As a firm owner for over a years, I count on software program and automation to enhance operations and deliver outcomes. So when GoHighLevel arised on the scene couple of years back, it certainly caught my focus GoHighLevel For Insurance Agents.
The concept was enticing– an all-in-one customer management platform with marketing, sales, and service devices incorporated together. As a business owner constantly looking to streamline and scale my business, it felt like a dream come true theoretically. Who would not desire a solitary service that does it all?
However in this in-depth GoHighLevel testimonial, I’ll take you inside my tragic journey of trying (and stopping working) to switch to this popular new software application. You’ll find out:
If you’re thinking about whether GoHighLevel is right for your own organization demands, ideally you can gain from my agonizing mistakes and blew up assumptions.
Spoiler: I do NOT advise GoHighLevel. If you need a CRM, begin with this listing of best CRMs rather. I use Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re trying to find a sales, marketing, and task management option to GoHighLevel, after that right here are a couple of we recommend.
Backstory: Why I Thought About Switching from Keap
To recognize what attracted me to GoHighLevel to begin with, you require context regarding my previous setup. For over 5 years I had been gladly relying upon Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) to meet all my customer management and automation needs.
I discovered Keap intuitive to use and it handled everything I required– CRM, e-mail marketing, sales funnels, subscription sites, and customer support.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are developed to help local business keep their clients while adding brand-new ones easily. Automate follow-ups with e-mails and messages, guaranteeing leads and clients obtain the ideal messages at the correct time. Usage site and social media sites forms to improve lead follow-up, and manage your growth with simple consultation organizing and lead tracking. Boost sales with automated estimating, invoicing, and repayment handling, maximizing your time. With Keap, small businesses can save 10 hours per week and boost earnings by 39%. Start with a 14-day free trial, no charge card needed.
Why we like Keap
Keap provides an extensive customer partnership administration (CRM) and marketing automation option tailored for small companies and entrepreneurs. We appreciate Keap’s concentrate on simplifying sales procedures and supporting customer connections with effective automation devices. The platform’s all-in-one strategy integrates CRM, email marketing, invoicing, and job administration, making it particularly attractive for services wanting to combine their technology stack.
For the most part, it simply functioned reliably with minimal difficulty or upkeep required. My open and click-through rates were terrific (like 35% terrific). Automations ran smoothly without concerns.
So why on earth was I attracted to uproot my whole functional foundation from a system that functioned to try something unverified and untested?
In hindsight I can confess I got attracted by the siren telephone call of “shiny things disorder”. You recognize the sensation: when everyone’s discussing a new tool that will reinvent your service … The turf usually looks greener beyond, and I questioned whether GoHighLevel could reduce rubbing points that I would certainly found out to endure over the years with Keap.
I stood up to in the beginning, yet a few more aggravations led me to believe maybe it was time for a change.
The Financial investment: Moving My Company to GoHighLevel
Previously this year I made a decision to start. I enrolled in HighLevel’s Firm plan at $297/month, spending substantially more than the $97/month starter cost.
This had not been a choice I took lightly. I understood switching over platforms was going to need migrating all my Keap data and essentially reconstructing my entire technology facilities from square one making use of all of the GoHighLevel integrations available.
Below’s a summary of simply a few of the effort needed:
- By hand exporting 20,000+ e-mail subscriber documents
- Recreating loads of automations and workflows
- Relocating client profiles, notes, and task information to the new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe payment integration
- Setting up landing pages, promotions, and sales funnels around again
- Learning a completely international UX and user interface design
Done in, I invested around 30-40 tedious hours of arrangement job transitioning everything over– not to mention dealing with shed efficiency throughout the switch.
However ultimately, it was a calculated investment I wanted to make. I figured some short-term pain would repay with GoHighLevel offering a better lasting solution for my business, Dripify. Oh exactly how wrong I was …
It just took me regarding a month of hands-on usage to realize I had made a big mistake. The problems started accumulating quickly, until it reached a factor I needed to cut my losses and switch back to Keap completely.
Allow’s walk through the horrible problems I came across.
Protection Issues & Numerous Bugs
Given GoHighLevel placed itself as an all-in-one automation platform, I made sure to diligently recreate each and every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These included sequences for onboarding brand-new e-mail clients, onboarding new clients, automating follow-ups for webinar enrollments, sending occasion pointers, managing membership expirations and much more.
Whatever appeared to be working fine … up until suddenly it wasn’t. One early morning, I awoke to discover 171 totally unnecessary emails had actually been sent out to individuals who ought to NOT have actually gotten them. This happened 3 days straight, with a different set of 160 individuals every day.
I anxiously tried troubleshooting and restoring the automation from square one. But the trouble persisted.
When I seriously connected to their assistance team, they vaguely declared “web server issues” were at fault. Yet this description didn’t make any feeling, considering that the errors proceeded taking place each morning like clockwork unconnected to any kind of downtime.
In my mind, this massive failing was entirely inappropriate and just really did not work for my business. I have thousands of calls counting on my automated campaigns running smoothly.
So if GoHighLevel was going to be totally undependable, just how could I delegate mission-critical workflows and delicate client data to their technology?
The unintuitive user interface just intensified these problems …
Aggravating UX
Originating from Keap where every little thing was seamless and intuitive, GoHighLevel’s learning contour felt steep and challenging.
Basic jobs like editing workflows involved excavating through menu systems that were all over the place. Trick setups were unexplainably spread in totally various areas. Relocating between features really felt disjointed or complex.
I’ll tell you what I suggest by talking about their funnel builder as an example. There were 3 separate setups panels to manage total, specific, and product configurations. Yet for some crazy reason, the web links to gain access to each of these core settings were spread out on opposite sides of the screen. What!?
As somebody who values clean, thoughtful design, this seriously frustrated me.
It strengthened that GoHighLevel still felt like a work-in-progress rather than a refined product prepared for prime-time use. Their priorities seemed focused on cramming in every feature imaginable, with poor usability as a second thought.
And speaking of features, I soon recognized the low cost tag included pricey compromises …
Deceptive Pricing GoHighLevel For Insurance Agents
Among GoHighLevel’s most significant selling points is the cost effective price for accessibility to many features. Yet I quickly learned this cheap base price was misleading.
They nickle-and-dimed customers with erratic fees for core functionality. Instantly my credit card declarations had vague $10 charges from GoHighLevel occasionally.
As it turned out, you get charged each time you send an e-mail via their web servers. So for high volume individuals, this amounted to thousands of dollars in unforeseen expenses.
Between these per-email charges and paying additional for deliverability add-ons like Mailgun, my “affordable” GoHighLevel membership wound up costing substantially greater than my Keap plan.
The reduced sticker price was appealing, however just not practical in practice. This bait-and-switch left a bad taste in my mouth.
Email Fees Suffered
The final dealbreaker was seeing my carefully nurtured email open rates plummet virtually overnight after switching over to GoHighLevel.
Formerly, my audience engagement regularly struck 35-40% open rates in Keap month after month. Once I migrated their documents over to GoHighLevel, efficiency tanked instantly to a pitiful 9% open rate.
No matter just how much I maximized my sending out methods or tried every troubleshooting trick, I can barely nudge open rates back right into the teenagers– still a 50%+ decrease from my previous criteria GoHighLevel For Insurance Agents.
Let me repeat: my exact same target market and e-mails instantly had horrible interaction. The only thing I can assume that would be causing this was whatever was happening behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a firm so depending on email marketing, this was a big deal.
Between the debilitating deliverability issues, concealed costs, busted features, and horrible interface, I had ultimately reached my restriction …
Why I Quit GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Simply 45 days after moving my agency to GoHighLevel, I understood I had made a big mistake. The disadvantages drastically exceeded any benefits.
No software is ideal, but the sheer quantity of issues was past acceptable.
At the end of the day, software comes down to trust. If I can not trust it to manage important features properly or believe a supplier has my benefits in mind, after that it’s time to leave– also after spending significant time, cash, and initiative migrating.
So I made the challenging phone call to reverse program and return back to Keap completely just weeks after going all in on GoHighLevel. Allow’s discover what I picked up from this debacle.
Trick Takeaways: What I Learned From My GoHighLevel Error
My time with HighLevel can be summed up as a costly misadventure. However in knowledge, it educated me a few crucial lessons:
- Stay with what works. Don’t distress what’s functioning unless something is definitively much better across the board. Modification brings risk.
- Vet asserts thoroughly. Marketing hype around new software program often obscures larger underlying defects. Deep due persistance is important.
- Choose simpleness over features. Well-designed tools ought to make your work life simpler, not more complicated and messy.
- Openness builds depend on. Nontransparent pricing, shady reseller terms, and finger-pointing to evade troubles destroys count on.
- Look for impartial testimonials. Satisfied support examines suggest much less if too much problems imply inadequate total use.
- Excellence is impossible. No single option can perfectly meet every distinct business requirement. Locate the least-bad fit.
- Advancement over revolution. Step-by-step enhancements usually exceed risky wholesale reinvention of what already works penalty.
Basically, I discovered to be extra skeptical of “too good to be true” marketing cases and less attracted by the allure of shiny brand-new items. The devices you utilize daily ought to earn count on through transparency and efficiency, not slick advertising.