As a company owner for over a decade, I rely on software application and automation to enhance procedures and provide results. So when GoHighLevel emerged on the scene couple of years back, it certainly caught my interest GoHighLevel For Freelancers.
The concept was appealing– an all-in-one client monitoring platform with marketing, sales, and service tools integrated with each other. As a business owner constantly looking to streamline and scale my business, it seemed like a desire become a reality on paper. Who would not want a solitary remedy that does it all?
However in this comprehensive GoHighLevel testimonial, I’ll take you inside my disastrous journey of trying (and failing) to switch over to this popular new software application. You’ll find out:
If you’re considering whether GoHighLevel is right for your very own business needs, hopefully you can learn from my painful blunders and inflated expectations.
Looter: I do NOT advise GoHighLevel. If you require a CRM, start with this checklist of best CRMs instead. I make use of Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re looking for a sales, marketing, and job administration choice to GoHighLevel, after that below are a few we suggest.
Backstory: Why I Considered Changing 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 actually been gladly depending on Keap (previously Infusionsoft) to satisfy all my customer management and automation demands.
I discovered Keap intuitive to make use of and it handled every little thing I needed– CRM, email marketing, sales funnels, membership websites, and customer support.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are designed to aid small companies keep their clients while adding brand-new ones easily. Automate follow-ups with emails and texts, making certain leads and customers get the best messages at the correct time. Usage website and social networks types to streamline lead follow-up, and manage your growth with very easy consultation scheduling and lead monitoring. Boost sales with automated pricing estimate, invoicing, and payment handling, maximizing your time. With Keap, small businesses can conserve 10 hours each week and rise profits by 39%. Beginning with a 14-day free trial, no credit card called for.
Why we like Keap
Keap supplies an extensive client partnership management (CRM) and marketing automation solution tailored for small companies and business owners. We appreciate Keap’s concentrate on simplifying sales processes and nurturing customer connections through effective automation tools. The platform’s all-in-one strategy integrates CRM, e-mail marketing, invoicing, and job management, making it especially appealing for organizations seeking to settle their tech stack.
Essentially, it simply worked dependably with marginal fuss or maintenance needed. My open and click-through rates were terrific (like 35% terrific). Automations ran efficiently without any issues.
So why on earth was I tempted to uproot my entire functional foundation from a system that functioned to try something unverified and untested?
In hindsight I can admit I got seduced by the alarm telephone call of “glossy item syndrome”. You understand the sensation: when every person’s speaking about a new device that will revolutionize your business … The turf typically looks greener beyond, and I questioned whether GoHighLevel might lower rubbing points that I ‘d found out to endure for many years with Keap.
I withstood at first, however a couple of more irritations led me to think maybe it was time for an adjustment.
The Investment: Moving My Agency to GoHighLevel
Earlier this year I determined to take the plunge. I signed up for HighLevel’s Company plan at $297/month, investing considerably greater than the $97/month starter price.
This wasn’t a choice I took lightly. I knew switching systems was going to need migrating all my Keap information and essentially restoring my entire technology facilities from square one using all of the GoHighLevel integrations readily available.
Here’s a review of just a few of the initiative required:
- Manually exporting 20,000+ e-mail subscriber records
- Recreating lots of automations and workflows
- Relocating customer profiles, notes, and project information to the brand-new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe billing integration
- Establishing landing pages, coupons, and sales funnels throughout again
- Learning an entirely foreign UX and user interface style
Done in, I spent around 30-40 laborious hours of arrangement job transitioning every little thing over– not to mention taking care of lost efficiency throughout the button.
Yet ultimately, it was a calculated investment I wanted to make. I figured some temporary discomfort would certainly settle with GoHighLevel providing a far better long-term option for my organization, Dripify. Oh exactly how incorrect I was …
It just took me about a month of hands-on use to recognize I had actually made a large mistake. The issues began accumulating quickly, till it got to a point I had to cut my losses and switch back to Keap totally.
Allow’s go through the horrible issues I ran into.
Security Issues & Lots of Vermin
Given GoHighLevel positioned itself as an all-in-one automation platform, I took care to carefully recreate each and every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These consisted of series for onboarding brand-new e-mail subscribers, onboarding brand-new customers, automating follow-ups for webinar registrations, sending occasion reminders, managing subscription expiries and much more.
Every little thing seemed to be functioning fine … up until unexpectedly it wasn’t. One early morning, I awoke to find 171 completely irrelevant e-mails had been sent out to users that ought to NOT have gotten them. This happened three days straight, with a different set of 160 people daily.
I desperately tried troubleshooting and rebuilding the automation from square one. Yet the trouble persisted.
When I desperately connected to their support group, they vaguely declared “web server concerns” were responsible. But this explanation really did not make any type of sense, considering that the errors proceeded occurring each morning like clockwork unrelated to any type of downtime.
In my mind, this large failure was entirely undesirable and simply didn’t benefit my organization. I have countless contacts relying on my automated campaigns running efficiently.
So if GoHighLevel was going to be absolutely unstable, just how could I delegate mission-critical workflows and sensitive customer information to their modern technology?
The unintuitive user interface just intensified these issues …
Discouraging UX
Coming from Keap where everything was smooth and instinctive, GoHighLevel’s learning curve really felt steep and complicated.
Straightforward tasks like editing and enhancing workflows included excavating with food selection systems that were all over the place. Secret setups were unexplainably spread in entirely various sections. Relocating in between features felt disjointed or confusing.
I’ll tell you what I indicate by talking about their funnel builder as an instance. There were 3 separate settings panels to manage total, specific, and product setups. Yet for some crazy factor, the links to access each of these core settings were expanded on contrary sides of the display. What!?
As a person that values clean, thoughtful layout, this seriously irritated me.
It strengthened that GoHighLevel still seemed like a work-in-progress instead of a sleek product all set for prime-time usage. Their top priorities seemed focused on stuffing in every feature imaginable, with bad usability as an afterthought.
And talking features, I soon understood the low price tag featured pricey concessions …
Misleading Pricing GoHighLevel For Freelancers
Among GoHighLevel’s largest selling points is the economical cost for access to numerous features. Yet I promptly discovered this inexpensive base price was misleading.
They nickle-and-dimed customers with occasional costs for core capability. Suddenly my credit card declarations had unclear $10 fees from GoHighLevel here and there.
As it turned out, you obtain billed whenever you send out an email through their web servers. So for high volume individuals, this added up to hundreds of bucks in unforeseen expenses.
In between these per-email fees and paying additional for deliverability add-ons like Mailgun, my “inexpensive” GoHighLevel registration wound up setting you back significantly greater than my Keap plan.
The reduced price tag was alluring, however simply not reasonable in practice. This bait-and-switch left a poor preference in my mouth.
Email Fees Suffered
The final dealbreaker was seeing my meticulously nurtured e-mail open prices drop almost over night after switching to GoHighLevel.
Previously, my audience involvement constantly struck 35-40% open rates in Keap month after month. But once I migrated their records over to GoHighLevel, efficiency tanked immediately to a useless 9% open price.
Regardless of just how much I optimized my sending out techniques or attempted every repairing method, I might hardly push open prices back into the teens– still a 50%+ decline from my previous benchmarks GoHighLevel For Freelancers.
Let me repeat: my exact same audience and emails instantly had awful involvement. 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 e-mail marketing, this was a big deal.
In between the debilitating deliverability concerns, concealed fees, busted features, and awful user interface, I had actually lastly reached my limitation …
Why I Give up GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Just 45 days after migrating my agency to GoHighLevel, I knew I had made a big error. The disadvantages substantially surpassed any type of benefits.
No software application is best, however the sheer quantity of problems was beyond appropriate.
At the end of the day, software program boils down to depend on. If I can not trust it to take care of vital features capably or think a vendor has my benefits in mind, after that it’s time to walk away– even after investing considerable time, money, and effort migrating.
So I made the tough contact us to turn around training course and return back to Keap entirely just weeks after going done in on GoHighLevel. Allow’s discover what I gained from this debacle.
Secret Takeaways: What I Picked up from My GoHighLevel Blunder
My time with HighLevel can be summed up as a pricey misadventure. However in hindsight, it instructed me a few essential lessons:
- Stay with what works. Don’t upset what’s working unless something is definitively far better across the board. Modification brings threat.
- Veterinarian asserts thoroughly. Marketing hype around brand-new software frequently obscures bigger underlying problems. Deep due diligence is important.
- Select simpleness over features. Well-designed tools must make your work life much easier, not more complex and untidy.
- Transparency builds trust fund. Opaque pricing, shady reseller terms, and finger-pointing to avert problems destroys depend on.
- Seek objective evaluations. Happy support examines suggest much less if extreme concerns suggest inadequate overall use.
- Perfection is difficult. No solitary option can flawlessly satisfy every one-of-a-kind business requirement. Find the least-bad fit.
- Development over change. Incremental renovations normally surpass high-risk wholesale reinvention of what currently works fine.
In short, I discovered to be extra cynical of “also excellent to be true” marketing cases and much less lured by the appeal of glossy brand-new objects. The devices you use daily should make count on with openness and efficiency, not slick advertising.