As an agency proprietor for over a decade, I rely on software program and automation to streamline procedures and deliver results. So when GoHighLevel arised on the scene couple of years back, it absolutely captured my focus GoHighLevel For Letting Agents.
The idea was attractive– an all-in-one customer management system with marketing, sales, and solution tools incorporated with each other. As an entrepreneur always wanting to simplify and scale my company, it appeared like a desire happened theoretically. That wouldn’t desire a single remedy that does it all?
Yet in this thorough GoHighLevel evaluation, I’ll take you inside my devastating journey of attempting (and stopping working) to change to this popular new software application. You’ll find out:
If you’re considering whether GoHighLevel is right for your very own company requirements, ideally you can gain from my uncomfortable mistakes and pumped up assumptions.
Spoiler: I do NOT advise GoHighLevel. If you require a CRM, start with this list of best CRMs rather. I use Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re searching for a sales, marketing, and job management option to GoHighLevel, after that right here are a few we advise.
Backstory: Why I Thought About Changing from Keap
To recognize what attracted me to GoHighLevel in the first place, you require context regarding my previous setup. For over 5 years I had been gladly relying on Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) to satisfy all my customer administration and automation requirements.
I found Keap user-friendly to utilize and it handled whatever I needed– CRM, email marketing, sales funnels, subscription sites, and client assistance.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are designed to assist small businesses keep their customers while including brand-new ones easily. Automate follow-ups with e-mails and texts, making certain leads and clients get the right messages at the correct time. Usage internet site and social media kinds to improve lead follow-up, and manage your growth with simple appointment scheduling and lead tracking. Boost sales with automated pricing estimate, invoicing, and settlement processing, liberating your time. With Keap, small companies can conserve 10 hours weekly and rise profits by 39%. Start with a 14-day free trial, no credit card called for.
Why we like Keap
Keap provides a detailed customer relationship administration (CRM) and marketing automation remedy customized for local business and entrepreneurs. We appreciate Keap’s focus on improving sales procedures and nurturing client relationships with powerful automation devices. The platform’s all-in-one strategy incorporates CRM, e-mail marketing, invoicing, and task administration, making it particularly eye-catching for companies aiming to consolidate their tech pile.
Essentially, it simply worked accurately with very little difficulty or upkeep called for. My open and click-through prices were terrific (like 35% great). Automations ran efficiently without any issues.
So why in the world was I attracted to uproot my entire functional foundation from a system that worked to try something unproven and untested?
In knowledge I can admit I got attracted by the alarm call of “glossy object syndrome”. You understand the feeling: when every person’s discussing a brand-new tool that will reinvent your business … The lawn often looks greener on the other side, and I questioned whether GoHighLevel could minimize rubbing factors that I would certainly found out to endure over the years with Keap.
I withstood at first, yet a few even more disappointments led me to think perhaps it was time for an adjustment.
The Financial investment: Migrating My Firm to GoHighLevel
Previously this year I determined to start. I signed up for HighLevel’s Company plan at $297/month, spending dramatically greater than the $97/month starter price.
This had not been a decision I took lightly. I understood switching over systems was mosting likely to call for moving all my Keap data and essentially reconstructing my whole technology infrastructure from the ground up utilizing every one of the GoHighLevel integrations readily available.
Right here’s a review of simply a few of the effort needed:
- Manually exporting 20,000+ e-mail customer documents
- Recreating loads of automations and workflows
- Relocating client accounts, notes, and job information to the brand-new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe invoicing integration
- Establishing landing pages, coupons, and sales funnels throughout once more
- Learning a totally international UX and user interface style
All in, I spent around 30-40 tedious hours of configuration job transitioning everything over– in addition to handling shed performance during the switch.
But ultimately, it was a calculated investment I wanted to make. I figured some short-term discomfort would pay off with GoHighLevel offering a far better long-term service for my business, Dripify. Oh how wrong I was …
It only took me about a month of hands-on usage to understand I had actually made a large error. The problems began piling up promptly, till it reached a point I needed to reduce my losses and switch back to Keap totally.
Let’s walk through the horrible problems I ran into.
Security Issues & Many Bugs
Provided GoHighLevel positioned itself as an all-in-one automation platform, I took care to meticulously recreate every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These consisted of series for onboarding new e-mail clients, onboarding brand-new customers, automating follow-ups for webinar enrollments, sending out event suggestions, handling membership expirations and much more.
Every little thing appeared to be working fine … till instantly it wasn’t. One early morning, I awoke to locate 171 entirely irrelevant e-mails had actually been sent out to customers who need to NOT have actually gotten them. This occurred 3 days in a row, with a various batch of 160 individuals daily.
I anxiously attempted repairing and restoring the automation from the ground up. But the issue lingered.
When I frantically connected to their assistance team, they slightly claimed “server concerns” were at fault. Yet this description didn’t make any feeling, considering that the errors proceeded happening each morning like clockwork unassociated to any type of downtime.
In my mind, this huge failure was entirely undesirable and just didn’t benefit my business. I have hundreds of get in touches with depending on my automated campaigns running smoothly.
So if GoHighLevel was going to be totally unstable, just how could I hand over mission-critical workflows and delicate client information to their modern technology?
The unintuitive interface just worsened these problems …
Frustrating UX
Coming from Keap where every little thing was seamless and instinctive, GoHighLevel’s learning contour felt steep and challenging.
Easy jobs like modifying workflows entailed excavating with menu systems that were all over the place. Trick settings were unexplainably scattered in totally different areas. Relocating in between functions really felt disjointed or confusing.
I’ll tell you what I imply by talking about their funnel builder as an instance. There were 3 separate settings panels to handle overall, individual, and product setups. Yet for some crazy reason, the web links to accessibility each of these core setups were expanded on contrary sides of the screen. What!?
As somebody that values tidy, thoughtful design, this seriously upset me.
It strengthened that GoHighLevel still seemed like a work-in-progress instead of a polished product prepared for prime-time usage. Their top priorities seemed concentrated on stuffing in every feature imaginable, with bad use as a second thought.
And talking features, I quickly understood the small cost tag came with pricey concessions …
Misleading Pricing GoHighLevel For Letting Agents
Among GoHighLevel’s most significant selling points is the inexpensive rate for accessibility to numerous features. However I promptly learned this inexpensive base cost was misleading.
They nickle-and-dimed users with erratic costs for core performance. Unexpectedly my credit card statements had unclear $10 charges from GoHighLevel occasionally.
As it ended up, you obtain charged every time you send an e-mail with their web servers. So for high quantity customers, this amounted to hundreds of dollars in unanticipated expenses.
In between these per-email costs and paying added for deliverability add-ons like Mailgun, my “economical” GoHighLevel registration ended up setting you back significantly greater than my Keap plan.
The reduced sticker price was appealing, but simply not reasonable 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 prices drop almost over night after changing to GoHighLevel.
Formerly, my target market engagement constantly hit 35-40% open rates in Keap month after month. Once I migrated their documents over to GoHighLevel, performance tanked quickly to a pitiful 9% open rate.
Despite how much I optimized my sending out practices or tried every fixing technique, I can barely nudge open prices back into the teenagers– still a 50%+ decrease from my previous criteria GoHighLevel For Letting Agents.
Let me repeat: my exact same target market and emails all of a sudden had awful involvement. The only point I might believe that would be creating this was whatever was taking place behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For an agency so dependent on email marketing, this was a big deal.
Between the crippling deliverability problems, hidden charges, damaged features, and horrible interface, I had ultimately reached my limit …
Why I Quit GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Simply 45 days after moving my firm to GoHighLevel, I recognized I had actually made a massive mistake. The disadvantages dramatically exceeded any type of advantages.
No software is excellent, yet the sheer volume of troubles was beyond appropriate.
At the end of the day, software application comes down to trust. If I can’t trust it to manage vital features properly or think a vendor has my best interests in mind, then it’s time to leave– even after spending significant time, cash, and effort migrating.
So I made the challenging contact us to reverse course and return back to Keap completely simply weeks after going all in on GoHighLevel. Allow’s discover what I gained from this ordeal.
Key Takeaways: What I Picked up from My GoHighLevel Mistake
My time with HighLevel can be summed up as a costly accident. But in knowledge, it showed me a few key lessons:
- Adhere to what jobs. Don’t disturb what’s functioning unless something is definitively much better across the board. Adjustment brings danger.
- Veterinarian asserts completely. Marketing hype around brand-new software typically obscures bigger underlying flaws. Deep due diligence is necessary.
- Pick simplicity over features. Properly designed devices must make your work life less complicated, not much more complicated and unpleasant.
- Transparency constructs depend on. Opaque pricing, shady reseller terms, and finger-pointing to avert issues ruins depend on.
- Seek unbiased reviews. Pleased assistance reviews indicate less if too much issues suggest bad general use.
- Excellence is impossible. No solitary remedy can perfectly satisfy every unique service requirement. Find the least-bad fit.
- Evolution over revolution. Incremental improvements generally exceed dangerous wholesale reinvention of what currently functions fine.
In other words, I found out to be more cynical of “as well excellent to be real” marketing insurance claims and much less lured by the allure of glossy brand-new objects. The tools you make use of daily need to gain trust via transparency and performance, not glossy advertising.