into Consideration Changing from Keap
To understand what attracted me to GoHighLevel to begin with, you need context regarding my previous setup. For over 5 years I had actually been gladly depending on Keap (previously Infusionsoft) to fulfill all my customer management and automation requirements.
I found Keap instinctive to make use of and it took care of whatever I needed– CRM, email marketing, sales funnels, subscription websites, and customer support.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are created to help local business keep their clients while including new ones effortlessly. Automate follow-ups with e-mails and messages, making certain leads and clients get the ideal messages at the correct time. Usage internet site and social media sites types to enhance lead follow-up, and manage your development with easy consultation scheduling and lead tracking. Boost sales with automated quoting, invoicing, and settlement processing, liberating your time. With Keap, local business can conserve 10 hours per week and rise earnings by 39%. Beginning with a 14-day free trial, no credit card called for.
Why we like Keap
Keap supplies an extensive consumer connection monitoring (CRM) and marketing automation service customized for small businesses and business owners. We value Keap’s focus on simplifying sales procedures and supporting client partnerships with powerful automation devices. The platform’s all-in-one technique incorporates CRM, email marketing, invoicing, and task administration, making it especially eye-catching for businesses aiming to combine their tech pile.
Generally, it just functioned reliably with very little fuss or upkeep required. My open and click-through rates were great (like 35% excellent). Automations ran efficiently with no problems.
So why in the world was I lured to uproot my entire operational foundation from a system that worked to try something unproven and untested?
In hindsight I can admit I got attracted by the siren telephone call of “shiny item syndrome”. You know the feeling: when everybody’s discussing a brand-new device that will change your service … The yard commonly looks greener beyond, and I wondered whether GoHighLevel may reduce rubbing points that I ‘d discovered to tolerate throughout the years with Keap.
I resisted in the beginning, however a couple of more stress led me to assume possibly it was time for a modification.
The Financial investment: Migrating My Agency to GoHighLevel
Earlier this year I decided to take the plunge. I signed up for HighLevel’s Company plan at $297/month, spending significantly more than the $97/month starter cost.
This wasn’t a choice I ignored. I understood changing systems was going to need moving all my Keap information and essentially reconstructing my entire tech framework from scratch using every one of the GoHighLevel integrations offered.
Right here’s an introduction of just several of the initiative needed:
- By hand exporting 20,000+ e-mail client documents
- Recreating dozens of automations and workflows
- Moving customer accounts, notes, and project information to the new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe payment integration
- Establishing landing pages, discounts, and sales funnels throughout once more
- Learning an entirely international UX and user interface design
Done in, I spent around 30-40 laborious hours of configuration job transitioning whatever over– and also dealing with shed performance throughout the switch.
But inevitably, it was a computed financial investment I agreed to make. I figured some short-term discomfort would repay with GoHighLevel giving a far better long-lasting service for my service, Dripify. Oh just how wrong I was …
It only took me about a month of hands-on usage to recognize I had actually made a big blunder. The concerns started accumulating swiftly, until it got to a factor I needed to reduce my losses and switch back to Keap totally.
Let’s walk through the horrible issues I came across.
Safety Issues & Several Bugs
Provided GoHighLevel positioned itself as an all-in-one automation system, I took care to thoroughly recreate every workflow from my old Keap account.
These consisted of sequences for onboarding brand-new email customers, onboarding new customers, automating follow-ups for webinar enrollments, sending event suggestions, taking care of membership expiries and far more.
Every little thing appeared to be operating fine … till instantly it had not been. One morning, I woke up to discover 171 completely unimportant e-mails had actually been sent to users that should NOT have received them. This occurred three days straight, with a various batch of 160 people every day.
I anxiously attempted troubleshooting and reconstructing the automation from square one. However the trouble continued.
When I desperately connected to their support group, they vaguely claimed “web server concerns” were at fault. However this description really did not make any feeling, since the mistakes continued taking place each early morning like clockwork unconnected to any type of downtime.
In my mind, this huge failing was entirely inappropriate and simply didn’t work for my company. I have hundreds of get in touches with relying on my automated campaigns running smoothly.
So if GoHighLevel was mosting likely to be totally undependable, exactly how could I leave mission-critical workflows and delicate customer data to their innovation?
The unintuitive interface only intensified these issues …
Aggravating UX
Coming from Keap where everything was smooth and instinctive, GoHighLevel’s learning contour really felt steep and complicated.
Simple jobs like editing workflows involved digging with menu systems that were all over the place. Trick setups were unexplainably spread in entirely different areas. Moving between features really felt disjointed or complicated.
I’ll tell you what I suggest by speaking about their funnel builder as an example. There were 3 different settings panels to take care of total, individual, and product setups. Yet for some crazy factor, the web links to accessibility each of these core setups were spread out on contrary sides of the screen. What!?
As a person who values tidy, thoughtful style, this seriously frustrated me.
It enhanced that GoHighLevel still seemed like a work-in-progress rather than a polished item all set for prime-time use. Their concerns seemed concentrated on packing in every feature under the sun, with poor use as a second thought.
And speaking of features, I quickly recognized the small cost tag included pricey compromises …
Misleading Pricing GoHighLevel Chatbot
One of GoHighLevel’s largest marketing points is the inexpensive price for accessibility to numerous features. But I quickly discovered this inexpensive base expense was misleading.
They nickle-and-dimed customers with sporadic fees for core performance. Unexpectedly my charge card declarations had obscure $10 charges from GoHighLevel here and there.
As it turned out, you obtain charged every single time you send out an email via their servers. So for high volume customers, this amounted to hundreds of bucks in unexpected expenses.
In between these per-email charges and paying additional for deliverability attachments like Mailgun, my “inexpensive” GoHighLevel registration wound up costing substantially MORE than my Keap plan.
The low sticker price was alluring, however just not realistic in practice. This bait-and-switch left a poor taste in my mouth.
Email Fees Suffered
The last dealbreaker was seeing my meticulously nurtured email open rates plummet virtually over night after switching to GoHighLevel.
Previously, my audience engagement continually struck 35-40% open prices in Keap month after month. Once I moved their records over to GoHighLevel, performance tanked immediately to a worthless 9% open rate.
Despite how much I optimized my sending practices or attempted every troubleshooting technique, I could hardly push open rates back into the teens– still a 50%+ decrease from my previous standards GoHighLevel Chatbot.
Let me repeat: my exact same audience and emails unexpectedly had dreadful interaction. The only point I can think that would certainly be causing this was whatever was occurring behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a firm so based on e-mail marketing, this was a big deal.
In between the crippling deliverability issues, hidden charges, broken features, and dreadful user interface, I had finally reached my limitation …
Why I Stop GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Simply 45 days after moving my agency to GoHighLevel, I understood I had made a massive blunder. The cons significantly exceeded any kind of benefits.
No software application is perfect, but the sheer volume of problems was beyond acceptable.
At the end of the day, software program comes down to trust. If I can not trust it to handle crucial features capably or think a vendor has my best interests in mind, then it’s time to leave– even after investing significant time, money, and effort moving.
So I made the hard call to reverse training course and return back to Keap totally just weeks after going done in on GoHighLevel. Let’s explore what I learned from this debacle.
Key Takeaways: What I Picked up from My GoHighLevel Error
My time with HighLevel can be summarized as an expensive misadventure. Yet in hindsight, it educated me a couple of essential lessons:
- Adhere to what jobs. Don’t disturb what’s working unless something is definitively far better across the board. Change brings danger.
- Vet claims completely. Marketing buzz around brand-new software program typically obscures larger underlying problems. Deep due diligence is vital.
- Choose simplicity over features. Properly designed tools ought to make your job life easier, not a lot more complicated and unpleasant.
- Openness builds trust. Opaque pricing, dubious reseller terms, and finger-pointing to evade problems destroys trust fund.
- Look for honest reviews. Happy support evaluates mean much less if extreme problems imply bad general use.
- Excellence is impossible. No solitary solution can perfectly meet every unique company demand. Locate the least-bad fit.
- Development over revolution. Incremental improvements commonly outweigh risky wholesale reinvention of what currently works penalty.
In other words, I found out to be a lot more skeptical of “as well good to be real” marketing cases and much less lured by the allure of glossy brand-new things. The devices you use daily need to make count on through transparency and performance, not slick advertising.