As a company owner for over a years, I rely upon software program and automation to streamline procedures and deliver results. So when GoHighLevel arised on the scene couple of years back, it certainly caught my attention GoHighLevel Contest Submission.
The concept was attractive– an all-in-one customer monitoring platform with marketing, sales, and solution devices integrated together. As an entrepreneur always seeking to streamline and scale my company, it felt like a desire come true theoretically. That wouldn’t want a single remedy that does it all?
But in this in-depth GoHighLevel review, I’ll take you inside my dreadful journey of attempting (and failing) to switch over to this popular new software. You’ll learn:
If you’re thinking about whether GoHighLevel is right for your own service demands, with any luck you can pick up from my agonizing mistakes and blew up expectations.
Looter: I do NOT recommend GoHighLevel. If you need a CRM, start with this list of ideal CRMs instead. I make use of Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re seeking a sales, marketing, and task administration choice to GoHighLevel, then below are a few we suggest.
Backstory: Why I Considered Changing from Keap
To understand what attracted me to GoHighLevel to begin with, you require context about my previous setup. For over 5 years I had been gladly counting on Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) to satisfy all my customer management and automation needs.
I discovered Keap instinctive to use and it dealt with everything I needed– CRM, email marketing, sales funnels, subscription sites, and client support.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are designed to aid small businesses keep their clients while including brand-new ones easily. Automate follow-ups with e-mails and messages, making certain leads and clients receive the best messages at the right time. Usage site and social media sites types to improve lead follow-up, and handle your growth with easy appointment organizing and lead monitoring. Boost sales with automated quoting, invoicing, and settlement handling, maximizing your time. With Keap, small companies can conserve 10 hours weekly and rise revenue by 39%. Beginning with a 14-day free trial, no charge card called for.
Why we like Keap
Keap offers a thorough consumer partnership monitoring (CRM) and marketing automation solution customized for small businesses and entrepreneurs. We value Keap’s concentrate on streamlining sales procedures and nurturing customer relationships via effective automation devices. The platform’s all-in-one strategy integrates CRM, email marketing, invoicing, and task administration, making it specifically appealing for businesses seeking to consolidate their tech stack.
Generally, it simply functioned accurately with marginal hassle or maintenance required. My open and click-through rates were great (like 35% fantastic). Automations ran smoothly without any concerns.
So why on earth was I tempted to uproot my entire functional foundation from a system that functioned to attempt something unverified and untried?
In hindsight I can admit I obtained seduced by the siren call of “shiny things disorder”. You recognize the sensation: when everyone’s discussing a new tool that will certainly change your service … The grass usually looks greener beyond, and I wondered whether GoHighLevel could lower friction factors that I ‘d found out to tolerate over the years with Keap.
I resisted at first, but a few even more frustrations led me to believe perhaps it was time for a change.
The Financial investment: Moving My Company to GoHighLevel
Previously this year I chose to take the plunge. I registered for HighLevel’s Company plan at $297/month, investing substantially more than the $97/month starter price.
This wasn’t a decision I took lightly. I knew changing platforms was going to call for migrating all my Keap data and essentially restoring my entire technology infrastructure from the ground up making use of all of the GoHighLevel integrations available.
Here’s a summary of simply a few of the effort required:
- Manually exporting 20,000+ email client records
- Recreating dozens of automations and workflows
- Moving customer accounts, notes, and project information to the new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe billing integration
- Setting up landing pages, coupons, and sales funnels all over once more
- Learning a completely international UX and interface style
Done in, I invested around 30-40 tedious hours of setup job transitioning every little thing over– as well as handling shed efficiency throughout the button.
However inevitably, it was a calculated investment I agreed to make. I figured some short-term pain would certainly pay off with GoHighLevel giving a much better long-lasting service for my company, Dripify. Oh how wrong I was …
It just took me concerning a month of hands-on use to recognize I had actually made a big mistake. The issues started accumulating quickly, until it got to a factor I needed to cut my losses and switch back to Keap totally.
Let’s walk through the nightmarish troubles I came across.
Security Issues & Many Bugs
Provided GoHighLevel placed itself as an all-in-one automation platform, I took care to thoroughly recreate every workflow from my old Keap account.
These included sequences for onboarding brand-new e-mail subscribers, onboarding brand-new customers, automating follow-ups for webinar registrations, sending occasion reminders, managing subscription expirations and far more.
Whatever seemed to be functioning penalty … until instantly it had not been. One morning, I awoke to discover 171 totally unimportant e-mails had been sent to users who must NOT have actually gotten them. This took place three days in a row, with a different set of 160 people each day.
I hysterically tried troubleshooting and restoring the automation from scratch. Yet the issue persisted.
When I seriously reached out to their assistance team, they slightly asserted “web server issues” were at fault. However this description didn’t make any kind of sense, considering that the mistakes proceeded happening each morning like clockwork unassociated to any downtime.
In my mind, this huge failing was totally undesirable and just really did not benefit my business. I have hundreds of calls relying on my automated campaigns running efficiently.
So if GoHighLevel was going to be totally undependable, how could I hand over mission-critical workflows and delicate client information to their technology?
The unintuitive interface just intensified these problems …
Irritating UX
Coming from Keap where everything was smooth and instinctive, GoHighLevel’s learning contour felt steep and challenging.
Simple tasks like editing workflows involved digging with menu systems that were all over the place. Trick settings were unexplainably spread in totally various areas. Moving in between functions really felt disjointed or complicated.
I’ll tell you what I indicate by speaking about their funnel builder as an instance. There were 3 separate settings panels to manage overall, specific, and item setups. Yet for some insane factor, the links to gain access to each of these core setups were spread out on contrary sides of the screen. What!?
As someone that values clean, thoughtful layout, this seriously frustrated me.
It reinforced that GoHighLevel still felt 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 bad functionality as an afterthought.
And speaking of features, I quickly recognized the small cost tag included costly compromises …
Misleading Pricing GoHighLevel Contest Submission
One of GoHighLevel’s largest marketing factors is the inexpensive rate for accessibility to a lot of features. Yet I promptly learned this affordable base expense was misleading.
They nickle-and-dimed customers with occasional costs for core functionality. Suddenly my credit card statements had unclear $10 charges from GoHighLevel here and there.
As it turned out, you get billed whenever you send out an e-mail through their web servers. So for high volume customers, this amounted to hundreds of bucks in unanticipated prices.
Between these per-email charges and paying additional for deliverability attachments like Mailgun, my “affordable” GoHighLevel registration wound up setting you back considerably MORE than my Keap plan.
The low sticker price was appealing, yet simply not practical in practice. This bait-and-switch left a poor taste in my mouth.
Email Rates Suffered
The final dealbreaker was seeing my thoroughly nurtured e-mail open rates plummet nearly over night after changing to GoHighLevel.
Formerly, my target market engagement constantly struck 35-40% open prices in Keap month after month. Once I migrated their records over to GoHighLevel, performance tanked instantaneously to a pitiful 9% open price.
Despite how much I optimized my sending out methods or attempted every fixing trick, I could barely push open prices back into the teens– still a 50%+ decline from my previous criteria GoHighLevel Contest Submission.
Let me repeat: my exact same audience and e-mails instantly had awful involvement. The only thing I might think that would be causing this was whatever was happening behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a firm so based on e-mail marketing, this was a big deal.
Between the debilitating deliverability problems, hidden costs, damaged features, and horrible user interface, I had actually ultimately reached my restriction …
Why I Give up GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Just 45 days after migrating my firm to GoHighLevel, I recognized I had made a significant error. The disadvantages considerably exceeded any kind of benefits.
No software program is best, but the sheer volume of troubles was beyond acceptable.
At the end of the day, software program boils down to trust. If I can not trust it to manage essential functions effectively or believe a vendor has my benefits in mind, then it’s time to leave– even after spending significant time, money, and initiative migrating.
So I made the difficult call to turn around training course and return back to Keap totally just weeks after going done in on GoHighLevel. Allow’s explore what I gained from this fiasco.
Secret Takeaways: What I Learned From My GoHighLevel Mistake
My time with HighLevel can be summarized as a costly accident. However in hindsight, it showed me a few essential lessons:
- Stay with what works. Do not distress what’s functioning unless something is definitively better across the board. Adjustment brings risk.
- Veterinarian declares thoroughly. Marketing hype around brand-new software application commonly covers bigger underlying problems. Deep due persistance is essential.
- Choose simplicity over features. Well-designed devices ought to make your job life much easier, not a lot more challenging and messy.
- Openness develops count on. Opaque pricing, questionable reseller terms, and finger-pointing to evade troubles ruins depend on.
- Seek impartial reviews. Pleased support reviews suggest less if extreme problems suggest poor general functionality.
- Perfection is impossible. No single solution can completely fulfill every one-of-a-kind organization need. Discover the least-bad fit.
- Evolution over transformation. Step-by-step renovations normally exceed risky wholesale reinvention of what currently works fine.
In other words, I found out to be much more doubtful of “also good to be true” marketing cases and less lured by the attraction of shiny brand-new items. The tools you utilize daily must earn count on with openness and performance, not glossy advertising.