As a firm owner for over a years, I rely on software application and automation to simplify operations and deliver outcomes. So when GoHighLevel emerged on the scene couple of years back, it definitely captured my attention GoHighLevel For B2C.
The concept was attractive– an all-in-one customer administration platform with marketing, sales, and service devices integrated with each other. As a business owner constantly wanting to simplify and scale my company, it appeared like a dream become a reality on paper. That wouldn’t want a single solution that does it all?
Yet in this extensive GoHighLevel review, I’ll take you inside my dreadful trip of trying (and stopping working) to change to this prominent new software program. You’ll learn:
If you’re taking into consideration whether GoHighLevel is right for your own service requirements, ideally you can gain from my agonizing errors and pumped up expectations.
Looter: I do NOT recommend GoHighLevel. If you need a CRM, begin with this list of ideal CRMs instead. I make use of Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re searching for a sales, marketing, and job administration option to GoHighLevel, then below are a couple of we suggest.
Backstory: Why I Considered Switching from Keap
To understand what attracted me to GoHighLevel to begin with, you require context regarding my previous arrangement. For over 5 years I had been gladly depending on Keap (previously Infusionsoft) to satisfy all my customer management and automation needs.
I discovered Keap user-friendly to utilize and it dealt with every little thing I needed– CRM, email marketing, sales funnels, subscription websites, and customer assistance.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are designed to help local business keep their customers while including brand-new ones effortlessly. Automate follow-ups with emails and messages, making certain leads and clients obtain the ideal messages at the right time. Usage web site and social media kinds to simplify lead follow-up, and manage your development with simple appointment scheduling and lead monitoring. Boost sales with automated pricing estimate, invoicing, and settlement handling, maximizing your time. With Keap, small businesses can conserve 10 hours weekly and increase revenue by 39%. Begin with a 14-day free trial, no bank card called for.
Why we like Keap
Keap supplies a thorough client partnership management (CRM) and marketing automation remedy customized for small companies and entrepreneurs. We value Keap’s concentrate on streamlining sales processes and supporting customer relationships via effective automation tools. The system’s all-in-one technique combines CRM, e-mail marketing, invoicing, and job management, making it specifically attractive for businesses wanting to consolidate their tech pile.
Essentially, it simply functioned reliably with minimal difficulty or upkeep needed. My open and click-through prices were great (like 35% excellent). Automations ran efficiently without any concerns.
So why on earth was I tempted to uproot my entire functional structure from a system that worked to try something unverified and untested?
In hindsight I can admit I got seduced by the siren phone call of “shiny things syndrome”. You know the feeling: when everyone’s speaking about a new tool that will transform your business … The yard often looks greener beyond, and I asked yourself whether GoHighLevel may decrease friction factors that I ‘d found out to tolerate over the years with Keap.
I resisted initially, however a few even more frustrations led me to think possibly it was time for a modification.
The Financial investment: Moving My Firm to GoHighLevel
Earlier this year I decided to start. I signed up for HighLevel’s Firm plan at $297/month, spending dramatically greater than the $97/month starter cost.
This had not been a decision I ignored. I understood changing systems was mosting likely to need migrating all my Keap information and basically rebuilding my whole tech infrastructure from the ground up using every one of the GoHighLevel integrations readily available.
Below’s an overview of just some of the effort called for:
- Manually exporting 20,000+ e-mail client records
- Recreating lots of automations and workflows
- Relocating customer profiles, notes, and project data to the new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe invoicing integration
- Establishing landing pages, discounts, and sales funnels throughout once again
- Learning an entirely international UX and interface layout
All in, I spent around 30-40 tedious hours of configuration job transitioning whatever over– in addition to taking care of shed efficiency throughout the switch.
However eventually, it was a computed financial investment I was willing to make. I figured some short-term pain would certainly repay with GoHighLevel supplying a much better lasting service for my service, Dripify. Oh exactly how incorrect I was …
It just took me about a month of hands-on usage to realize I had actually made a huge mistake. The concerns began piling up quickly, up until it got to a point I had to reduce my losses and change back to Keap completely.
Allow’s walk through the nightmarish problems I came across.
Safety Issues & Numerous Vermin
Offered GoHighLevel positioned itself as an all-in-one automation system, I took care to diligently recreate every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These consisted of sequences for onboarding brand-new email customers, onboarding new clients, automating follow-ups for webinar registrations, sending out occasion reminders, taking care of subscription expiries and far more.
Everything seemed to be operating penalty … till unexpectedly it had not been. One morning, I woke up to locate 171 totally irrelevant e-mails had actually been sent to users that need to NOT have received them. This happened 3 days straight, with a different batch of 160 people daily.
I anxiously tried repairing and rebuilding the automation from the ground up. Yet the problem continued.
When I seriously reached out to their assistance group, they vaguely claimed “server problems” were responsible. But this description didn’t make any type of feeling, considering that the errors continued happening each morning like clockwork unconnected to any kind of downtime.
In my mind, this massive failure was entirely undesirable and just really did not benefit my organization. I have thousands of calls depending on my automated campaigns running efficiently.
So if GoHighLevel was mosting likely to be entirely unreliable, how could I turn over mission-critical workflows and sensitive client information to their innovation?
The unintuitive user interface just worsened these problems …
Discouraging UX
Originating from Keap where whatever was seamless and user-friendly, GoHighLevel’s learning curve felt steep and difficult.
Easy tasks like editing workflows entailed digging via food selection systems that were all over the place. Key settings were unexplainably spread in totally different sections. Moving between features really felt disjointed or complicated.
I’ll inform you what I imply by discussing their funnel builder as an example. There were 3 separate settings panels to take care of general, private, and item configurations. Yet for some crazy reason, the links to gain access to each of these core setups were spread out on opposite sides of the screen. What!?
As someone who values tidy, thoughtful design, this seriously irritated me.
It reinforced that GoHighLevel still felt like a work-in-progress rather than a sleek product all set for prime-time usage. Their priorities appeared concentrated on packing in every feature under the sun, with poor functionality as an afterthought.
And speaking of features, I quickly realized the affordable price tag featured costly concessions …
Misleading Pricing GoHighLevel For B2C
Among GoHighLevel’s biggest marketing points is the economical rate for access to many features. However I swiftly discovered this low-cost base cost was deceitful.
They nickle-and-dimed users with occasional fees for core capability. All of a sudden my credit card statements had vague $10 charges from GoHighLevel here and there.
As it turned out, you get billed every single time you send an e-mail with their servers. So for high quantity customers, this amounted to hundreds of bucks in unanticipated costs.
In between these per-email costs and paying added for deliverability attachments like Mailgun, my “budget-friendly” GoHighLevel registration ended up setting you back considerably greater than my Keap plan.
The low price tag was appealing, however just not realistic in practice. This bait-and-switch left a poor preference in my mouth.
Email Fees Suffered
The last dealbreaker was seeing my very carefully supported email open prices plummet practically overnight after switching to GoHighLevel.
Previously, my audience involvement regularly struck 35-40% open prices in Keap month after month. Once I moved their documents over to GoHighLevel, performance tanked immediately to a useless 9% open rate.
Despite how much I enhanced my sending techniques or attempted every troubleshooting method, I might barely nudge open rates back into the teenagers– still a 50%+ decrease from my previous benchmarks GoHighLevel For B2C.
Let me repeat: my exact same audience and e-mails unexpectedly had horrible interaction. The only point I could assume that would certainly be causing this was whatever was taking place behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For an agency so based on email marketing, this was a big deal.
In between the debilitating deliverability problems, concealed costs, busted features, and awful user interface, I had lastly reached my limit …
Why I Give up GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Simply 45 days after migrating my agency to GoHighLevel, I understood I had actually made a substantial error. The disadvantages considerably surpassed any kind of benefits.
No software program is best, but the large quantity of troubles was beyond appropriate.
At the end of the day, software comes down to trust fund. If I can’t trust it to deal with vital functions effectively or believe a vendor has my best interests in mind, after that it’s time to walk away– even after investing considerable time, money, and initiative moving.
So I made the tough call to turn around course and return back to Keap totally just weeks after going done in on GoHighLevel. Allow’s discover what I learned from this fiasco.
Trick Takeaways: What I Gained from My GoHighLevel Mistake
My time with HighLevel can be summed up as an expensive ill fortune. Yet in hindsight, it instructed me a couple of essential lessons:
- Adhere to what jobs. Do not upset what’s functioning unless something is definitively better across the board. Adjustment brings danger.
- Veterinarian declares thoroughly. Marketing buzz around brand-new software program commonly obscures larger underlying imperfections. Deep due diligence is necessary.
- Select simplicity over features. Well-designed devices must make your job life much easier, not much more complicated and untidy.
- Openness develops depend on. Nontransparent pricing, shady reseller terms, and finger-pointing to avert issues damages count on.
- Look for honest reviews. Delighted support reviews indicate much less if too much problems suggest poor general use.
- Perfection is difficult. No solitary option can perfectly satisfy every special service demand. Locate the least-bad fit.
- Advancement over transformation. Incremental improvements normally surpass dangerous wholesale reinvention of what currently functions penalty.
In other words, I discovered to be a lot more skeptical of “as well great to be true” marketing cases and much less tempted by the allure of glossy new items. The tools you utilize daily need to make trust via openness and performance, not glossy advertising.