As an agency owner for over a years, I count on software and automation to improve procedures and deliver results. So when GoHighLevel emerged on the scene few years back, it most definitely caught my focus GoHighLevel Demo Request.
The idea was attractive– an all-in-one customer management system with marketing, sales, and solution devices integrated together. As an entrepreneur always looking to simplify and scale my service, it felt like a desire come true on paper. Who wouldn’t want a single option that does it all?
Yet in this in-depth GoHighLevel review, I’ll take you inside my devastating journey of trying (and failing) to change to this popular 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 unpleasant blunders and blew up assumptions.
Looter: I do NOT suggest GoHighLevel. If you need a CRM, start with this checklist of ideal CRMs rather. I use Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re looking for a sales, marketing, and task monitoring choice to GoHighLevel, after that here are a couple of we advise.
Backstory: Why I Took Into Consideration Switching from Keap
To comprehend what attracted me to GoHighLevel to begin with, you need context regarding my previous setup. For over 5 years I had been happily depending on Keap (previously Infusionsoft) to satisfy all my customer monitoring and automation needs.
I found Keap intuitive to use and it took care of whatever I required– CRM, email marketing, sales funnels, subscription websites, and client assistance.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are created to help small companies keep their customers while including new ones easily. Automate follow-ups with emails and texts, making sure leads and clients get the best messages at the correct time. Use web site and social media forms to improve lead follow-up, and manage your growth with simple appointment organizing 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 each week and boost earnings by 39%. Beginning with a 14-day free trial, no bank card needed.
Why we like Keap
Keap uses a thorough client relationship administration (CRM) and marketing automation service customized for small businesses and business owners. We value Keap’s concentrate on enhancing sales procedures and supporting consumer partnerships via effective automation tools. The platform’s all-in-one method incorporates CRM, e-mail marketing, invoicing, and job management, making it specifically eye-catching for organizations seeking to settle their technology pile.
Generally, it simply worked reliably with minimal difficulty or upkeep called for. My open and click-through prices were fantastic (like 35% wonderful). Automations ran smoothly without issues.
So why on earth was I attracted to uproot my whole operational foundation from a system that worked to try something unproven and untested?
In hindsight I can confess I got attracted by the siren call of “shiny object syndrome”. You understand the sensation: when every person’s talking about a brand-new device that will certainly reinvent your business … The grass typically looks greener on the other side, and I wondered whether GoHighLevel could decrease friction points that I would certainly learned to tolerate over the years with Keap.
I withstood at first, yet a couple of even more aggravations led me to believe possibly it was time for a change.
The Financial investment: Moving My Firm to GoHighLevel
Previously this year I made a decision to take the plunge. I signed up for HighLevel’s Firm plan at $297/month, investing significantly greater than the $97/month starter expense.
This had not been a decision I took lightly. I understood switching over systems was mosting likely to require moving all my Keap information and basically reconstructing my whole tech framework from scratch making use of all of the GoHighLevel integrations offered.
Below’s an introduction of simply a few of the initiative needed:
- Manually exporting 20,000+ e-mail customer records
- Recreating loads of automations and workflows
- Moving client accounts, notes, and project data to the new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe payment integration
- Establishing landing pages, coupons, and sales funnels around again
- Learning a completely international UX and user interface design
Done in, I invested around 30-40 laborious hours of configuration work transitioning everything over– in addition to managing shed efficiency during the switch.
However inevitably, it was a calculated financial investment I agreed to make. I figured some short-term discomfort would certainly settle with GoHighLevel supplying a much better long-lasting service for my business, Dripify. Oh just how incorrect I was …
It just took me about a month of hands-on use to recognize I had actually made a huge mistake. The issues started piling up quickly, up until it got to a factor I needed to cut my losses and switch back to Keap entirely.
Allow’s go through the horrible issues I came across.
Security Issues & Many Bugs
Provided GoHighLevel positioned itself as an all-in-one automation system, I took care to meticulously recreate every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These included series for onboarding new email subscribers, onboarding new customers, automating follow-ups for webinar registrations, sending out event suggestions, managing subscription expirations and far more.
Whatever seemed to be operating penalty … up until instantly it wasn’t. One morning, I awoke to locate 171 completely unimportant emails had actually been sent out to customers who should NOT have actually gotten them. This occurred three days straight, with a various batch of 160 individuals each day.
I desperately attempted fixing and rebuilding the automation from the ground up. But the trouble continued.
When I seriously reached out to their support group, they vaguely claimed “server problems” were at fault. However this explanation really did not make any kind of sense, considering that the errors continued occurring each morning like clockwork unconnected to any type of downtime.
In my mind, this substantial failing was completely undesirable and just didn’t benefit my business. I have thousands of get in touches with relying on my automated campaigns running efficiently.
So if GoHighLevel was going to be absolutely unstable, how could I turn over mission-critical workflows and delicate customer data to their technology?
The unintuitive interface just worsened these issues …
Irritating UX
Originating from Keap where everything was seamless and user-friendly, GoHighLevel’s learning contour felt high and complex.
Simple tasks like editing and enhancing workflows included digging via menu systems that were all over the place. Secret settings were unexplainably spread in totally different areas. Relocating in between features felt disjointed or complicated.
I’ll tell you what I imply by speaking about their funnel builder as an example. There were 3 separate settings panels to handle general, specific, and product setups. Yet for some crazy factor, the links to access each of these core setups were spread out on opposite sides of the display. What!?
As someone that values tidy, thoughtful style, this seriously irritated me.
It strengthened that GoHighLevel still felt like a work-in-progress rather than a sleek item all set for prime-time use. Their concerns appeared concentrated on packing in every feature under the sun, with bad use as an afterthought.
And speaking of features, I soon understood the low cost tag included pricey concessions …
Misleading Pricing GoHighLevel Demo Request
Among GoHighLevel’s largest marketing points is the affordable cost for access to a lot of features. But I rapidly discovered this low-cost base expense was deceptive.
They nickle-and-dimed individuals with sporadic costs for core capability. Unexpectedly my credit card declarations had obscure $10 charges from GoHighLevel here and there.
As it turned out, you get billed each time you send an email through their servers. So for high quantity individuals, this added up to numerous dollars in unanticipated prices.
Between these per-email charges and paying added for deliverability attachments like Mailgun, my “inexpensive” GoHighLevel membership wound up costing substantially MORE than my Keap plan.
The reduced sticker price was alluring, however just not practical in practice. This bait-and-switch left a poor preference in my mouth.
Email Fees Suffered
The final dealbreaker was seeing my thoroughly supported email open prices drop practically over night after changing to GoHighLevel.
Previously, my target market interaction continually hit 35-40% open rates in Keap month after month. Once I migrated their documents over to GoHighLevel, efficiency tanked instantly to a useless 9% open rate.
Regardless of how much I optimized my sending out practices or tried every troubleshooting trick, I might hardly push open prices back into the teens– still a 50%+ decline from my previous standards GoHighLevel Demo Request.
Let me repeat: my exact same target market and emails unexpectedly had awful interaction. The only point I might assume that would be creating this was whatever was happening behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a firm so based on email marketing, this was a big deal.
In between the debilitating deliverability concerns, hidden fees, busted features, and awful user interface, I had actually finally reached my limitation …
Why I Stop GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Just 45 days after migrating my firm to GoHighLevel, I knew I had actually made a significant blunder. The disadvantages dramatically exceeded any kind of advantages.
No software program is best, yet the large quantity of problems was past appropriate.
At the end of the day, software application boils down to count on. If I can’t trust it to take care of crucial features properly or believe a vendor has my best interests in mind, then it’s time to leave– also after investing considerable time, money, and effort moving.
So I made the challenging phone call to reverse program and return back to Keap entirely just weeks after going done in on GoHighLevel. Let’s discover what I learned from this fiasco.
Secret Takeaways: What I Picked up from My GoHighLevel Blunder
My time with HighLevel can be summed up as an expensive ill fortune. Yet in hindsight, it taught me a few crucial lessons:
- Stick to what jobs. Don’t disturb what’s working unless something is definitively much better across the board. Adjustment brings threat.
- Veterinarian asserts thoroughly. Marketing buzz around new software application often covers larger underlying imperfections. Deep due diligence is necessary.
- Choose simpleness over features. Well-designed devices must make your job life less complicated, not extra difficult and unpleasant.
- Openness builds depend on. Opaque pricing, dubious reseller terms, and finger-pointing to evade issues ruins trust fund.
- Look for unbiased testimonials. Satisfied support examines mean less if excessive problems suggest poor general usability.
- Excellence is impossible. No single option can perfectly fulfill every unique company need. Locate the least-bad fit.
- Development over change. Step-by-step improvements generally exceed dangerous wholesale reinvention of what already works fine.
In short, I learned to be much more hesitant of “as well good to be true” marketing cases and less tempted by the attraction of glossy new objects. The devices you use daily need to gain depend on via transparency and performance, not glossy advertising.