As an agency owner for over a decade, I count on software application and automation to simplify procedures and provide results. So when GoHighLevel arised on the scene few years back, it absolutely caught my attention GoHighLevel For Banks.
The concept was appealing– an all-in-one client administration platform with marketing, sales, and service tools incorporated with each other. As a business owner always wanting to simplify and scale my service, it felt like a desire come true on paper. Who would not desire a single service that does it all?
However in this in-depth GoHighLevel testimonial, I’ll take you inside my disastrous trip of attempting (and falling short) to change to this popular brand-new software. You’ll find out:
If you’re taking into consideration whether GoHighLevel is right for your own organization demands, ideally you can gain from my excruciating mistakes and pumped up assumptions.
Looter: I do NOT advise GoHighLevel. If you need a CRM, begin with this list of finest CRMs instead. I make use of Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re seeking a sales, marketing, and task management alternative to GoHighLevel, then below are a few we advise.
Backstory: Why I Thought About Switching 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 happily counting on Keap (previously Infusionsoft) to meet all my client administration and automation needs.
I located Keap instinctive to utilize and it handled every little thing I needed– CRM, e-mail marketing, sales funnels, subscription websites, and client support.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are developed to assist local business keep their customers while adding new ones effortlessly. Automate follow-ups with e-mails and texts, making certain leads and clients obtain the right messages at the right time. Use website and social media sites types to improve lead follow-up, and manage your growth with easy consultation organizing and lead monitoring. Boost sales with automated estimating, invoicing, and repayment handling, liberating your time. With Keap, small companies can save 10 hours per week and increase income by 39%. Beginning with a 14-day free trial, no credit card needed.
Why we like Keap
Keap supplies a thorough client connection management (CRM) and marketing automation service customized for local business and entrepreneurs. We value Keap’s focus on improving sales processes and nurturing client partnerships via powerful automation devices. The system’s all-in-one technique combines CRM, email marketing, invoicing, and job administration, making it particularly attractive for organizations seeking to settle their tech pile.
Essentially, it simply functioned accurately with marginal fuss or upkeep called for. My open and click-through prices were excellent (like 35% great). Automations ran smoothly without concerns.
So why in the world was I lured to uproot my whole functional foundation from a system that functioned to try something unproven and untried?
In knowledge I can admit I got attracted by the alarm telephone call of “glossy things disorder”. You recognize the sensation: when everybody’s speaking about a brand-new tool that will certainly revolutionize your company … The yard typically looks greener on the other side, and I asked yourself whether GoHighLevel could lower friction factors that I ‘d discovered to tolerate throughout the years with Keap.
I stood up to at first, yet a couple of more stress led me to think perhaps it was time for a change.
The Investment: Migrating My Agency to GoHighLevel
Previously this year I decided to take the plunge. I enrolled in HighLevel’s Firm plan at $297/month, spending significantly more than the $97/month starter expense.
This had not been a decision I ignored. I knew switching platforms was going to call for moving all my Keap data and basically rebuilding my entire technology framework from scratch using all of the GoHighLevel integrations available.
Here’s a summary of simply several of the effort needed:
- Manually exporting 20,000+ e-mail client documents
- Recreating lots of automations and workflows
- Relocating client accounts, notes, and project data to the brand-new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe invoicing integration
- Establishing landing pages, discounts, and sales funnels throughout once more
- Learning an entirely foreign UX and interface design
All in, I spent around 30-40 tedious hours of setup work transitioning every little thing over– as well as dealing with lost performance during the button.
But ultimately, it was a computed financial investment I wanted to make. I figured some short-term discomfort would certainly repay with GoHighLevel offering a much better lasting option for my business, Dripify. Oh how incorrect I was …
It just took me regarding a month of hands-on usage to understand I had made a huge blunder. The issues began accumulating quickly, up until it got to a factor I had to reduce my losses and switch over back to Keap entirely.
Allow’s walk through the horrible troubles I encountered.
Safety Issues & Several Vermin
Given GoHighLevel positioned itself as an all-in-one automation platform, I took care to meticulously recreate every workflow from my old Keap account.
These included series for onboarding brand-new email customers, onboarding new clients, automating follow-ups for webinar registrations, sending out occasion suggestions, handling subscription expirations and much more.
Every little thing appeared to be working penalty … till suddenly it wasn’t. One early morning, I awoke to locate 171 totally irrelevant emails had been sent out to individuals that should NOT have gotten them. This happened 3 days straight, with a various set of 160 people daily.
I desperately attempted troubleshooting and restoring the automation from square one. Yet the issue persisted.
When I desperately connected to their support team, they slightly claimed “web server issues” were at fault. However this explanation didn’t make any feeling, given that the errors proceeded occurring each early morning like clockwork unconnected to any kind of downtime.
In my mind, this substantial failing was entirely inappropriate and just really did not benefit my business. I have countless get in touches with counting on my automated campaigns running smoothly.
So if GoHighLevel was going to be completely unstable, just how could I entrust mission-critical workflows and sensitive client information to their innovation?
The unintuitive user interface only intensified these concerns …
Irritating UX
Originating from Keap where whatever was seamless and user-friendly, GoHighLevel’s learning curve felt high and complex.
Simple tasks like editing and enhancing workflows included excavating via food selection systems that were all over the place. Trick setups were unexplainably spread in entirely different areas. Moving in between features really felt disjointed or complicated.
I’ll tell you what I suggest by talking about their funnel builder as an instance. There were 3 separate settings panels to take care of overall, individual, and product setups. Yet for some crazy reason, the links to accessibility each of these core setups were expanded on contrary sides of the display. What!?
As a person who values tidy, thoughtful design, this seriously annoyed me.
It enhanced that GoHighLevel still felt like a work-in-progress rather than a refined product prepared for prime-time usage. Their concerns seemed concentrated on packing in every feature imaginable, with poor functionality as an afterthought.
And talking features, I soon understood the low cost tag featured costly concessions …
Deceptive Pricing GoHighLevel For Banks
One of GoHighLevel’s biggest marketing factors is the inexpensive cost for access to numerous features. Yet I quickly learned this inexpensive base expense was misleading.
They nickle-and-dimed users with sporadic costs for core performance. Unexpectedly my credit card declarations had vague $10 charges from GoHighLevel occasionally.
As it ended up, you obtain billed whenever you send an email with their servers. So for high quantity users, this amounted to numerous bucks in unexpected expenses.
Between these per-email charges and paying additional for deliverability add-ons like Mailgun, my “cost effective” GoHighLevel membership wound up costing substantially greater than my Keap plan.
The reduced price tag was alluring, however simply not reasonable in practice. This bait-and-switch left a negative taste in my mouth.
Email Rates Suffered
The final dealbreaker was seeing my thoroughly nurtured e-mail open prices plunge virtually overnight after switching to GoHighLevel.
Previously, my target market involvement consistently struck 35-40% open rates in Keap month after month. But once I moved their documents over to GoHighLevel, performance tanked instantaneously to a pitiful 9% open rate.
Despite just how much I enhanced my sending out techniques or tried every troubleshooting method, I might barely nudge open prices back into the teenagers– still a 50%+ decrease from my previous benchmarks GoHighLevel For Banks.
Let me repeat: my exact same audience and e-mails all of a sudden had horrible interaction. The only point I can believe that would certainly be creating this was whatever was occurring behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a firm so depending on email marketing, this was a big deal.
In between the crippling deliverability concerns, concealed fees, damaged features, and awful interface, I had actually lastly reached my limit …
Why I Stop GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Just 45 days after migrating my firm to GoHighLevel, I knew I had made a huge blunder. The cons considerably exceeded any kind of benefits.
No software program is ideal, but the sheer quantity of problems was past appropriate.
At the end of the day, software comes down to trust. If I can’t trust it to handle vital features effectively or think a vendor has my benefits in mind, then it’s time to walk away– also after spending significant time, money, and effort migrating.
So I made the challenging phone call to reverse program and return back to Keap completely simply weeks after going all in on GoHighLevel. Allow’s discover what I learned from this ordeal.
Secret Takeaways: What I Learned From My GoHighLevel Mistake
My time with HighLevel can be summarized as an expensive accident. But in hindsight, it showed me a couple of essential lessons:
- Stick to what jobs. Do not distress what’s working unless something is definitively better across the board. Change brings threat.
- Vet declares completely. Marketing buzz around brand-new software application usually covers bigger underlying problems. Deep due diligence is important.
- Choose simpleness over features. Well-designed tools must make your job life easier, not extra challenging and unpleasant.
- Openness develops count on. Nontransparent pricing, unethical reseller terms, and finger-pointing to escape troubles damages depend on.
- Look for honest reviews. Satisfied support reviews mean much less if excessive concerns indicate inadequate total use.
- Perfection is difficult. No single option can flawlessly fulfill every special organization need. Discover the least-bad fit.
- Advancement over change. Incremental improvements normally outweigh high-risk wholesale reinvention of what currently functions fine.
In short, I discovered to be a lot more skeptical of “as well good to be true” marketing insurance claims and much less tempted by the attraction of glossy brand-new things. The devices you use daily ought to gain trust through transparency and performance, not slick advertising.