As an agency owner for over a years, I depend on software application and automation to improve procedures and supply results. So when GoHighLevel arised on the scene couple of years back, it definitely captured my interest GoHighLevel E-Commerce Stores.
The concept was attractive– an all-in-one client administration platform with marketing, sales, and service devices integrated together. As a business owner constantly seeking to simplify and scale my business, it felt like a dream become a reality theoretically. Who would not want a solitary remedy that does it all?
However in this in-depth GoHighLevel evaluation, I’ll take you inside my disastrous journey of trying (and falling short) to switch over to this preferred new software application. You’ll learn:
If you’re taking into consideration whether GoHighLevel is right for your own organization demands, hopefully you can pick up from my excruciating errors and inflated assumptions.
Spoiler: I do NOT suggest GoHighLevel. If you require a CRM, begin with this list of ideal CRMs rather. I use Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re trying to find a sales, marketing, and job management alternative to GoHighLevel, then right here are a couple of we suggest.
Backstory: Why I Took Into Consideration Changing from Keap
To understand what attracted me to GoHighLevel to begin with, you need context about my previous arrangement. For over 5 years I had been gladly relying upon Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) to fulfill all my customer administration and automation needs.
I found Keap intuitive to make use of and it managed whatever I required– CRM, email marketing, sales funnels, membership websites, and customer assistance.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are made to aid local business keep their clients while including new ones effortlessly. Automate follow-ups with emails and texts, making sure leads and customers get the right messages at the right time. Usage internet site and social media forms to streamline lead follow-up, and manage your development with simple consultation scheduling and lead tracking. Boost sales with automated pricing quote, invoicing, and payment processing, liberating your time. With Keap, small companies can conserve 10 hours each week and boost profits by 39%. Begin with a 14-day free trial, no credit card called for.
Why we like Keap
Keap supplies a comprehensive client relationship monitoring (CRM) and marketing automation remedy customized for small companies and business owners. We value Keap’s focus on simplifying sales processes and supporting customer connections via powerful automation tools. The platform’s all-in-one strategy combines CRM, email marketing, invoicing, and task monitoring, making it especially appealing for businesses seeking to combine their tech pile.
For the most part, it simply functioned accurately with marginal difficulty or upkeep called for. My open and click-through rates were excellent (like 35% excellent). Automations ran smoothly without any problems.
So why on earth was I lured to uproot my entire operational structure from a system that worked to attempt something unproven and untried?
In hindsight I can confess I obtained seduced by the siren call of “glossy object disorder”. You recognize the feeling: when everyone’s talking about a brand-new device that will change your business … The turf often looks greener on the other side, and I wondered whether GoHighLevel may reduce rubbing factors that I would certainly learned to tolerate for many years with Keap.
I withstood at first, but a couple of even more frustrations led me to assume perhaps it was time for an adjustment.
The Financial investment: Migrating My Firm to GoHighLevel
Previously this year I chose to take the plunge. I enrolled in HighLevel’s Agency plan at $297/month, investing dramatically greater than the $97/month starter price.
This had not been a choice I ignored. I understood switching platforms was mosting likely to require migrating all my Keap data and essentially reconstructing my whole tech infrastructure from the ground up using every one of the GoHighLevel integrations readily available.
Right here’s a review of just some of the effort needed:
- Manually exporting 20,000+ email subscriber documents
- Recreating dozens of automations and workflows
- Moving client profiles, notes, and project information to the new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe billing integration
- Setting up landing pages, promos, and sales funnels throughout once again
- Learning a totally international UX and interface layout
Done in, I invested around 30-40 tedious hours of arrangement job transitioning everything over– in addition to taking care of lost efficiency during the switch.
Yet eventually, it was a computed investment I wanted to make. I figured some temporary discomfort would repay with GoHighLevel providing a better long-lasting service for my company, Dripify. Oh exactly how wrong I was …
It only took me regarding a month of hands-on use to realize I had actually made a large error. The issues started piling up quickly, till it got to a point I needed to reduce my losses and switch back to Keap totally.
Allow’s go through the horrible troubles I came across.
Protection Issues & Lots of Vermin
Offered GoHighLevel placed itself as an all-in-one automation system, I made sure to diligently recreate each and every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These included series for onboarding new email subscribers, onboarding new customers, automating follow-ups for webinar enrollments, sending occasion pointers, managing membership expirations and much more.
Whatever seemed to be functioning fine … till unexpectedly it had not been. One morning, I awoke to find 171 entirely unimportant e-mails had actually been sent to individuals who must NOT have actually gotten them. This occurred three days in a row, with a different set of 160 people daily.
I desperately attempted troubleshooting and rebuilding the automation from square one. However the problem continued.
When I frantically reached out to their assistance team, they slightly claimed “web server concerns” were to blame. Yet this explanation really did not make any kind of sense, because the errors proceeded happening each early morning like clockwork unconnected to any downtime.
In my mind, this substantial failing was totally inappropriate and simply didn’t help my service. I have hundreds of contacts counting on my automated campaigns running smoothly.
So if GoHighLevel was going to be completely undependable, exactly how could I entrust mission-critical workflows and delicate client data to their technology?
The unintuitive interface only worsened these concerns …
Irritating UX
Originating from Keap where everything was smooth and user-friendly, GoHighLevel’s learning contour really felt steep and complex.
Easy jobs like modifying workflows included digging with food selection systems that were all over the place. Trick setups were unexplainably scattered in completely various areas. Moving in between functions really felt disjointed or complex.
I’ll tell you what I suggest by discussing their funnel builder as an instance. There were 3 different setups panels to handle general, individual, and item arrangements. Yet for some insane factor, the links to access each of these core settings were expanded on contrary sides of the display. What!?
As someone that values tidy, thoughtful style, this seriously annoyed me.
It reinforced that GoHighLevel still felt like a work-in-progress rather than a sleek product all set for prime-time usage. Their top priorities seemed focused on stuffing in every feature imaginable, with poor functionality as a second thought.
And speaking of features, I soon recognized the low price tag featured costly concessions …
Misleading Pricing GoHighLevel E-Commerce Stores
One of GoHighLevel’s most significant selling factors is the affordable cost for accessibility to many features. Yet I swiftly learned this cheap base cost was deceptive.
They nickle-and-dimed customers with occasional charges for core capability. Suddenly my charge card declarations had vague $10 charges from GoHighLevel here and there.
As it turned out, you obtain billed every single time you send out an e-mail with their servers. So for high quantity individuals, this added up to thousands of dollars in unforeseen expenses.
In between these per-email costs and paying additional for deliverability attachments like Mailgun, my “inexpensive” GoHighLevel subscription ended up setting you back dramatically greater than my Keap plan.
The low price tag was tempting, but just not sensible in practice. This bait-and-switch left a poor preference in my mouth.
Email Rates Suffered
The last dealbreaker was seeing my thoroughly nurtured e-mail open prices plunge virtually over night after switching over to GoHighLevel.
Previously, my audience interaction consistently hit 35-40% open rates in Keap month after month. Once I migrated their records over to GoHighLevel, efficiency tanked instantaneously to a pitiful 9% open price.
Despite just how much I enhanced my sending methods or tried every repairing technique, I can hardly nudge open prices back right into the teens– still a 50%+ decrease from my previous standards GoHighLevel E-Commerce Stores.
Let me repeat: my exact same audience and e-mails suddenly had terrible interaction. The only point I could assume that would be triggering this was whatever was occurring behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a firm so based on email marketing, this was a big deal.
Between the debilitating deliverability issues, concealed charges, broken features, and terrible user interface, I had ultimately reached my limit …
Why I Quit GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Simply 45 days after migrating my agency to GoHighLevel, I understood I had made a significant error. The disadvantages substantially exceeded any kind of benefits.
No software is best, but the large quantity of problems was past acceptable.
At the end of the day, software application boils down to depend on. If I can not trust it to manage critical functions effectively or think a vendor has my best interests in mind, after that it’s time to leave– also after spending significant time, money, and effort migrating.
So I made the hard phone call to turn around course and return back to Keap completely just weeks after going done in on GoHighLevel. Let’s discover what I picked up from this debacle.
Trick Takeaways: What I Learned From My GoHighLevel Mistake
My time with HighLevel can be summed up as a costly ill fortune. However in knowledge, it taught me a couple of crucial lessons:
- Stick to what works. Do not disturb what’s functioning unless something is definitively better across the board. Adjustment brings danger.
- Vet claims completely. Marketing buzz around new software application commonly obscures bigger underlying problems. Deep due diligence is crucial.
- Choose simplicity over features. Well-designed devices ought to make your job life simpler, not much more challenging and messy.
- Transparency builds count on. Nontransparent pricing, shady reseller terms, and finger-pointing to escape troubles ruins depend on.
- Look for impartial reviews. Delighted support examines imply much less if extreme problems suggest poor overall functionality.
- Perfection is difficult. No solitary option can perfectly satisfy every one-of-a-kind company requirement. Find the least-bad fit.
- Evolution over change. Incremental enhancements normally exceed risky wholesale reinvention of what already works penalty.
In short, I learned to be a lot more hesitant of “also good to be real” marketing cases and much less tempted by the attraction of glossy new objects. The devices you make use of daily need to make trust fund with transparency and efficiency, not slick advertising.