As a company proprietor for over a decade, I rely upon software and automation to streamline procedures and supply outcomes. So when GoHighLevel emerged on the scene few years back, it certainly caught my interest GoHighLevel Cyber Monday Deals.
The idea was appealing– an all-in-one client monitoring platform with marketing, sales, and service devices integrated with each other. As an entrepreneur always aiming to simplify and scale my company, it felt like a desire come to life on paper. That would not desire a solitary option 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 to this popular brand-new software. You’ll learn:
If you’re thinking about whether GoHighLevel is right for your very own business requirements, ideally you can gain from my uncomfortable mistakes and inflated expectations.
Spoiler: I do NOT advise GoHighLevel. If you require a CRM, begin with this list of ideal CRMs rather. I make use of Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re trying to find a sales, marketing, and task monitoring option to GoHighLevel, after that here are a few we suggest.
Backstory: Why I Thought About Switching from Keap
To understand what attracted me to GoHighLevel to begin with, you need context concerning my previous configuration. For over 5 years I had been gladly relying upon Keap (previously Infusionsoft) to satisfy all my client administration and automation demands.
I located Keap instinctive to make use of and it handled every little thing I needed– CRM, email marketing, sales funnels, subscription sites, and customer support.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are made to assist small businesses keep their clients while adding brand-new ones easily. Automate follow-ups with emails and texts, making certain leads and customers receive the best messages at the right time. Use website and social media kinds to simplify lead follow-up, and handle your growth with very easy consultation scheduling and lead tracking. Boost sales with automated pricing quote, invoicing, and repayment processing, maximizing your time. With Keap, small companies can save 10 hours weekly and boost earnings by 39%. Beginning with a 14-day free trial, no charge card needed.
Why we like Keap
Keap offers a thorough client partnership monitoring (CRM) and marketing automation option customized for small businesses and entrepreneurs. We value Keap’s focus on enhancing sales procedures and nurturing consumer relationships via effective automation devices. The system’s all-in-one approach integrates CRM, e-mail marketing, invoicing, and task management, making it specifically eye-catching for companies wanting to consolidate their tech pile.
Generally, it simply functioned reliably with marginal hassle or upkeep needed. My open and click-through prices were great (like 35% great). Automations ran efficiently with no problems.
So why in the world was I lured to uproot my entire functional foundation from a system that functioned to try something unverified and untested?
In knowledge I can admit I obtained seduced by the alarm call of “shiny things syndrome”. You understand the sensation: when everybody’s discussing a brand-new tool that will reinvent your business … The lawn often looks greener beyond, and I asked yourself whether GoHighLevel may decrease friction points that I would certainly discovered to tolerate throughout the years with Keap.
I withstood initially, but a couple of more aggravations led me to think possibly it was time for a modification.
The Financial investment: Migrating My Firm to GoHighLevel
Earlier this year I decided to start. I enrolled in HighLevel’s Agency plan at $297/month, spending significantly greater than the $97/month starter expense.
This had not been a decision I ignored. I understood changing platforms was going to call for moving all my Keap data and essentially rebuilding my whole tech infrastructure from square one making use of all of the GoHighLevel integrations available.
Here’s a summary of simply several of the effort required:
- By hand exporting 20,000+ email client records
- Recreating loads of automations and workflows
- Relocating customer accounts, notes, and job information to the brand-new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe invoicing integration
- Establishing landing pages, coupons, and sales funnels throughout once more
- Learning a totally international UX and user interface design
All in, I invested around 30-40 tedious hours of setup work transitioning whatever over– in addition to managing lost performance throughout the switch.
But inevitably, it was a computed investment I was willing to make. I figured some temporary discomfort would pay off with GoHighLevel providing a better lasting remedy for my company, Dripify. Oh how incorrect I was …
It just took me regarding a month of hands-on usage to recognize I had actually made a large blunder. The problems started piling up swiftly, up until it got to a point I needed to cut my losses and switch back to Keap completely.
Let’s walk through the horrible troubles I came across.
Security Issues & Several Bugs
Offered GoHighLevel placed itself as an all-in-one automation platform, I took care to carefully recreate every workflow from my old Keap account.
These included sequences for onboarding new email subscribers, onboarding brand-new clients, automating follow-ups for webinar enrollments, sending event tips, handling membership expiries and much more.
Every little thing appeared to be working penalty … until instantly it had not been. One morning, I awoke to locate 171 totally unnecessary emails had been sent to individuals who must NOT have received them. This took place 3 days straight, with a different batch of 160 individuals daily.
I anxiously attempted repairing and restoring the automation from scratch. Yet the problem continued.
When I seriously reached out to their assistance team, they slightly declared “web server concerns” were at fault. But this description didn’t make any type of feeling, given that the errors proceeded happening each morning like clockwork unrelated to any type of downtime.
In my mind, this enormous failing was entirely undesirable and simply didn’t help my company. I have hundreds of contacts relying upon my automated campaigns running efficiently.
So if GoHighLevel was going to be absolutely unreliable, how could I delegate mission-critical workflows and sensitive client information to their modern technology?
The unintuitive user interface only intensified these problems …
Discouraging UX
Originating from Keap where every little thing was smooth and instinctive, GoHighLevel’s learning contour really felt steep and complex.
Straightforward jobs like editing workflows involved excavating through menu systems that were all over the place. Key setups were unexplainably spread in totally various sections. Moving in between features really felt disjointed or confusing.
I’ll tell you what I indicate by talking about their funnel builder as an example. There were 3 different settings panels to handle total, private, and item setups. Yet for some crazy reason, the links to accessibility each of these core settings were expanded on opposite sides of the screen. What!?
As somebody who values clean, thoughtful style, this seriously annoyed me.
It reinforced that GoHighLevel still seemed like a work-in-progress rather than a sleek item prepared 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 quickly understood the small cost tag came with expensive concessions …
Deceptive Pricing GoHighLevel Cyber Monday Deals
Among GoHighLevel’s largest selling points is the affordable rate for access to a lot of features. However I quickly discovered this low-cost base expense was misleading.
They nickle-and-dimed users with occasional fees for core performance. Suddenly my charge card declarations had vague $10 costs from GoHighLevel occasionally.
As it ended up, you get billed every single time you send out an email through their web servers. So for high quantity customers, this amounted to hundreds of dollars in unanticipated costs.
Between these per-email costs and paying additional for deliverability add-ons like Mailgun, my “inexpensive” GoHighLevel membership ended up costing dramatically greater than my Keap plan.
The low price tag was alluring, yet simply not reasonable in practice. This bait-and-switch left a negative taste in my mouth.
Email Rates Suffered
The final dealbreaker was seeing my very carefully nurtured e-mail open prices plunge virtually overnight after changing to GoHighLevel.
Previously, my audience engagement regularly struck 35-40% open rates in Keap month after month. Once I moved their records over to GoHighLevel, efficiency tanked instantly to a pitiful 9% open price.
Despite just how much I optimized my sending practices or attempted every troubleshooting trick, I might hardly nudge open rates back into the teenagers– still a 50%+ decline from my previous standards GoHighLevel Cyber Monday Deals.
Let me repeat: my exact same audience and emails instantly had dreadful interaction. The only thing I can assume that would certainly be triggering this was whatever was happening behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For an agency so depending on e-mail marketing, this was a big deal.
Between the debilitating deliverability issues, concealed charges, broken features, and awful interface, I had ultimately reached my restriction …
Why I Give up GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Simply 45 days after moving my company to GoHighLevel, I understood I had actually made a big mistake. The cons substantially exceeded any advantages.
No software application is excellent, but the large quantity of troubles was past acceptable.
At the end of the day, software program boils down to trust fund. If I can’t trust it to take care of important functions competently or believe a vendor has my best interests in mind, then it’s time to leave– even after spending considerable time, money, and initiative migrating.
So I made the hard phone call to turn around course and return back to Keap entirely simply weeks after going all in on GoHighLevel. Allow’s discover what I gained from this debacle.
Secret Takeaways: What I Learned From My GoHighLevel Blunder
My time with HighLevel can be summarized as an expensive accident. Yet in knowledge, it educated me a couple of essential lessons:
- Stay with what works. Do not disturb what’s functioning unless something is definitively far better across the board. Modification brings threat.
- Veterinarian asserts completely. Marketing buzz around new software application commonly obscures bigger underlying problems. Deep due diligence is important.
- Pick simplicity over features. Well-designed tools must make your work life easier, not extra difficult and messy.
- Transparency develops trust. Opaque pricing, dubious reseller terms, and finger-pointing to avert issues damages trust.
- Look for unbiased reviews. Delighted assistance reviews indicate much less if excessive concerns suggest poor total functionality.
- Excellence is difficult. No solitary remedy can perfectly fulfill every special service need. Discover the least-bad fit.
- Advancement over transformation. Step-by-step renovations typically exceed risky wholesale reinvention of what currently functions penalty.
In other words, I found out to be much more cynical of “as well excellent to be true” marketing claims and much less lured by the attraction of glossy new items. The tools you use daily need to earn trust fund via transparency and efficiency, not glossy advertising.