As a firm proprietor for over a years, I rely upon software and automation to streamline procedures and provide results. So when GoHighLevel emerged on the scene few years back, it most definitely captured my attention GoHighLevel DMARC.
The idea was appealing– an all-in-one customer administration system with marketing, sales, and service devices incorporated with each other. As a business owner always looking to streamline and scale my business, it appeared like a dream happened on paper. That would not want a single service that does it all?
But in this comprehensive GoHighLevel evaluation, I’ll take you inside my devastating trip of attempting (and stopping working) to switch to this prominent new software program. You’ll find out:
If you’re taking into consideration whether GoHighLevel is right for your own organization demands, hopefully you can learn from my painful errors and pumped up assumptions.
Looter: I do NOT recommend GoHighLevel. If you require a CRM, start with this checklist of finest CRMs instead. I utilize Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re seeking a sales, marketing, and project management option to GoHighLevel, then below are a couple of we recommend.
Backstory: Why I Considered Changing from Keap
To comprehend what attracted me to GoHighLevel to begin with, you require context concerning my previous configuration. For over 5 years I had been gladly relying upon Keap (previously Infusionsoft) to meet all my client management and automation demands.
I located Keap instinctive to make use of and it took care of whatever I needed– CRM, email marketing, sales funnels, subscription sites, and customer support.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are developed to help local business keep their clients while adding brand-new ones easily. Automate follow-ups with e-mails and texts, making sure leads and clients get the best messages at the correct time. Use site and social media types to improve lead follow-up, and manage your growth with easy appointment scheduling and lead tracking. Boost sales with automated estimating, invoicing, and settlement processing, maximizing your time. With Keap, local business can conserve 10 hours weekly and boost income by 39%. Begin with a 14-day free trial, no credit card needed.
Why we like Keap
Keap uses a detailed client connection administration (CRM) and marketing automation solution customized for small businesses and business owners. We value Keap’s concentrate on streamlining sales procedures and nurturing customer relationships with powerful automation tools. The platform’s all-in-one approach incorporates CRM, email marketing, invoicing, and task administration, making it specifically eye-catching for businesses seeking to consolidate their technology stack.
For the most part, it simply worked reliably with minimal fuss or maintenance called for. My open and click-through prices were excellent (like 35% fantastic). Automations ran smoothly without problems.
So why in the world was I attracted to uproot my whole functional foundation from a system that functioned to attempt something unverified and untried?
In knowledge I can confess I obtained seduced by the alarm call of “shiny things syndrome”. You know the sensation: when every person’s talking about a brand-new tool that will certainly reinvent your business … The yard commonly looks greener on the other side, and I asked yourself whether GoHighLevel could lower friction points that I ‘d found out to endure throughout the years with Keap.
I resisted at first, yet a couple of even more irritations led me to assume perhaps it was time for an adjustment.
The Investment: Moving My Agency to GoHighLevel
Earlier this year I determined to start. I registered for HighLevel’s Company plan at $297/month, spending significantly more than the $97/month starter expense.
This had not been a choice I ignored. I understood switching over platforms was going to need moving all my Keap data and basically reconstructing my whole technology facilities from scratch utilizing all of the GoHighLevel integrations offered.
Right here’s an overview of simply a few of the initiative needed:
- By hand exporting 20,000+ e-mail subscriber records
- Recreating loads of automations and workflows
- Relocating customer accounts, notes, and job information to the brand-new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe payment integration
- Setting up landing pages, discounts, and sales funnels throughout once more
- Learning a completely foreign UX and interface design
Done in, I invested around 30-40 laborious hours of setup work transitioning every little thing over– as well as handling lost productivity during the switch.
However inevitably, it was a computed investment I was willing to make. I figured some short-term discomfort would certainly repay with GoHighLevel offering a better long-term solution for my business, Dripify. Oh how incorrect I was …
It only took me about a month of hands-on use to understand I had actually made a huge blunder. The problems started piling up swiftly, till it reached a factor I had to cut my losses and switch over back to Keap entirely.
Allow’s go through the horrible problems I experienced.
Security Issues & Several Vermin
Provided GoHighLevel placed itself as an all-in-one automation platform, I took care to diligently recreate every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These consisted of series for onboarding new email subscribers, onboarding brand-new clients, automating follow-ups for webinar registrations, sending occasion reminders, taking care of membership expirations and far more.
Everything appeared to be operating penalty … up until unexpectedly it wasn’t. One morning, I woke up to find 171 totally irrelevant e-mails had been sent out to users who need to NOT have received them. This happened three days straight, with a various set of 160 people daily.
I desperately tried fixing and rebuilding the automation from the ground up. But the trouble lingered.
When I frantically connected to their assistance team, they vaguely asserted “server issues” were responsible. Yet this explanation didn’t make any type of feeling, given that the errors continued taking place each early morning like clockwork unrelated to any type of downtime.
In my mind, this large failing was entirely undesirable and simply really did not help my service. I have thousands of calls counting on my automated campaigns running efficiently.
So if GoHighLevel was going to be entirely unstable, just how could I turn over mission-critical workflows and delicate customer information to their innovation?
The unintuitive interface only worsened these issues …
Frustrating UX
Coming from Keap where everything was smooth and instinctive, GoHighLevel’s learning curve felt steep and challenging.
Simple jobs like editing and enhancing workflows included digging with food selection systems that were all over the place. Secret settings were unexplainably spread in completely different sections. Relocating in between features felt disjointed or confusing.
I’ll tell you what I imply by discussing their funnel builder as an example. There were 3 different settings panels to take care of general, specific, and item setups. Yet for some insane factor, the web links to access each of these core settings were spread out on contrary sides of the screen. What!?
As someone who values tidy, thoughtful design, this seriously upset me.
It strengthened that GoHighLevel still seemed like a work-in-progress instead of a polished item ready for prime-time use. Their priorities appeared focused on cramming in every feature imaginable, with poor usability as an afterthought.
And talking features, I soon understood the low cost tag came with costly compromises …
Deceptive Pricing GoHighLevel DMARC
Among GoHighLevel’s largest selling points is the budget-friendly price for access to so many features. However I promptly learned this affordable base expense was misleading.
They nickle-and-dimed customers with erratic costs for core performance. Unexpectedly my bank card statements had obscure $10 charges from GoHighLevel occasionally.
As it turned out, you obtain billed each time you send an email through their web servers. So for high volume users, this amounted to hundreds of bucks in unforeseen prices.
Between these per-email charges and paying extra for deliverability add-ons like Mailgun, my “budget friendly” GoHighLevel subscription ended up setting you back considerably MORE than my Keap plan.
The reduced sticker price was tempting, however just not practical in practice. This bait-and-switch left a poor taste in my mouth.
Email Rates Suffered
The last dealbreaker was seeing my very carefully nurtured email open rates drop almost over night after changing to GoHighLevel.
Previously, my audience interaction constantly hit 35-40% open rates in Keap month after month. But once I migrated their documents over to GoHighLevel, efficiency tanked instantaneously to a worthless 9% open rate.
Despite just how much I optimized my sending methods or attempted every fixing technique, I could hardly nudge open rates back right into the teenagers– still a 50%+ decline from my previous standards GoHighLevel DMARC.
Let me repeat: my exact same audience and emails all of a sudden had terrible involvement. The only point I might assume that would certainly be triggering this was whatever was occurring behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a firm so dependent on e-mail marketing, this was a big deal.
In between the debilitating deliverability problems, hidden fees, broken features, and awful user interface, I had ultimately reached my restriction …
Why I Stop GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Just 45 days after moving my agency to GoHighLevel, I knew I had made a huge blunder. The disadvantages significantly surpassed any kind of advantages.
No software application is perfect, however the sheer volume of troubles was beyond acceptable.
At the end of the day, software boils down to trust. If I can not trust it to deal with essential features competently or believe a vendor has my benefits in mind, after that it’s time to walk away– also after investing substantial time, money, and effort moving.
So I made the challenging phone call to turn around course and return back to Keap completely simply weeks after going done in on GoHighLevel. Let’s discover what I learned from this ordeal.
Trick Takeaways: What I Picked up from My GoHighLevel Blunder
My time with HighLevel can be summarized as an expensive ill fortune. Yet in hindsight, it showed me a few crucial lessons:
- Stay with what works. Do not upset what’s functioning unless something is definitively far better across the board. Adjustment brings danger.
- Veterinarian asserts extensively. Marketing hype around new software program often obscures larger underlying flaws. Deep due diligence is vital.
- Select simplicity over features. Properly designed devices need to make your job life simpler, not extra complicated and untidy.
- Transparency develops trust fund. Nontransparent pricing, unethical reseller terms, and finger-pointing to evade issues damages trust.
- Look for objective testimonials. Delighted assistance reviews indicate less if excessive issues suggest poor total functionality.
- Excellence is difficult. No solitary solution can completely meet every special service requirement. Locate the least-bad fit.
- Evolution over revolution. Step-by-step improvements typically exceed dangerous wholesale reinvention of what currently works fine.
Basically, I learned to be more doubtful of “too great to be real” marketing insurance claims and much less attracted by the appeal of glossy new items. The tools you use daily need to gain count on with openness and performance, not slick advertising.