As a firm proprietor for over a decade, I count on software and automation to enhance operations and deliver outcomes. So when GoHighLevel emerged on the scene couple of years back, it most definitely caught my attention GoHighLevel Facebook Lead Forms.
The idea was attractive– an all-in-one customer administration platform with marketing, sales, and solution devices incorporated together. As an entrepreneur always wanting to streamline and scale my organization, it looked like a desire come true theoretically. That would not want a single solution that does it all?
Yet in this in-depth GoHighLevel evaluation, I’ll take you inside my devastating trip of trying (and failing) to switch over to this prominent new software application. You’ll learn:
If you’re considering whether GoHighLevel is right for your own service needs, with any luck you can learn from my agonizing mistakes and blew up expectations.
Looter: I do NOT recommend GoHighLevel. If you require a CRM, start with this checklist of best CRMs instead. I use Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re looking for a sales, marketing, and project monitoring option to GoHighLevel, after that right here are a few we recommend.
Backstory: Why I Thought About Switching from Keap
To recognize what attracted me to GoHighLevel in the first place, you need context about my previous arrangement. For over 5 years I had been happily relying upon Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) to satisfy all my client monitoring and automation needs.
I located Keap user-friendly to make use of and it took care of whatever I required– CRM, e-mail marketing, sales funnels, membership sites, and customer support.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are created to help small businesses maintain their clients while adding brand-new ones effortlessly. Automate follow-ups with emails and messages, guaranteeing leads and clients obtain the best messages at the right time. Usage web site and social media kinds to improve lead follow-up, and manage your development with simple appointment scheduling and lead monitoring. Boost sales with automated estimating, invoicing, and repayment processing, maximizing your time. With Keap, small businesses can conserve 10 hours each week and rise revenue by 39%. Beginning with a 14-day free trial, no charge card needed.
Why we like Keap
Keap offers a thorough consumer relationship management (CRM) and marketing automation option customized for local business and entrepreneurs. We appreciate Keap’s concentrate on streamlining sales procedures and supporting customer relationships with powerful automation devices. The platform’s all-in-one method combines CRM, email marketing, invoicing, and task management, making it particularly attractive for companies looking to combine their tech stack.
Generally, it just functioned reliably with minimal difficulty or maintenance needed. My open and click-through prices were wonderful (like 35% fantastic). Automations ran efficiently with no concerns.
So why on earth was I lured to uproot my entire functional structure from a system that worked to try something unproven and untested?
In hindsight I can confess I got attracted by the siren phone call of “glossy things disorder”. You understand the sensation: when everybody’s talking about a brand-new tool that will reinvent your business … The turf typically looks greener on the other side, and I wondered whether GoHighLevel may decrease rubbing points that I ‘d learned to tolerate throughout the years with Keap.
I withstood at first, yet a couple of more frustrations led me to believe perhaps it was time for a change.
The Investment: Moving My Agency to GoHighLevel
Earlier this year I made a decision to take the plunge. I registered for HighLevel’s Agency plan at $297/month, spending substantially more than the $97/month starter price.
This wasn’t a choice I took lightly. I recognized switching over platforms was going to need moving all my Keap data and essentially reconstructing my whole technology facilities from the ground up making use of every one of the GoHighLevel integrations available.
Below’s a review of just a few of the effort called for:
- Manually exporting 20,000+ email customer documents
- Recreating dozens of automations and workflows
- Relocating client accounts, notes, and task data to the brand-new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe invoicing integration
- Setting up landing pages, coupons, and sales funnels all over once more
- Learning a totally international UX and interface layout
Done in, I invested around 30-40 tedious hours of setup job transitioning every little thing over– not to mention dealing with lost efficiency during the switch.
But ultimately, it was a computed financial investment I agreed to make. I figured some temporary pain would repay with GoHighLevel providing a far better long-lasting solution for my company, Dripify. Oh just how incorrect I was …
It just took me concerning a month of hands-on usage to understand I had made a huge mistake. The concerns began piling up swiftly, up until it reached a point I had to reduce my losses and change back to Keap entirely.
Allow’s walk through the horrible problems I came across.
Protection Issues & Numerous 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 series for onboarding brand-new email subscribers, onboarding brand-new clients, automating follow-ups for webinar registrations, sending out occasion pointers, taking care of membership expirations and far more.
Every little thing seemed to be working penalty … until unexpectedly it wasn’t. One early morning, I woke up to discover 171 completely pointless emails had been sent to customers who need to NOT have obtained them. This took place 3 days straight, with a various set of 160 individuals daily.
I anxiously tried troubleshooting and rebuilding the automation from scratch. However the trouble persisted.
When I desperately reached out to their support group, they slightly claimed “web server issues” were responsible. But this description didn’t make any kind of sense, given that the errors proceeded occurring each early morning like clockwork unconnected to any type of downtime.
In my mind, this substantial failure was totally inappropriate and just really did not benefit my service. I have countless contacts relying upon my automated campaigns running efficiently.
So if GoHighLevel was going to be absolutely unstable, just how could I delegate mission-critical workflows and delicate client data to their modern technology?
The unintuitive interface only compounded these concerns …
Irritating UX
Originating from Keap where every little thing was smooth and user-friendly, GoHighLevel’s learning contour felt high and complicated.
Straightforward tasks like modifying workflows entailed excavating through menu systems that were all over the place. Key setups were unexplainably scattered in totally various areas. Moving in between functions really felt disjointed or confusing.
I’ll inform you what I suggest by discussing their funnel builder as an instance. There were 3 separate 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 expanded on contrary sides of the screen. What!?
As someone who values clean, thoughtful layout, this seriously irritated me.
It enhanced that GoHighLevel still felt like a work-in-progress as opposed to a sleek item ready for prime-time usage. Their concerns seemed focused on cramming in every feature imaginable, with bad usability as a second thought.
And speaking of features, I soon recognized the small cost tag included pricey concessions …
Misleading Pricing GoHighLevel Facebook Lead Forms
Among GoHighLevel’s largest selling points is the economical price for access to many features. But I rapidly learned this affordable base expense was misleading.
They nickle-and-dimed customers with erratic fees for core performance. All of a sudden my bank card statements had vague $10 costs from GoHighLevel occasionally.
As it ended up, you obtain billed whenever you send an e-mail with their servers. So for high quantity customers, this amounted to thousands of dollars in unanticipated expenses.
Between these per-email costs and paying additional for deliverability add-ons like Mailgun, my “inexpensive” GoHighLevel registration ended up setting you back significantly greater than my Keap plan.
The low sticker price was tempting, but 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 very carefully supported email open prices drop virtually over night after switching to GoHighLevel.
Previously, my audience involvement consistently hit 35-40% open rates in Keap month after month. Once I moved their records over to GoHighLevel, performance tanked instantly to a pathetic 9% open rate.
Regardless of how much I optimized my sending methods or attempted every fixing trick, I might barely nudge open rates back right into the teenagers– still a 50%+ decrease from my previous criteria GoHighLevel Facebook Lead Forms.
Let me repeat: my exact same audience and e-mails unexpectedly had terrible interaction. The only point I can believe that would be causing this was whatever was occurring behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a company so dependent on email marketing, this was a big deal.
In between the crippling deliverability issues, hidden fees, broken features, and terrible interface, I had ultimately reached my limit …
Why I Quit GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Just 45 days after moving my agency to GoHighLevel, I understood I had made a substantial error. The disadvantages drastically exceeded any benefits.
No software program is ideal, however the large volume of problems was past acceptable.
At the end of the day, software program boils down to trust. If I can not trust it to take care of crucial features competently or think a vendor has my benefits in mind, then it’s time to leave– also after investing significant time, cash, and initiative migrating.
So I made the tough call to turn around course and return back to Keap entirely just weeks after going all in on GoHighLevel. Allow’s discover what I gained from this ordeal.
Trick Takeaways: What I Learned From My GoHighLevel Error
My time with HighLevel can be summarized as a costly ill fortune. Yet in hindsight, it educated me a couple of essential lessons:
- Adhere to what works. Don’t distress what’s functioning unless something is definitively far better across the board. Adjustment brings risk.
- Veterinarian declares extensively. Marketing hype around brand-new software application often obscures bigger underlying problems. Deep due persistance is vital.
- Pick simplicity over features. Well-designed tools ought to make your work life simpler, not more complex and untidy.
- Openness develops trust fund. Nontransparent pricing, unethical reseller terms, and finger-pointing to avert problems damages count on.
- Seek honest testimonials. Pleased support evaluates imply much less if extreme issues suggest poor general functionality.
- Excellence is difficult. No single solution can completely satisfy every special company need. Locate the least-bad fit.
- Development over transformation. Step-by-step improvements normally exceed risky wholesale reinvention of what already works fine.
In short, I discovered to be a lot more doubtful of “also great to be true” marketing claims and much less attracted by the appeal of shiny new items. The devices you utilize daily need to gain trust fund through transparency and efficiency, not glossy advertising.