As a firm owner for over a years, I rely on software program and automation to enhance operations and provide results. So when GoHighLevel arised on the scene couple of years back, it certainly caught my attention GoHighLevel For Lawyers.
The concept was attractive– an all-in-one client monitoring platform with marketing, sales, and service devices integrated together. As an entrepreneur always wanting to streamline and scale my business, it appeared like a dream happened theoretically. That wouldn’t desire a single option that does it all?
However in this in-depth GoHighLevel review, I’ll take you inside my devastating trip of trying (and falling short) to switch over to this prominent new software application. You’ll find out:
If you’re taking into consideration whether GoHighLevel is right for your own company needs, ideally you can pick up from my agonizing errors and inflated expectations.
Looter: I do NOT suggest GoHighLevel. If you require a CRM, begin with this checklist of ideal CRMs instead. I make use of Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re searching for a sales, marketing, and task administration choice to GoHighLevel, then below are a few we advise.
Backstory: Why I Took Into Consideration Switching Over from Keap
To understand what attracted me to GoHighLevel in the first place, you require context concerning my previous arrangement. For over 5 years I had actually been gladly relying upon Keap (previously Infusionsoft) to meet all my customer monitoring and automation needs.
I found Keap instinctive to utilize and it handled whatever I needed– CRM, email marketing, sales funnels, subscription websites, and customer support.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are created to help local business maintain their customers while adding brand-new ones easily. Automate follow-ups with emails and texts, making certain leads and customers receive the appropriate messages at the correct time. Use web site and social networks kinds to simplify lead follow-up, and handle your development with very easy visit organizing and lead monitoring. Boost sales with automated estimating, invoicing, and payment processing, liberating your time. With Keap, local business can save 10 hours per week and boost income by 39%. Begin with a 14-day free trial, no charge card needed.
Why we like Keap
Keap supplies an extensive client connection management (CRM) and marketing automation solution tailored for small businesses and business owners. We appreciate Keap’s concentrate on improving sales procedures and nurturing consumer partnerships with effective automation devices. The system’s all-in-one approach incorporates CRM, e-mail marketing, invoicing, and task monitoring, making it specifically appealing for companies looking to consolidate their technology pile.
Essentially, it simply worked accurately with marginal difficulty or maintenance needed. My open and click-through prices were great (like 35% fantastic). Automations ran efficiently with no issues.
So why in the world was I attracted to uproot my whole functional foundation from a system that worked to try something unverified and untried?
In knowledge I can admit I obtained seduced by the alarm telephone call of “glossy item disorder”. You understand the feeling: when everyone’s discussing a brand-new device that will revolutionize your business … The grass often looks greener on the other side, and I questioned whether GoHighLevel could decrease friction factors that I ‘d found out to endure for many years with Keap.
I resisted at first, but a few more stress led me to believe perhaps it was time for a change.
The Investment: Migrating My Firm to GoHighLevel
Previously this year I determined to start. I signed up for HighLevel’s Company plan at $297/month, investing significantly more than the $97/month starter cost.
This had not been a choice I ignored. I knew switching over systems was mosting likely to require migrating all my Keap data and basically restoring my whole technology facilities from square one making use of every one of the GoHighLevel integrations readily available.
Right here’s a review of simply several of the effort called for:
- By hand exporting 20,000+ e-mail customer records
- Recreating lots of automations and workflows
- Relocating client profiles, notes, and job data to the new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe invoicing integration
- Setting up landing pages, discounts, and sales funnels all over once more
- Learning a completely foreign UX and user interface layout
All in, I invested around 30-40 laborious hours of arrangement job transitioning everything over– not to mention handling shed efficiency during the switch.
However ultimately, it was a computed financial investment I wanted to make. I figured some temporary pain would certainly settle with GoHighLevel supplying a far better long-term option for my organization, Dripify. Oh exactly how wrong I was …
It just took me regarding a month of hands-on usage to understand I had made a large blunder. The problems started accumulating quickly, till it got to a factor I needed to cut my losses and switch back to Keap completely.
Let’s walk through the nightmarish issues I encountered.
Safety Issues & Several Bugs
Given GoHighLevel positioned itself as an all-in-one automation platform, I took care to diligently recreate every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These consisted of sequences for onboarding new email customers, onboarding brand-new customers, automating follow-ups for webinar registrations, sending event suggestions, handling membership expirations and far more.
Everything appeared to be working fine … until instantly it wasn’t. One morning, I awoke to locate 171 entirely irrelevant e-mails had actually been sent out to individuals that ought to NOT have actually obtained them. This took place three days in a row, with a different set of 160 people daily.
I desperately attempted troubleshooting and rebuilding the automation from scratch. Yet the issue lingered.
When I seriously reached out to their assistance team, they slightly claimed “server issues” were to blame. Yet this description really did not make any kind of sense, since the mistakes proceeded happening each morning like clockwork unrelated to any type of downtime.
In my mind, this large failure was totally inappropriate and simply didn’t benefit my service. I have hundreds of get in touches with counting on my automated campaigns running smoothly.
So if GoHighLevel was mosting likely to be entirely unreliable, exactly how could I delegate mission-critical workflows and delicate client data to their technology?
The unintuitive interface just worsened these concerns …
Frustrating UX
Originating from Keap where whatever was smooth and user-friendly, GoHighLevel’s learning contour felt steep and complex.
Easy jobs like modifying workflows entailed excavating via food selection systems that were all over the place. Key setups were unexplainably spread in totally various areas. Relocating between functions 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 manage total, individual, and product configurations. Yet for some insane reason, the links to gain access to each of these core setups were expanded on contrary sides of the display. What!?
As somebody who values tidy, thoughtful style, this seriously annoyed me.
It reinforced that GoHighLevel still felt like a work-in-progress rather than a sleek product all set for prime-time usage. Their top priorities seemed concentrated on cramming in every feature imaginable, with poor use as a second thought.
And speaking of features, I quickly recognized the low price tag featured pricey compromises …
Misleading Pricing GoHighLevel For Lawyers
Among GoHighLevel’s biggest marketing factors is the budget-friendly price for access to numerous features. Yet I promptly discovered this affordable base expense was misleading.
They nickle-and-dimed users with erratic fees for core performance. All of a sudden my credit card statements had vague $10 charges from GoHighLevel occasionally.
As it ended up, you get charged every time you send an e-mail with their web servers. So for high quantity customers, this added up to numerous bucks in unexpected prices.
Between these per-email fees and paying additional for deliverability add-ons like Mailgun, my “affordable” GoHighLevel registration wound up costing dramatically MORE than my Keap plan.
The low price tag was appealing, yet simply not sensible in practice. This bait-and-switch left a negative taste in my mouth.
Email Rates Suffered
The final dealbreaker was seeing my thoroughly supported email open rates plummet virtually overnight after changing to GoHighLevel.
Previously, my target market engagement constantly hit 35-40% open rates in Keap month after month. But once I moved their documents over to GoHighLevel, efficiency tanked instantly to a useless 9% open rate.
Despite just how much I optimized my sending methods or tried every fixing method, I might hardly nudge open rates back into the teens– still a 50%+ decline from my previous benchmarks GoHighLevel For Lawyers.
Let me repeat: my exact same audience and e-mails unexpectedly had horrible engagement. The only thing I might assume that would certainly be triggering this was whatever was happening behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a company so based on e-mail marketing, this was a big deal.
Between the crippling deliverability concerns, concealed fees, busted features, and awful interface, I had actually finally reached my restriction …
Why I Stop GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Just 45 days after migrating my firm to GoHighLevel, I understood I had actually made a substantial blunder. The disadvantages considerably outweighed any benefits.
No software application is ideal, but the sheer quantity of issues was past appropriate.
At the end of the day, software application comes down to count on. If I can’t trust it to take care of crucial features effectively or think a vendor has my benefits in mind, after that it’s time to walk away– even after spending considerable time, money, and effort migrating.
So I made the tough phone call to turn around program and return back to Keap totally simply weeks after going all in on GoHighLevel. Allow’s explore what I gained from this fiasco.
Trick Takeaways: What I Gained from My GoHighLevel Blunder
My time with HighLevel can be summarized as a costly ill fortune. But in hindsight, it instructed me a few key lessons:
- Adhere to what works. Do not upset what’s working unless something is definitively much better across the board. Adjustment brings threat.
- Veterinarian claims extensively. Marketing hype around brand-new software application frequently obscures larger underlying problems. Deep due persistance is crucial.
- Choose simplicity over features. Well-designed tools need to make your job life much easier, not much more difficult and untidy.
- Transparency develops trust. Nontransparent pricing, dubious reseller terms, and finger-pointing to escape issues ruins trust fund.
- Seek objective testimonials. Pleased assistance reviews suggest less if excessive problems indicate poor overall use.
- Perfection is impossible. No single remedy can flawlessly satisfy every special service need. Locate the least-bad fit.
- Advancement over revolution. Incremental enhancements typically outweigh high-risk wholesale reinvention of what currently functions penalty.
Simply put, I discovered to be extra skeptical of “too excellent to be true” marketing cases and much less attracted by the attraction of glossy new items. The devices you make use of daily need to earn trust through transparency and performance, not glossy advertising.