As a company owner for over a decade, I count on software and automation to enhance procedures and deliver outcomes. So when GoHighLevel arised on the scene couple of years back, it absolutely captured my attention GoHighLevel DKIM.
The concept was appealing– an all-in-one client monitoring system with marketing, sales, and service tools incorporated with each other. As a business owner always looking to streamline and scale my business, it appeared like a desire come to life on paper. Who wouldn’t desire a solitary service that does it all?
Yet in this thorough GoHighLevel evaluation, I’ll take you inside my disastrous journey of attempting (and stopping working) to change to this prominent new software program. You’ll discover:
If you’re taking into consideration whether GoHighLevel is right for your own service requirements, ideally you can learn from my excruciating mistakes and inflated assumptions.
Looter: I do NOT suggest GoHighLevel. If you require a CRM, start with this listing of best CRMs rather. I make use of Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re looking for a sales, marketing, and project management option to GoHighLevel, after that right here are a few we recommend.
Backstory: Why I Considered Switching Over from Keap
To understand what attracted me to GoHighLevel to begin with, you require context concerning my previous arrangement. For over 5 years I had actually been gladly relying upon Keap (previously Infusionsoft) to satisfy all my customer management and automation requirements.
I discovered Keap instinctive to use and it handled everything I required– CRM, e-mail marketing, sales funnels, membership websites, and customer assistance.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are created to help small companies keep their clients while adding new ones effortlessly. Automate follow-ups with e-mails and messages, making certain leads and clients receive the ideal messages at the right time. Use site and social networks forms to enhance lead follow-up, and manage your development with easy visit scheduling and lead tracking. Boost sales with automated estimating, invoicing, and settlement handling, maximizing your time. With Keap, local business can save 10 hours per week and rise income by 39%. Start with a 14-day free trial, no charge card required.
Why we like Keap
Keap uses a comprehensive customer partnership administration (CRM) and marketing automation service tailored for local business and business owners. We value Keap’s focus on improving sales procedures and supporting consumer partnerships via effective automation devices. The system’s all-in-one approach integrates CRM, e-mail marketing, invoicing, and job administration, making it particularly attractive for businesses wanting to settle their tech pile.
Generally, it simply worked accurately with very little hassle or upkeep required. My open and click-through rates were terrific (like 35% great). Automations ran smoothly with no concerns.
So why on earth was I tempted to uproot my entire functional foundation from a system that worked to attempt something unverified and untested?
In knowledge I can admit I got seduced by the siren phone call of “glossy item syndrome”. You know the sensation: when everyone’s discussing a brand-new tool that will revolutionize your company … The lawn usually looks greener beyond, and I questioned whether GoHighLevel could lower friction points that I would certainly found out to endure over the years with Keap.
I withstood initially, however a few even more frustrations led me to think maybe it was time for a change.
The Investment: Moving My Company to GoHighLevel
Previously this year I chose to take the plunge. I signed up for HighLevel’s Company plan at $297/month, investing dramatically more than the $97/month starter price.
This had not been a decision I ignored. I recognized switching systems was mosting likely to call for migrating all my Keap information and essentially reconstructing my entire technology infrastructure from square one using all of the GoHighLevel integrations offered.
Here’s a review of just a few of the initiative required:
- Manually exporting 20,000+ e-mail customer documents
- Recreating dozens of automations and workflows
- Moving client profiles, notes, and project data to the brand-new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe invoicing integration
- Setting up landing pages, promos, and sales funnels all over again
- Learning an entirely international UX and interface layout
Done in, I invested around 30-40 tedious hours of arrangement work transitioning whatever over– and also dealing with lost performance during the switch.
Yet inevitably, it was a calculated financial investment I was willing to make. I figured some temporary discomfort would certainly settle with GoHighLevel providing a far better lasting remedy for my business, Dripify. Oh how wrong I was …
It only took me about a month of hands-on usage to understand I had made a big error. The concerns started piling up quickly, until it reached a factor I needed to reduce my losses and switch back to Keap entirely.
Let’s go through the nightmarish troubles I came across.
Safety Issues & Lots of Vermin
Given 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 sequences for onboarding brand-new email customers, onboarding new clients, automating follow-ups for webinar registrations, sending out occasion reminders, taking care of subscription expirations and far more.
Everything appeared to be operating penalty … up until suddenly it wasn’t. One early morning, I woke up to discover 171 totally irrelevant emails had actually been sent to users who should NOT have actually received them. This occurred three days straight, with a various batch of 160 individuals every day.
I frantically attempted troubleshooting and restoring the automation from scratch. However the problem lingered.
When I desperately reached out to their support group, they vaguely asserted “web server problems” were at fault. But this description really did not make any kind of feeling, given that the errors proceeded taking place each early morning like clockwork unassociated to any type of downtime.
In my mind, this large failing was totally undesirable and just didn’t help my business. I have thousands of calls depending on my automated campaigns running smoothly.
So if GoHighLevel was going to be entirely undependable, how could I turn over mission-critical workflows and sensitive customer data to their innovation?
The unintuitive user interface just worsened these concerns …
Irritating UX
Originating from Keap where every little thing was seamless and instinctive, GoHighLevel’s learning curve really felt high and complex.
Simple jobs like editing workflows involved excavating with menu systems that were all over the place. Trick settings were unexplainably scattered in absolutely different sections. Relocating in between features felt disjointed or confusing.
I’ll tell you what I indicate by discussing their funnel builder as an instance. There were 3 different settings panels to take care of total, individual, and product arrangements. Yet for some insane reason, the web links to gain access to each of these core settings were expanded on contrary sides of the screen. What!?
As someone that values clean, thoughtful layout, this seriously annoyed me.
It enhanced that GoHighLevel still seemed like a work-in-progress instead of a polished item all set for prime-time usage. Their priorities appeared concentrated on cramming in every feature imaginable, with bad use as a second thought.
And talking features, I soon realized the affordable price tag featured pricey compromises …
Deceptive Pricing GoHighLevel DKIM
One of GoHighLevel’s biggest marketing points is the cost effective price for access to many features. Yet I quickly learned this low-cost base cost was deceptive.
They nickle-and-dimed individuals with sporadic fees for core capability. All of a sudden my credit card statements had unclear $10 costs from GoHighLevel here and there.
As it turned out, you get billed whenever you send an email with their web servers. So for high quantity individuals, this amounted to hundreds of bucks in unanticipated expenses.
Between these per-email fees and paying extra for deliverability add-ons like Mailgun, my “cost effective” GoHighLevel subscription ended up costing significantly MORE than my Keap plan.
The reduced price tag was alluring, however just not reasonable in practice. This bait-and-switch left a negative preference in my mouth.
Email Fees Suffered
The final dealbreaker was seeing my very carefully nurtured e-mail open prices drop practically over night after switching over to GoHighLevel.
Previously, my target market interaction regularly hit 35-40% open prices in Keap month after month. But once I moved their documents over to GoHighLevel, efficiency tanked quickly to a pathetic 9% open rate.
No matter how much I optimized my sending methods or attempted every repairing method, I might hardly nudge open prices back right into the teens– still a 50%+ decrease from my previous standards GoHighLevel DKIM.
Let me repeat: my exact same target market and emails suddenly had awful involvement. The only point I can think that would be creating this was whatever was taking place behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a company so depending on email marketing, this was a big deal.
Between the crippling deliverability concerns, hidden charges, busted features, and horrible interface, I had lastly reached my limit …
Why I Give up GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Just 45 days after moving my firm to GoHighLevel, I recognized I had actually made a significant error. The cons substantially exceeded any benefits.
No software program is best, yet the sheer quantity of problems was past appropriate.
At the end of the day, software application boils down to count on. If I can not trust it to take care of crucial features capably or believe a supplier has my best interests in mind, then it’s time to leave– even after investing substantial time, money, and initiative migrating.
So I made the hard call to reverse course and return back to Keap totally simply weeks after going all in on GoHighLevel. Let’s explore what I picked up from this ordeal.
Secret Takeaways: What I Learned From My GoHighLevel Blunder
My time with HighLevel can be summarized as an expensive misadventure. However in knowledge, it educated me a few essential lessons:
- Adhere to what jobs. Don’t disturb what’s functioning unless something is definitively much better across the board. Adjustment brings threat.
- Vet claims extensively. Marketing buzz around brand-new software program often covers larger underlying defects. Deep due persistance is necessary.
- Pick simplicity over features. Properly designed devices ought to make your work life less complicated, not much more complex and untidy.
- Openness builds depend on. Opaque pricing, unethical reseller terms, and finger-pointing to avert troubles damages trust.
- Seek unbiased evaluations. Satisfied support evaluates suggest less if extreme concerns imply poor overall usability.
- Excellence is difficult. No solitary service can perfectly fulfill every unique company requirement. Discover the least-bad fit.
- Advancement over transformation. Step-by-step enhancements typically exceed risky wholesale reinvention of what already functions penalty.
In short, I discovered to be extra cynical of “too great to be true” marketing insurance claims and less attracted by the attraction of shiny brand-new items. The devices you utilize daily must make count on through openness and performance, not slick advertising.