As an agency owner for over a decade, I depend on software and automation to streamline operations and supply results. So when GoHighLevel emerged on the scene few years back, it certainly caught my interest GoHighLevel For Digital Marketers.
The idea was enticing– an all-in-one client management platform with marketing, sales, and service tools integrated with each other. As an entrepreneur always looking to streamline and scale my organization, it felt like a desire come to life on paper. That wouldn’t desire a single solution that does it all?
Yet in this extensive GoHighLevel review, I’ll take you inside my dreadful journey of trying (and falling short) to switch to this popular new software program. You’ll discover:
If you’re thinking about whether GoHighLevel is right for your very own business demands, hopefully you can learn from my uncomfortable errors and inflated expectations.
Spoiler: I do NOT recommend GoHighLevel. If you require a CRM, begin with this list of ideal CRMs rather. I utilize Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re seeking a sales, marketing, and job administration option to GoHighLevel, then right here are a couple of we recommend.
Backstory: Why I Took Into Consideration Changing from Keap
To understand what attracted me to GoHighLevel to begin with, you need context about my previous setup. For over 5 years I had actually been happily counting on Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) to fulfill all my customer monitoring and automation demands.
I found Keap intuitive to utilize and it dealt with everything I needed– CRM, e-mail marketing, sales funnels, membership sites, and client assistance.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are developed to aid local business keep their customers while adding brand-new ones easily. Automate follow-ups with e-mails and texts, ensuring leads and customers get the best messages at the correct time. Usage internet site and social media sites forms to enhance lead follow-up, and manage your development with simple consultation organizing and lead monitoring. Boost sales with automated pricing estimate, invoicing, and settlement handling, freeing up your time. With Keap, local business can conserve 10 hours each week and rise profits by 39%. Start with a 14-day free trial, no bank card called for.
Why we like Keap
Keap supplies a thorough customer relationship administration (CRM) and marketing automation remedy tailored for small businesses and entrepreneurs. We appreciate Keap’s focus on improving sales processes and nurturing consumer partnerships via powerful automation devices. The system’s all-in-one approach integrates CRM, e-mail marketing, invoicing, and job monitoring, making it particularly appealing for organizations wanting to combine their tech stack.
Generally, it just worked dependably with very little fuss or maintenance required. My open and click-through prices were terrific (like 35% excellent). Automations ran efficiently with no concerns.
So why in the world was I attracted to uproot my entire functional foundation from a system that worked to try something unverified and untested?
In hindsight I can admit I obtained seduced by the alarm phone call of “glossy object syndrome”. You understand the sensation: when everybody’s discussing a brand-new tool that will certainly transform your organization … The yard typically looks greener on the other side, and I wondered whether GoHighLevel could reduce friction factors that I ‘d discovered to endure throughout the years with Keap.
I stood up to initially, however a couple of more disappointments led me to think maybe it was time for an adjustment.
The Financial investment: Migrating My Agency to GoHighLevel
Previously this year I determined to take the plunge. I enrolled in HighLevel’s Firm plan at $297/month, spending substantially greater than the $97/month starter price.
This wasn’t a decision I ignored. I recognized switching systems was going to need moving all my Keap information and essentially rebuilding my entire technology framework from the ground up using every one of the GoHighLevel integrations offered.
Right here’s an introduction of simply a few of the effort needed:
- By hand exporting 20,000+ email client records
- Recreating loads of automations and workflows
- Relocating client profiles, notes, and project information to the new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe payment integration
- Establishing landing pages, discounts, and sales funnels throughout once more
- Learning an entirely foreign UX and interface design
Done in, I spent around 30-40 laborious hours of configuration work transitioning everything over– in addition to managing shed performance during the switch.
However ultimately, it was a computed investment I agreed to make. I figured some short-term discomfort would certainly settle with GoHighLevel offering a better long-term option for my company, Dripify. Oh just how wrong I was …
It only took me about a month of hands-on use to realize I had actually made a big error. The issues began piling up rapidly, up until it got to a factor I needed to reduce my losses and change back to Keap totally.
Let’s walk through the horrible problems I experienced.
Safety Issues & Lots of Bugs
Offered GoHighLevel positioned itself as an all-in-one automation platform, I took care to carefully recreate every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These included sequences for onboarding new e-mail subscribers, onboarding brand-new clients, automating follow-ups for webinar enrollments, sending out occasion suggestions, handling membership expirations and far more.
Whatever appeared to be working fine … until unexpectedly it wasn’t. One morning, I woke up to discover 171 totally unimportant e-mails had been sent out to individuals that should NOT have actually obtained them. This occurred 3 days in a row, with a different batch of 160 people daily.
I hysterically tried fixing and reconstructing the automation from scratch. But the issue continued.
When I frantically reached out to their assistance team, they slightly declared “server problems” were to blame. But this explanation didn’t make any type of feeling, because the mistakes continued happening each early morning like clockwork unconnected to any kind of downtime.
In my mind, this massive failure was completely undesirable and just really did not work for my organization. I have countless calls depending on my automated campaigns running efficiently.
So if GoHighLevel was mosting likely to be absolutely unstable, how could I turn over mission-critical workflows and sensitive customer data to their innovation?
The unintuitive interface only worsened these concerns …
Frustrating UX
Coming from Keap where every little thing was seamless and instinctive, GoHighLevel’s learning curve really felt steep and difficult.
Easy jobs like editing workflows involved digging with food selection systems that were all over the place. Key settings were unexplainably spread in entirely different areas. Moving between features felt disjointed or complex.
I’ll inform you what I suggest by speaking about their funnel builder as an example. There were 3 different settings panels to handle overall, private, and product arrangements. Yet for some crazy reason, the links to gain access to each of these core setups were expanded on contrary sides of the screen. What!?
As someone that values tidy, thoughtful layout, this seriously frustrated me.
It strengthened that GoHighLevel still seemed like a work-in-progress rather than a polished item ready for prime-time usage. Their concerns appeared concentrated on cramming in every feature imaginable, with bad usability as an afterthought.
And speaking of features, I quickly understood the small cost tag included expensive compromises …
Misleading Pricing GoHighLevel For Digital Marketers
One of GoHighLevel’s greatest selling factors is the cost effective rate for access to so many features. But I swiftly learned this cheap base price was misleading.
They nickle-and-dimed individuals with sporadic charges for core capability. Unexpectedly my bank card statements had vague $10 fees from GoHighLevel occasionally.
As it turned out, you obtain charged each time you send out an email through their web servers. So for high quantity individuals, this added up to thousands of dollars in unexpected expenses.
In between these per-email fees and paying extra for deliverability attachments like Mailgun, my “affordable” GoHighLevel subscription wound up costing significantly MORE than my Keap plan.
The low sticker price was tempting, however just not sensible in practice. This bait-and-switch left a poor preference in my mouth.
Email Fees Suffered
The last dealbreaker was seeing my meticulously supported email open rates drop almost over night after changing to GoHighLevel.
Formerly, my audience interaction consistently hit 35-40% open prices in Keap month after month. Once I moved their documents over to GoHighLevel, efficiency tanked immediately to a worthless 9% open price.
Regardless of just how much I optimized my sending out techniques or attempted every troubleshooting method, I can barely nudge open rates back right into the teenagers– still a 50%+ decline from my previous criteria GoHighLevel For Digital Marketers.
Let me repeat: my exact same target market and emails instantly had terrible interaction. The only thing I could think that would certainly be creating this was whatever was taking place behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a company so based on email marketing, this was a big deal.
In between the debilitating deliverability issues, hidden fees, broken features, and awful interface, I had actually ultimately reached my limitation …
Why I Stop GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Just 45 days after moving my company to GoHighLevel, I recognized I had actually made a huge blunder. The cons drastically outweighed any benefits.
No software is best, but the large volume of problems was beyond appropriate.
At the end of the day, software boils down to trust. If I can’t trust it to handle critical functions properly or think a supplier has my best interests in mind, then it’s time to walk away– also after investing significant time, money, and effort migrating.
So I made the tough contact us to reverse course and return back to Keap completely simply weeks after going done in on GoHighLevel. Allow’s discover what I picked up from this ordeal.
Trick Takeaways: What I Learned From My GoHighLevel Error
My time with HighLevel can be summarized as a pricey misadventure. Yet in knowledge, it instructed me a couple of vital lessons:
- Stick to what jobs. Do not distress what’s working unless something is definitively better across the board. Modification brings risk.
- Vet claims thoroughly. Marketing hype around brand-new software typically obscures larger underlying problems. Deep due diligence is necessary.
- Choose simplicity over features. Properly designed devices ought to make your job life simpler, not much more difficult and messy.
- Transparency builds trust fund. Opaque pricing, questionable reseller terms, and finger-pointing to evade problems damages depend on.
- Seek honest evaluations. Happy assistance examines suggest less if too much concerns suggest poor overall functionality.
- Perfection is difficult. No single option can perfectly fulfill every distinct business demand. Discover the least-bad fit.
- Evolution over change. Incremental improvements generally surpass dangerous wholesale reinvention of what already works fine.
In short, I found out to be much more doubtful of “too great to be true” marketing claims and less attracted by the attraction of glossy new objects. The devices you utilize daily ought to earn trust via transparency and performance, not slick advertising.