As a firm proprietor for over a years, I depend on software application and automation to streamline procedures and supply results. So when GoHighLevel arised on the scene few years back, it absolutely captured my interest GoHighLevel For Local Business.
The concept was attractive– an all-in-one customer administration system with marketing, sales, and service tools incorporated together. As an entrepreneur always wanting to simplify and scale my service, it looked like a dream become a reality theoretically. That would not want a solitary service that does it all?
Yet in this extensive GoHighLevel testimonial, I’ll take you inside my dreadful journey of attempting (and stopping working) to change to this preferred brand-new software. You’ll find out:
If you’re considering whether GoHighLevel is right for your very own service needs, ideally you can learn from my painful errors and inflated assumptions.
Looter: I do NOT suggest GoHighLevel. If you require a CRM, begin with this checklist of best CRMs instead. I use Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re trying to find a sales, marketing, and task administration choice to GoHighLevel, then right here are a few we suggest.
Backstory: Why I Considered Switching from Keap
To comprehend what attracted me to GoHighLevel to begin with, you need context regarding my previous setup. For over 5 years I had actually been happily relying upon Keap (previously Infusionsoft) to meet all my customer administration and automation needs.
I found Keap instinctive to use and it managed everything I needed– CRM, e-mail marketing, sales funnels, membership websites, and customer support.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are made to aid small companies maintain their clients while adding brand-new ones easily. Automate follow-ups with e-mails and messages, ensuring leads and clients get the ideal messages at the right time. Usage site and social networks kinds to improve lead follow-up, and manage your development with easy visit organizing and lead monitoring. Boost sales with automated pricing quote, invoicing, and repayment processing, freeing up your time. With Keap, small companies can conserve 10 hours per week and boost income by 39%. Start with a 14-day free trial, no bank card required.
Why we like Keap
Keap supplies a thorough customer partnership management (CRM) and marketing automation remedy customized for small companies and business owners. We value Keap’s focus on streamlining sales procedures and supporting customer relationships through effective automation devices. The platform’s all-in-one strategy integrates CRM, email marketing, invoicing, and task monitoring, making it especially eye-catching for services looking to consolidate their tech pile.
Essentially, it just functioned reliably with marginal difficulty or maintenance needed. My open and click-through prices were terrific (like 35% fantastic). Automations ran smoothly without any problems.
So why on earth was I tempted to uproot my entire operational foundation from a system that functioned to attempt something unproven and untested?
In knowledge I can admit I got seduced by the alarm phone call of “glossy things disorder”. You understand the feeling: when everybody’s talking about a brand-new device that will certainly reinvent your company … The grass usually looks greener on the other side, and I questioned whether GoHighLevel might decrease friction factors that I would certainly discovered to endure over the years with Keap.
I withstood initially, yet a few more aggravations led me to believe maybe it was time for a modification.
The Investment: Migrating My Agency to GoHighLevel
Previously this year I decided to start. I signed up for HighLevel’s Firm plan at $297/month, investing substantially greater than the $97/month starter price.
This wasn’t a choice I took lightly. I knew switching over platforms was mosting likely to need migrating all my Keap data and essentially restoring my entire technology framework from square one using all of the GoHighLevel integrations available.
Here’s an overview of just a few of the initiative required:
- Manually exporting 20,000+ email customer records
- Recreating loads of automations and workflows
- Relocating customer profiles, notes, and task information to the brand-new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe billing integration
- Setting up landing pages, promotions, and sales funnels throughout once again
- Learning a completely foreign UX and interface style
All in, I invested around 30-40 tiresome hours of configuration work transitioning everything over– not to mention handling shed efficiency during the button.
However inevitably, it was a calculated investment I agreed to make. I figured some temporary pain would certainly repay with GoHighLevel providing a better long-lasting remedy for my business, Dripify. Oh just how incorrect I was …
It just took me regarding a month of hands-on usage to understand I had made a large mistake. The problems started accumulating promptly, till it got to a factor I had to cut my losses and switch over back to Keap totally.
Allow’s walk through the nightmarish issues I encountered.
Safety Issues & Numerous Bugs
Provided 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 included sequences for onboarding brand-new email clients, onboarding brand-new clients, automating follow-ups for webinar registrations, sending occasion pointers, managing membership expiries and a lot more.
Every little thing appeared to be operating fine … until instantly it had not been. One early morning, I woke up to find 171 completely pointless emails had been sent to users that should NOT have obtained them. This happened three days straight, with a various set of 160 people each day.
I desperately attempted repairing and restoring the automation from square one. But the problem persisted.
When I frantically reached out to their assistance team, they slightly declared “web server concerns” were at fault. Yet this explanation really did not make any type of feeling, considering that the mistakes continued happening each morning like clockwork unrelated to any type of downtime.
In my mind, this enormous failure was totally inappropriate and just really did not work for my business. I have hundreds of contacts depending on my automated campaigns running smoothly.
So if GoHighLevel was going to be entirely unstable, how could I entrust mission-critical workflows and sensitive client data to their modern technology?
The unintuitive interface only compounded these issues …
Aggravating UX
Originating from Keap where everything was seamless and intuitive, GoHighLevel’s learning contour felt high and complicated.
Straightforward jobs like modifying workflows entailed digging with food selection systems that were all over the place. Key settings were unexplainably scattered in entirely different areas. Moving in between functions felt disjointed or confusing.
I’ll inform you what I mean by talking about their funnel builder as an instance. There were 3 different settings panels to handle overall, private, and item configurations. Yet for some insane reason, the links to access each of these core settings were expanded on opposite sides of the screen. What!?
As somebody that values tidy, thoughtful design, this seriously upset me.
It enhanced that GoHighLevel still seemed like a work-in-progress as opposed to a refined product ready for prime-time usage. Their concerns seemed concentrated on stuffing in every feature imaginable, with poor usability as a second thought.
And talking features, I quickly recognized the low cost tag featured costly concessions …
Misleading Pricing GoHighLevel For Local Business
One of GoHighLevel’s greatest selling factors is the affordable price for accessibility to numerous features. But I rapidly learned this low-cost base price was misleading.
They nickle-and-dimed customers with occasional costs for core performance. All of a sudden my charge card declarations had obscure $10 fees from GoHighLevel occasionally.
As it ended up, you get billed each time you send out an email with their servers. So for high quantity customers, this added up to hundreds of bucks in unforeseen expenses.
In between these per-email fees and paying added for deliverability attachments like Mailgun, my “budget friendly” GoHighLevel subscription wound up setting you back substantially MORE than my Keap plan.
The low price tag was appealing, yet just not sensible in practice. This bait-and-switch left a negative preference in my mouth.
Email Rates Suffered
The final dealbreaker was seeing my meticulously supported email open prices drop almost over night after switching over to GoHighLevel.
Formerly, my audience involvement consistently hit 35-40% open rates in Keap month after month. Once I moved their documents over to GoHighLevel, performance tanked immediately to a pathetic 9% open rate.
Regardless of just how much I optimized my sending practices or attempted every fixing trick, I could barely nudge open prices back into the teens– still a 50%+ decrease from my previous benchmarks GoHighLevel For Local Business.
Let me repeat: my exact same audience and emails suddenly had dreadful interaction. The only thing I can assume that would certainly be triggering this was whatever was occurring behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a company so dependent on email marketing, this was a big deal.
Between the crippling deliverability issues, hidden charges, busted features, and awful interface, I had actually finally reached my limit …
Why I Stop GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Just 45 days after migrating my firm to GoHighLevel, I understood I had made a significant blunder. The disadvantages substantially surpassed any benefits.
No software application is best, but the sheer quantity of problems was past appropriate.
At the end of the day, software comes down to count on. If I can not trust it to handle crucial functions effectively or think a supplier has my best interests in mind, after that it’s time to leave– also after spending substantial time, cash, and initiative moving.
So I made the difficult contact us to turn around training course and return back to Keap completely just weeks after going done in on GoHighLevel. Let’s discover what I picked up from this debacle.
Trick Takeaways: What I Gained from My GoHighLevel Blunder
My time with HighLevel can be summarized as a pricey misadventure. However in hindsight, it instructed me a couple of essential lessons:
- Stay with what works. Don’t upset what’s working unless something is definitively better across the board. Adjustment brings risk.
- Veterinarian claims thoroughly. Marketing hype around new software application usually obscures larger underlying imperfections. Deep due diligence is necessary.
- Pick simplicity over features. Properly designed tools need to make your work life much easier, not extra challenging and messy.
- Openness constructs count on. Nontransparent pricing, questionable reseller terms, and finger-pointing to evade issues destroys depend on.
- Seek objective testimonials. Delighted support evaluates suggest less if excessive issues suggest inadequate general functionality.
- Excellence is difficult. No single solution can perfectly fulfill every unique company demand. Locate the least-bad fit.
- Development over revolution. Step-by-step renovations generally surpass dangerous wholesale reinvention of what already works fine.
Basically, I learned to be a lot more doubtful of “as well excellent to be real” marketing claims and less tempted by the appeal of glossy new items. The tools you utilize daily must make trust fund via transparency and performance, not glossy advertising.