As a firm owner for over a years, I rely upon software program and automation to improve operations and supply outcomes. So when GoHighLevel arised on the scene few years back, it certainly captured my attention GoHighLevel Facebook Shop.
The idea was enticing– an all-in-one customer administration system with marketing, sales, and service tools incorporated with each other. As an entrepreneur always aiming to simplify and scale my organization, it seemed like a dream become a reality on paper. Who would not desire a single service that does it all?
But in this comprehensive GoHighLevel review, I’ll take you inside my dreadful journey of trying (and failing) to switch over to this preferred new software application. You’ll discover:
If you’re thinking about whether GoHighLevel is right for your very own business needs, hopefully you can pick up from my uncomfortable mistakes and inflated expectations.
Spoiler: I do NOT recommend GoHighLevel. If you require a CRM, start with this listing of finest CRMs instead. I use Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re looking for a sales, marketing, and project management option to GoHighLevel, after that below are a couple of we suggest.
Backstory: Why I Considered Changing from Keap
To comprehend what attracted me to GoHighLevel in the first place, 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 requirements.
I found Keap instinctive to utilize and it took care of everything I required– CRM, email marketing, sales funnels, membership sites, and customer assistance.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are made to help small companies keep their customers while adding new ones easily. Automate follow-ups with e-mails and texts, ensuring leads and customers obtain the ideal messages at the correct time. Use site and social networks kinds to improve lead follow-up, and manage your development with very easy appointment organizing and lead monitoring. Boost sales with automated pricing quote, invoicing, and repayment processing, maximizing your time. With Keap, small businesses can save 10 hours each week and rise profits by 39%. Begin with a 14-day free trial, no credit card required.
Why we like Keap
Keap uses a detailed consumer partnership monitoring (CRM) and marketing automation solution tailored for small companies and entrepreneurs. We appreciate Keap’s concentrate on enhancing sales procedures and nurturing client partnerships with effective automation devices. The system’s all-in-one technique integrates CRM, e-mail marketing, invoicing, and job monitoring, making it especially attractive for businesses aiming to settle their tech stack.
For the most part, it simply functioned reliably with marginal hassle or maintenance called for. My open and click-through prices were excellent (like 35% fantastic). Automations ran efficiently without concerns.
So why in the world was I attracted to uproot my entire operational foundation from a system that worked to attempt something unproven and untried?
In knowledge I can admit I obtained seduced by the siren call of “glossy item syndrome”. You understand the feeling: when every person’s discussing a new device that will certainly revolutionize your business … The grass often looks greener beyond, and I questioned whether GoHighLevel may reduce friction factors that I ‘d discovered to tolerate over the years with Keap.
I resisted in the beginning, however a couple of even more stress led me to assume possibly it was time for an adjustment.
The Financial investment: Moving My Agency to GoHighLevel
Earlier this year I made a decision to take the plunge. I enrolled in HighLevel’s Agency plan at $297/month, spending dramatically greater than the $97/month starter expense.
This wasn’t a choice I ignored. I recognized switching systems was going to call for migrating all my Keap information and essentially restoring my entire technology facilities from square one making use of every one of the GoHighLevel integrations readily available.
Below’s an introduction of simply some of the initiative required:
- Manually exporting 20,000+ email subscriber records
- Recreating lots of automations and workflows
- Moving client accounts, notes, and job information to the brand-new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe invoicing integration
- Establishing landing pages, promotions, and sales funnels around again
- Learning a totally foreign UX and interface layout
All in, I invested around 30-40 laborious hours of arrangement work transitioning everything over– as well as taking care of lost efficiency during the switch.
However ultimately, it was a computed financial investment I wanted to make. I figured some temporary pain would pay off with GoHighLevel supplying a much better lasting remedy for my business, Dripify. Oh exactly how incorrect I was …
It just took me concerning a month of hands-on use to recognize I had made a huge blunder. The issues started piling up promptly, up until it got to a point I needed to reduce my losses and change back to Keap totally.
Allow’s go through the nightmarish issues I came across.
Safety And Security Issues & Lots of Bugs
Given GoHighLevel positioned itself as an all-in-one automation platform, I took care to thoroughly recreate every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These consisted of series for onboarding brand-new email customers, onboarding brand-new clients, automating follow-ups for webinar registrations, sending occasion pointers, taking care of membership expirations and much more.
Everything seemed to be operating fine … up until instantly it wasn’t. One morning, I woke up to discover 171 completely irrelevant emails had actually been sent to customers that need to NOT have actually received them. This occurred 3 days in a row, with a different batch of 160 people every day.
I frantically attempted troubleshooting and restoring the automation from scratch. But the issue continued.
When I seriously reached out to their assistance group, they vaguely claimed “server concerns” were to blame. Yet this description didn’t make any sense, since the mistakes continued occurring each early morning like clockwork unassociated to any type of downtime.
In my mind, this large failing was totally undesirable and simply didn’t help my company. I have hundreds of calls relying upon my automated campaigns running efficiently.
So if GoHighLevel was mosting likely to be entirely undependable, just how could I entrust mission-critical workflows and sensitive client information to their modern technology?
The unintuitive user interface only intensified these issues …
Discouraging UX
Originating from Keap where everything was smooth and user-friendly, GoHighLevel’s learning curve really felt high and challenging.
Easy tasks like editing and enhancing workflows entailed digging through food selection systems that were all over the place. Trick settings were unexplainably spread in totally different sections. Moving 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 different setups panels to handle overall, specific, and item configurations. Yet for some crazy reason, the links to gain access to each of these core setups were spread out on contrary sides of the screen. What!?
As someone who values tidy, thoughtful style, this seriously annoyed me.
It strengthened that GoHighLevel still felt like a work-in-progress rather than a refined item ready for prime-time use. Their top priorities appeared focused on cramming in every feature imaginable, with poor usability as an afterthought.
And talking features, I quickly realized the low price tag featured costly concessions …
Misleading Pricing GoHighLevel Facebook Shop
Among GoHighLevel’s biggest marketing factors is the inexpensive rate for access to numerous features. Yet I swiftly learned this economical base expense was misleading.
They nickle-and-dimed customers with occasional charges for core capability. Unexpectedly my charge card declarations had unclear $10 fees from GoHighLevel here and there.
As it ended up, you obtain billed every single time you send out an email through their servers. So for high volume customers, this amounted to hundreds of dollars in unforeseen costs.
Between these per-email fees and paying additional for deliverability add-ons like Mailgun, my “inexpensive” GoHighLevel registration wound up costing significantly MORE than my Keap plan.
The low price tag was appealing, but just not reasonable in practice. This bait-and-switch left a bad taste in my mouth.
Email Rates Suffered
The final dealbreaker was seeing my thoroughly supported e-mail open rates plummet nearly over night after changing to GoHighLevel.
Formerly, my audience involvement regularly hit 35-40% open rates in Keap month after month. But once I migrated their documents over to GoHighLevel, performance tanked instantaneously to a worthless 9% open price.
Regardless of how much I optimized my sending out methods or tried every repairing trick, I might barely nudge open rates back into the teens– still a 50%+ decline from my previous benchmarks GoHighLevel Facebook Shop.
Let me repeat: my exact same target market and emails suddenly had awful engagement. The only point I can believe that would be creating this was whatever was occurring behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a firm so based on e-mail marketing, this was a big deal.
In between the crippling deliverability problems, concealed costs, busted features, and terrible interface, I had actually lastly reached my limitation …
Why I Give up GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Simply 45 days after moving my company to GoHighLevel, I recognized I had actually made a huge blunder. The disadvantages substantially outweighed any type of benefits.
No software program is perfect, however the large quantity of troubles was beyond acceptable.
At the end of the day, software program boils down to depend on. If I can’t trust it to manage crucial features capably or believe a vendor has my best interests in mind, then it’s time to walk away– even after spending considerable time, cash, and effort moving.
So I made the hard phone call to reverse course and return back to Keap entirely simply weeks after going all in on GoHighLevel. Allow’s discover what I picked up from this fiasco.
Trick Takeaways: What I Learned From My GoHighLevel Error
My time with HighLevel can be summarized as a costly misadventure. However in knowledge, it educated me a couple of key lessons:
- Stay with what jobs. Don’t disturb what’s working unless something is definitively much better across the board. Change brings risk.
- Veterinarian declares extensively. Marketing hype around new software commonly obscures bigger underlying flaws. Deep due persistance is necessary.
- Pick simpleness over features. Well-designed tools ought to make your job life easier, not more challenging and messy.
- Transparency develops count on. Opaque pricing, dubious reseller terms, and finger-pointing to avert problems damages count on.
- Look for impartial testimonials. Happy support evaluates mean less if excessive problems suggest inadequate total use.
- Perfection is difficult. No single solution can perfectly meet every special business need. Discover the least-bad fit.
- Evolution over change. Step-by-step improvements typically outweigh high-risk wholesale reinvention of what already functions penalty.
In other words, I learned to be more hesitant of “as well good to be real” marketing insurance claims and much less tempted by the appeal of shiny brand-new items. The tools you utilize daily need to gain depend on through openness and efficiency, not glossy advertising.