As an agency proprietor for over a years, I rely upon software program and automation to simplify procedures and supply results. So when GoHighLevel emerged on the scene couple of years back, it absolutely caught my interest GoHighLevel For Home Loans.
The idea was appealing– an all-in-one client administration system with marketing, sales, and service tools incorporated together. As an entrepreneur constantly looking to streamline and scale my service, it felt like a dream come to life theoretically. That wouldn’t desire a single solution that does it all?
Yet in this extensive GoHighLevel review, I’ll take you inside my tragic trip of attempting (and failing) to switch to this prominent brand-new software program. You’ll find out:
If you’re thinking about whether GoHighLevel is right for your own company requirements, ideally you can gain from my uncomfortable blunders and pumped up expectations.
Spoiler: I do NOT advise GoHighLevel. If you require a CRM, start with this list of ideal CRMs instead. I utilize Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re looking for a sales, marketing, and job administration alternative to GoHighLevel, after that here are a few we recommend.
Backstory: Why I Thought About Changing from Keap
To recognize what attracted me to GoHighLevel in the first place, you require context about my previous arrangement. For over 5 years I had been gladly relying on Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) to fulfill all my client monitoring and automation requirements.
I located Keap user-friendly to make use of and it took care of whatever I needed– CRM, email marketing, sales funnels, membership sites, and customer support.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are made to aid small companies maintain their customers while adding new ones effortlessly. Automate follow-ups with e-mails and messages, making certain leads and customers receive the best messages at the right time. Usage site and social media forms to streamline lead follow-up, and manage your development with easy consultation organizing and lead monitoring. Boost sales with automated estimating, invoicing, and repayment handling, freeing up your time. With Keap, small businesses can conserve 10 hours weekly and boost revenue by 39%. Beginning with a 14-day free trial, no credit card required.
Why we like Keap
Keap offers an extensive consumer relationship monitoring (CRM) and marketing automation option tailored for small companies and entrepreneurs. We appreciate Keap’s concentrate on streamlining sales processes and supporting customer relationships with powerful automation devices. The platform’s all-in-one method combines CRM, email marketing, invoicing, and job monitoring, making it especially eye-catching for companies wanting to combine their tech stack.
For the most part, it just worked dependably with minimal fuss or maintenance needed. My open and click-through rates were wonderful (like 35% great). Automations ran smoothly without any concerns.
So why in the world was I attracted to uproot my entire functional foundation from a system that functioned to attempt something unverified and untested?
In hindsight I can admit I got seduced by the siren call of “glossy object disorder”. You know the sensation: when everybody’s talking about a brand-new device that will reinvent your business … The yard often looks greener beyond, and I questioned whether GoHighLevel may lower rubbing factors that I would certainly found out to endure for many years with Keap.
I stood up to in the beginning, however a few even more frustrations led me to think perhaps it was time for a modification.
The Financial investment: Migrating My Agency to GoHighLevel
Previously this year I chose to start. I enrolled in HighLevel’s Company plan at $297/month, spending dramatically greater than the $97/month starter cost.
This had not been a decision I took lightly. I recognized switching systems was going to call for migrating all my Keap information and basically reconstructing my whole tech facilities from square one making use of all of the GoHighLevel integrations available.
Below’s a summary of just a few of the effort needed:
- By hand exporting 20,000+ email client records
- Recreating dozens of automations and workflows
- Moving client accounts, notes, and project information to the new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe billing integration
- Setting up landing pages, promos, and sales funnels throughout once again
- Learning a completely international UX and interface style
All in, I invested around 30-40 laborious hours of arrangement work transitioning everything over– not to mention managing lost efficiency during the button.
However ultimately, it was a calculated financial investment I was willing to make. I figured some short-term pain would pay off with GoHighLevel supplying a far better long-lasting option for my service, Dripify. Oh how wrong I was …
It only took me regarding a month of hands-on usage to recognize I had actually made a large mistake. The issues started accumulating promptly, up until it reached a point I needed to reduce my losses and change back to Keap completely.
Let’s go through the nightmarish troubles I ran into.
Safety Issues & Lots of Vermin
Given GoHighLevel positioned itself as an all-in-one automation system, I took care to thoroughly recreate each and every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These consisted of series for onboarding new e-mail clients, onboarding new customers, automating follow-ups for webinar registrations, sending event suggestions, managing subscription expiries and much more.
Every little thing appeared to be operating penalty … up until instantly it wasn’t. One morning, I awoke to find 171 entirely irrelevant e-mails had been sent out to customers that should NOT have actually received them. This occurred 3 days straight, with a different set of 160 individuals every day.
I desperately tried fixing and rebuilding the automation from square one. But the trouble lingered.
When I desperately reached out to their support group, they vaguely declared “web server problems” were to blame. But this description didn’t make any type of feeling, considering that the errors proceeded occurring each morning like clockwork unassociated to any kind of downtime.
In my mind, this massive failing was totally inappropriate and simply didn’t benefit my business. I have hundreds of get in touches with relying on my automated campaigns running smoothly.
So if GoHighLevel was going to be absolutely unstable, how could I leave mission-critical workflows and delicate client data to their innovation?
The unintuitive interface only intensified these problems …
Frustrating UX
Coming from Keap where whatever was seamless and user-friendly, GoHighLevel’s learning curve really felt high and difficult.
Easy jobs like editing workflows included excavating with menu systems that were all over the place. Secret settings were unexplainably scattered in absolutely various areas. Moving in between features really felt disjointed or confusing.
I’ll tell you what I suggest by speaking about their funnel builder as an example. There were 3 separate settings panels to take care of overall, specific, and product arrangements. Yet for some crazy reason, the web links to gain access to each of these core setups were spread out on opposite sides of the screen. What!?
As a person that values clean, thoughtful design, this seriously annoyed me.
It enhanced that GoHighLevel still seemed like a work-in-progress as opposed to a polished item prepared for prime-time usage. Their priorities seemed concentrated on packing in every feature under the sun, with inadequate functionality as an afterthought.
And speaking of features, I soon understood the low cost tag came with costly compromises …
Deceptive Pricing GoHighLevel For Home Loans
One of GoHighLevel’s most significant selling points is the inexpensive rate for access to many features. However I rapidly learned this affordable base cost was deceitful.
They nickle-and-dimed customers with erratic costs for core capability. Unexpectedly my credit card statements had vague $10 costs from GoHighLevel occasionally.
As it ended up, you obtain billed each time you send an email through their web servers. So for high volume individuals, this added up to numerous bucks in unforeseen expenses.
In between these per-email costs and paying extra for deliverability add-ons like Mailgun, my “cost effective” GoHighLevel registration ended up setting you back significantly greater than my Keap plan.
The reduced sticker price was appealing, however simply not practical in practice. This bait-and-switch left a bad taste in my mouth.
Email Rates Suffered
The final dealbreaker was seeing my carefully supported email open prices plummet practically over night after switching over to GoHighLevel.
Formerly, my audience involvement constantly hit 35-40% open rates in Keap month after month. But once I migrated their documents over to GoHighLevel, efficiency tanked instantaneously to a pathetic 9% open price.
Despite just how much I maximized my sending techniques or attempted every troubleshooting technique, I might barely nudge open prices back right into the teenagers– still a 50%+ decrease from my previous benchmarks GoHighLevel For Home Loans.
Let me repeat: my exact same target market and emails all of a sudden had dreadful involvement. The only point I might assume that would be causing this was whatever was taking place behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For an agency so depending on e-mail marketing, this was a big deal.
Between the debilitating deliverability concerns, hidden fees, damaged features, and terrible user interface, I had actually ultimately reached my limitation …
Why I Quit GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Just 45 days after moving my company to GoHighLevel, I recognized I had actually made a substantial blunder. The cons dramatically outweighed any type of advantages.
No software is perfect, yet the large volume of issues was beyond appropriate.
At the end of the day, software application boils down to count on. If I can’t trust it to handle critical functions competently or believe a vendor has my best interests in mind, after that it’s time to leave– even after investing substantial time, cash, and effort moving.
So I made the hard call to turn around program and return back to Keap completely simply weeks after going done in on GoHighLevel. Let’s discover what I picked up from this debacle.
Secret Takeaways: What I Learned From My GoHighLevel Mistake
My time with HighLevel can be summed up as a costly misadventure. Yet in hindsight, it instructed me a few key lessons:
- Stick to what jobs. Don’t disturb what’s functioning unless something is definitively better across the board. Change brings danger.
- Veterinarian asserts thoroughly. Marketing hype around brand-new software application typically obscures larger underlying problems. Deep due persistance is important.
- Select simpleness over features. Properly designed devices must make your work life much easier, not more difficult and unpleasant.
- Openness constructs trust fund. Opaque pricing, unethical reseller terms, and finger-pointing to avert problems damages trust.
- Look for impartial evaluations. Pleased assistance assesses imply much less if too much issues imply bad total usability.
- Excellence is difficult. No solitary service can completely fulfill every one-of-a-kind company requirement. Find the least-bad fit.
- Evolution over revolution. Step-by-step renovations typically exceed risky wholesale reinvention of what already works fine.
Basically, I found out to be much more unconvinced of “too great to be real” marketing insurance claims and less tempted by the attraction of glossy new objects. The tools you use daily must earn depend on with openness and performance, not glossy advertising.