As an agency owner for over a decade, I count on software application and automation to enhance operations and deliver outcomes. So when GoHighLevel arised on the scene couple of years back, it definitely caught my attention GoHighLevel Feedback.
The idea was attractive– an all-in-one customer management system with marketing, sales, and solution tools incorporated with each other. As a business owner always wanting to streamline and scale my service, it seemed like a desire happened theoretically. That wouldn’t want a solitary remedy that does it all?
Yet in this in-depth GoHighLevel testimonial, I’ll take you inside my dreadful journey of attempting (and stopping working) to switch over to this preferred brand-new software program. You’ll learn:
If you’re taking into consideration whether GoHighLevel is right for your very own service demands, ideally you can gain from my excruciating mistakes and inflated assumptions.
Looter: I do NOT advise GoHighLevel. If you require a CRM, begin with this listing of ideal CRMs rather. I use Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re trying to find a sales, marketing, and task monitoring alternative to GoHighLevel, after that here are a few we advise.
Backstory: Why I Thought About Switching Over from Keap
To understand what attracted me to GoHighLevel in the first place, you require context regarding my previous configuration. For over 5 years I had been gladly relying on Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) to fulfill all my client monitoring and automation demands.
I discovered Keap user-friendly to make use of and it handled whatever I needed– CRM, email marketing, sales funnels, subscription sites, and customer support.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are created to help local business keep their clients while adding new ones effortlessly. Automate follow-ups with e-mails and texts, making certain leads and clients receive the best messages at the correct time. Use website and social networks forms to enhance lead follow-up, and handle your development with very easy consultation organizing and lead tracking. Boost sales with automated pricing estimate, invoicing, and payment processing, freeing up your time. With Keap, local business can save 10 hours each week and increase income by 39%. Start with a 14-day free trial, no credit card required.
Why we like Keap
Keap offers a thorough consumer partnership monitoring (CRM) and marketing automation service tailored for small businesses and business owners. We value Keap’s focus on improving sales processes and nurturing customer connections through effective automation tools. The system’s all-in-one approach integrates CRM, e-mail marketing, invoicing, and job management, making it particularly appealing for organizations looking to consolidate their technology pile.
Essentially, it simply functioned accurately with marginal difficulty or maintenance called for. My open and click-through rates were wonderful (like 35% terrific). Automations ran efficiently with no concerns.
So why on earth was I lured to uproot my entire functional foundation from a system that worked to try something unproven and untried?
In knowledge I can confess I obtained attracted by the alarm call of “glossy object syndrome”. You understand the sensation: when everyone’s speaking about a brand-new tool that will transform your service … The lawn frequently looks greener beyond, and I questioned whether GoHighLevel may lower rubbing factors that I would certainly discovered to tolerate over the years with Keap.
I resisted in the beginning, but a couple of more aggravations led me to assume maybe it was time for a change.
The Financial investment: Moving My Company to GoHighLevel
Earlier this year I determined to start. I signed up for HighLevel’s Agency plan at $297/month, investing significantly greater than the $97/month starter expense.
This had not been a choice I took lightly. I knew switching platforms was going to need migrating all my Keap data and essentially rebuilding my entire tech facilities from scratch utilizing all of the GoHighLevel integrations readily available.
Right here’s a summary of just several of the initiative called for:
- Manually exporting 20,000+ email client documents
- Recreating dozens of automations and workflows
- Moving customer profiles, notes, and task information to the new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe invoicing integration
- Establishing landing pages, promos, and sales funnels throughout once again
- Learning a completely international UX and interface layout
All in, I invested around 30-40 tiresome hours of configuration work transitioning whatever over– not to mention dealing with shed productivity throughout the switch.
However inevitably, it was a computed investment I was willing to make. I figured some temporary discomfort would certainly pay off with GoHighLevel giving a far better long-lasting service for my company, Dripify. Oh exactly how wrong I was …
It only took me about a month of hands-on usage to understand I had actually made a big mistake. The concerns began accumulating promptly, till it got to a point I needed to reduce my losses and switch back to Keap totally.
Allow’s go through the nightmarish problems I ran into.
Safety Issues & Many Vermin
Offered GoHighLevel positioned itself as an all-in-one automation system, I made sure to thoroughly recreate each and every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These included series for onboarding brand-new e-mail clients, onboarding new customers, automating follow-ups for webinar enrollments, sending occasion pointers, managing membership expiries and a lot more.
Whatever seemed to be operating fine … until unexpectedly it wasn’t. One morning, I woke up to find 171 completely unnecessary emails had been sent out to individuals that need to NOT have gotten them. This took place 3 days straight, with a different batch of 160 individuals each day.
I anxiously tried fixing and rebuilding the automation from square one. Yet the issue persisted.
When I frantically reached out to their assistance group, they vaguely declared “web server issues” were responsible. But this explanation really did not make any kind of sense, because the errors continued taking place each morning like clockwork unrelated to any kind of downtime.
In my mind, this large failing was entirely undesirable and just really did not work for my organization. I have thousands of get in touches with relying on my automated campaigns running efficiently.
So if GoHighLevel was going to be entirely undependable, exactly how could I hand over mission-critical workflows and sensitive customer information to their technology?
The unintuitive user interface only compounded these problems …
Discouraging UX
Coming from Keap where every little thing was seamless and instinctive, GoHighLevel’s learning curve really felt steep and complicated.
Basic jobs like editing and enhancing workflows involved excavating through food selection systems that were all over the place. Trick settings were unexplainably spread in entirely different areas. Relocating between functions felt disjointed or complicated.
I’ll tell you what I imply by discussing their funnel builder as an instance. There were 3 different setups panels to handle total, specific, and product setups. Yet for some crazy reason, the links to accessibility each of these core settings were expanded on contrary sides of the display. What!?
As someone who values clean, thoughtful design, this seriously upset me.
It strengthened that GoHighLevel still felt like a work-in-progress instead of a refined product ready for prime-time usage. Their concerns seemed focused on stuffing in every feature under the sun, with poor use as a second thought.
And speaking of features, I quickly realized the low price tag included pricey compromises …
Deceptive Pricing GoHighLevel Feedback
Among GoHighLevel’s greatest selling factors is the economical rate for accessibility to numerous features. But I promptly learned this affordable base expense was deceitful.
They nickle-and-dimed users with occasional costs for core capability. All of a sudden my bank card statements had vague $10 fees from GoHighLevel occasionally.
As it turned out, you obtain charged every single time you send an email via their web servers. So for high quantity customers, this amounted to thousands of dollars in unexpected costs.
In between these per-email costs and paying additional for deliverability attachments like Mailgun, my “budget friendly” GoHighLevel registration ended up costing dramatically greater than my Keap plan.
The reduced price tag was alluring, yet simply not realistic in practice. This bait-and-switch left a poor preference in my mouth.
Email Rates Suffered
The final dealbreaker was seeing my thoroughly nurtured email open prices plummet practically overnight after switching to GoHighLevel.
Formerly, my audience interaction continually hit 35-40% open prices in Keap month after month. But once I moved their documents over to GoHighLevel, performance tanked immediately to a pitiful 9% open rate.
Regardless of how much I maximized my sending out techniques or attempted every fixing technique, I could barely nudge open rates back into the teens– still a 50%+ decline from my previous criteria GoHighLevel Feedback.
Let me repeat: my exact same target market and e-mails all of a sudden had terrible involvement. The only thing I might assume that would be causing this was whatever was happening 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 charges, broken features, and awful user interface, I had actually ultimately reached my limit …
Why I Give up GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Just 45 days after moving my firm to GoHighLevel, I understood I had made a significant mistake. The disadvantages substantially exceeded any kind of advantages.
No software application is best, but the large volume of problems was past appropriate.
At the end of the day, software comes down to trust. If I can’t trust it to deal with essential functions effectively or believe a supplier has my benefits in mind, then it’s time to walk away– even after investing significant time, cash, and initiative migrating.
So I made the difficult call to reverse course and return back to Keap completely simply weeks after going done in on GoHighLevel. Allow’s explore what I learned from this fiasco.
Key Takeaways: What I Picked up from My GoHighLevel Blunder
My time with HighLevel can be summarized as a costly ill fortune. However in hindsight, it taught me a couple of key lessons:
- Adhere to what works. Don’t upset what’s functioning unless something is definitively far better across the board. Adjustment brings threat.
- Veterinarian asserts thoroughly. Marketing buzz around new software often covers larger underlying imperfections. Deep due persistance is vital.
- Choose simpleness over features. Properly designed tools should make your work life less complicated, not a lot more complex and untidy.
- Transparency constructs depend on. Nontransparent pricing, questionable reseller terms, and finger-pointing to avert problems destroys trust fund.
- Seek honest reviews. Delighted support evaluates imply less if extreme problems suggest poor overall functionality.
- Excellence is difficult. No solitary service can perfectly fulfill every unique service demand. Discover the least-bad fit.
- Evolution over change. Step-by-step renovations usually surpass high-risk wholesale reinvention of what already works penalty.
In short, I discovered to be a lot more doubtful of “as well excellent to be true” marketing claims and much less lured by the attraction of shiny brand-new objects. The tools you use daily ought to earn depend on through openness and performance, not glossy advertising.