As an agency proprietor for over a years, I count on software application and automation to enhance operations and provide outcomes. So when GoHighLevel emerged on the scene few years back, it definitely captured my attention GoHighLevel For Attorneys.
The concept was appealing– an all-in-one client management platform with marketing, sales, and service devices incorporated together. As a business owner constantly wanting to simplify and scale my service, it seemed like a dream become a reality theoretically. Who would not desire a single service that does it all?
However in this in-depth GoHighLevel evaluation, I’ll take you inside my disastrous trip of trying (and falling short) to switch over to this popular brand-new software program. You’ll learn:
If you’re considering whether GoHighLevel is right for your own business requirements, with any luck you can pick up from my uncomfortable blunders and pumped up assumptions.
Looter: I do NOT recommend GoHighLevel. If you require a CRM, start with this list of ideal CRMs instead. I use Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re looking for a sales, marketing, and task administration choice to GoHighLevel, then here are a couple of we advise.
Backstory: Why I Thought About Switching Over from Keap
To understand what attracted me to GoHighLevel to begin with, you require context about my previous configuration. For over 5 years I had actually been happily relying upon Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) to fulfill all my customer management and automation demands.
I discovered Keap user-friendly to utilize and it handled everything I required– CRM, email marketing, sales funnels, membership sites, and client assistance.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are developed to assist small companies maintain their customers while including new ones effortlessly. Automate follow-ups with e-mails and texts, making certain leads and clients receive the ideal messages at the right time. Use site and social media sites types to improve lead follow-up, and manage your development with simple appointment scheduling and lead tracking. Boost sales with automated quoting, invoicing, and settlement handling, maximizing your time. With Keap, local business can save 10 hours per week and rise earnings by 39%. Start with a 14-day free trial, no bank card called for.
Why we like Keap
Keap supplies a comprehensive customer connection monitoring (CRM) and marketing automation option customized for small companies and business owners. We appreciate Keap’s focus on enhancing sales processes and nurturing consumer connections via effective automation devices. The platform’s all-in-one approach combines CRM, email marketing, invoicing, and task management, making it specifically eye-catching for organizations wanting to settle their technology stack.
Generally, it simply functioned accurately with marginal hassle or upkeep called for. My open and click-through prices were fantastic (like 35% fantastic). Automations ran smoothly without any issues.
So why in the world was I attracted to uproot my whole operational foundation from a system that functioned to attempt something unproven and untried?
In hindsight I can admit I obtained attracted by the alarm telephone call of “shiny things disorder”. You know the sensation: when everyone’s discussing a brand-new tool that will reinvent your company … The yard commonly looks greener beyond, and I asked yourself whether GoHighLevel may reduce friction factors that I ‘d discovered to tolerate for many years with Keap.
I withstood initially, but a couple of even more stress led me to believe perhaps it was time for a change.
The Investment: Migrating My Agency to GoHighLevel
Previously this year I made a decision to take the plunge. I registered for HighLevel’s Firm plan at $297/month, spending significantly more than the $97/month starter price.
This had not been a choice I took lightly. I recognized switching over platforms was going to need migrating all my Keap information and essentially rebuilding my whole technology framework from square one using every one of the GoHighLevel integrations available.
Below’s an overview of just several of the effort required:
- By hand exporting 20,000+ email client records
- Recreating loads of automations and workflows
- Moving client accounts, notes, and task information to the new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe payment integration
- Setting up landing pages, discounts, and sales funnels throughout once again
- Learning a totally foreign UX and interface design
All in, I spent around 30-40 tiresome hours of setup job transitioning everything over– in addition to taking care of shed productivity during the switch.
However ultimately, it was a calculated financial investment I wanted to make. I figured some temporary discomfort would settle with GoHighLevel giving a better long-lasting service for my organization, Dripify. Oh how incorrect I was …
It just took me about a month of hands-on usage to recognize I had made a large mistake. The concerns started accumulating swiftly, up until it reached a point I needed to reduce my losses and switch back to Keap entirely.
Let’s walk through the horrible issues I came across.
Safety And Security Issues & Many Bugs
Provided GoHighLevel placed itself as an all-in-one automation platform, I made sure to diligently recreate each and every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These included sequences for onboarding brand-new e-mail clients, onboarding brand-new customers, automating follow-ups for webinar enrollments, sending occasion pointers, taking care of membership expirations and much more.
Every little thing seemed to be operating penalty … till instantly it had not been. One morning, I woke up to find 171 completely unimportant emails had been sent out to users that need to NOT have obtained them. This took place 3 days straight, with a various batch of 160 people every day.
I hysterically tried fixing and restoring the automation from the ground up. Yet the issue lingered.
When I desperately connected to their support group, they slightly asserted “web server problems” were at fault. However this explanation really did not make any type of sense, because the errors proceeded happening each early morning like clockwork unassociated to any downtime.
In my mind, this huge failure was entirely inappropriate and just really did not help my organization. I have countless get in touches with relying upon my automated campaigns running efficiently.
So if GoHighLevel was going to be absolutely unreliable, just how could I turn over mission-critical workflows and delicate customer data to their innovation?
The unintuitive interface just intensified these problems …
Irritating UX
Originating from Keap where whatever was smooth and intuitive, GoHighLevel’s learning curve really felt high and complicated.
Simple jobs like editing and enhancing workflows included excavating with menu systems that were all over the place. Key settings were unexplainably scattered in totally different sections. Moving between features really felt disjointed or confusing.
I’ll inform you what I mean by talking about their funnel builder as an example. There were 3 separate setups panels to take care of total, private, and item setups. Yet for some crazy reason, the links to access each of these core settings were expanded on contrary sides of the display. What!?
As somebody who values clean, thoughtful style, this seriously irritated me.
It enhanced that GoHighLevel still felt like a work-in-progress as opposed to a refined product prepared for prime-time usage. Their priorities appeared focused on stuffing in every feature under the sun, with bad use as a second thought.
And talking features, I soon recognized the affordable price tag came with pricey compromises …
Misleading Pricing GoHighLevel For Attorneys
One of GoHighLevel’s biggest marketing factors is the affordable cost for access to a lot of features. However I rapidly discovered this low-cost base price was misleading.
They nickle-and-dimed customers with sporadic charges for core capability. All of a sudden my bank card statements had obscure $10 charges from GoHighLevel here and there.
As it turned out, you get billed each time you send out an e-mail via their web servers. So for high volume users, this added up to numerous dollars in unforeseen expenses.
In between these per-email fees and paying additional for deliverability add-ons like Mailgun, my “cost effective” GoHighLevel registration wound up setting you back considerably greater than my Keap plan.
The reduced sticker price was tempting, however just not reasonable in practice. This bait-and-switch left a negative taste in my mouth.
Email Rates Suffered
The last dealbreaker was seeing my thoroughly supported email open prices plunge virtually overnight after changing to GoHighLevel.
Previously, my target market engagement regularly hit 35-40% open prices in Keap month after month. Once I migrated their records over to GoHighLevel, efficiency tanked immediately to a pathetic 9% open price.
No matter how much I enhanced my sending out practices or tried every fixing method, I might barely push open prices back right into the teens– still a 50%+ decline from my previous benchmarks GoHighLevel For Attorneys.
Let me repeat: my exact same audience and emails instantly had dreadful interaction. The only thing I could think that would be triggering this was whatever was happening behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For an agency so dependent on email marketing, this was a big deal.
Between the crippling deliverability concerns, concealed fees, damaged features, and terrible interface, I had lastly reached my limitation …
Why I Quit GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Simply 45 days after moving my company to GoHighLevel, I understood I had actually made a massive blunder. The cons considerably outweighed any advantages.
No software is best, yet the sheer volume of issues was beyond appropriate.
At the end of the day, software boils down to depend on. If I can not trust it to manage vital features effectively or believe a supplier has my best interests in mind, then it’s time to walk away– also after spending considerable time, cash, and effort moving.
So I made the tough call to turn around program and return back to Keap entirely simply weeks after going done in on GoHighLevel. Allow’s explore what I learned from this ordeal.
Key Takeaways: What I Picked up from My GoHighLevel Blunder
My time with HighLevel can be summarized as an expensive ill fortune. Yet in knowledge, it taught me a few crucial lessons:
- Stay with what jobs. Do not distress what’s working unless something is definitively far better across the board. Change brings danger.
- Veterinarian claims completely. Marketing hype around new software application commonly obscures bigger underlying problems. Deep due diligence is necessary.
- Choose simplicity over features. Properly designed tools need to make your work life easier, not much more difficult and messy.
- Transparency develops trust fund. Nontransparent pricing, unethical reseller terms, and finger-pointing to evade troubles ruins depend on.
- Seek honest reviews. Pleased assistance reviews suggest less if too much concerns indicate bad general functionality.
- Perfection is impossible. No single service can perfectly meet every special service need. Locate the least-bad fit.
- Evolution over change. Step-by-step renovations commonly exceed dangerous wholesale reinvention of what currently functions fine.
In short, I discovered to be extra skeptical of “as well excellent to be real” marketing cases and less lured by the appeal of glossy new objects. The tools you make use of daily need to earn count on through openness and performance, not glossy advertising.