As an agency owner for over a years, I depend on software program and automation to simplify operations and provide results. So when GoHighLevel arised on the scene couple of years back, it definitely caught my attention GoHighLevel For Nonprofit Organizations.
The concept was appealing– an all-in-one customer monitoring platform with marketing, sales, and service devices incorporated with each other. As a business owner constantly aiming to streamline and scale my business, it felt like a desire come true theoretically. That would not desire a single option that does it all?
But in this thorough GoHighLevel evaluation, I’ll take you inside my disastrous trip of trying (and failing) to switch to this prominent brand-new software program. You’ll learn:
If you’re considering whether GoHighLevel is right for your own company requirements, with any luck you can pick up from my uncomfortable errors and inflated assumptions.
Spoiler: I do NOT suggest GoHighLevel. If you require a CRM, start with this listing of ideal CRMs rather. I make use of Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re looking for a sales, marketing, and project administration alternative to GoHighLevel, then here are a couple of we recommend.
Backstory: Why I Took Into Consideration Changing from Keap
To recognize what attracted me to GoHighLevel in the first place, you require context concerning my previous setup. For over 5 years I had been happily relying on Keap (previously Infusionsoft) to fulfill all my client management and automation needs.
I discovered Keap intuitive to make use of and it took care of every little thing I needed– CRM, email marketing, sales funnels, subscription websites, and customer assistance.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are made to assist small companies keep their customers while including new ones easily. Automate follow-ups with e-mails and messages, making certain leads and customers obtain the right messages at the right time. Usage internet site and social media sites forms to enhance lead follow-up, and handle your development with very easy visit organizing and lead monitoring. Boost sales with automated pricing estimate, invoicing, and payment processing, freeing up your time. With Keap, local business can conserve 10 hours weekly and increase income by 39%. Beginning with a 14-day free trial, no credit card called for.
Why we like Keap
Keap uses a comprehensive customer relationship administration (CRM) and marketing automation solution tailored for small businesses and entrepreneurs. We value Keap’s concentrate on simplifying sales processes and supporting customer connections with effective automation devices. The platform’s all-in-one strategy incorporates CRM, email marketing, invoicing, and job monitoring, making it specifically eye-catching for organizations aiming to combine their tech pile.
Generally, it simply worked dependably with very little hassle or maintenance called for. My open and click-through rates were terrific (like 35% excellent). Automations ran smoothly without any problems.
So why in the world was I tempted to uproot my whole functional foundation from a system that worked to attempt something unproven and untried?
In hindsight I can confess I got attracted by the alarm telephone call of “shiny object syndrome”. You understand the feeling: when everyone’s talking about a brand-new tool that will reinvent your company … The yard frequently looks greener beyond, and I asked yourself whether GoHighLevel might decrease friction factors that I ‘d learned to endure over the years with Keap.
I stood up to at first, yet a few more irritations led me to believe perhaps it was time for a modification.
The Financial investment: Moving My Company to GoHighLevel
Previously this year I determined to take the plunge. I registered for HighLevel’s Company plan at $297/month, investing dramatically more than the $97/month starter cost.
This wasn’t a choice I took lightly. I recognized switching systems was mosting likely to call for moving all my Keap information and essentially rebuilding my whole tech framework from scratch utilizing all of the GoHighLevel integrations available.
Below’s an overview of just a few of the initiative needed:
- Manually exporting 20,000+ e-mail client documents
- Recreating dozens of automations and workflows
- Moving client accounts, notes, and task information to the brand-new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe billing integration
- Establishing landing pages, discounts, and sales funnels throughout again
- Learning a completely foreign UX and user interface design
All in, I invested around 30-40 tedious hours of setup work transitioning everything over– and also managing lost efficiency during the button.
Yet inevitably, it was a computed financial investment I agreed to make. I figured some temporary pain would certainly pay off with GoHighLevel supplying a much better long-term service for my company, Dripify. Oh exactly how incorrect I was …
It only took me about a month of hands-on usage to understand I had actually made a large blunder. The concerns started accumulating promptly, until it reached a factor I had to cut my losses and change back to Keap totally.
Let’s walk through the nightmarish issues I came across.
Safety Issues & Lots of Vermin
Given GoHighLevel positioned itself as an all-in-one automation system, I took care to thoroughly recreate every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These consisted of series for onboarding brand-new e-mail customers, onboarding brand-new clients, automating follow-ups for webinar enrollments, sending occasion suggestions, handling membership expirations and much more.
Whatever seemed to be operating penalty … till unexpectedly it had not been. One early morning, I awoke to discover 171 entirely unimportant e-mails had actually been sent out to individuals that need to NOT have received them. This took place three days straight, with a different batch of 160 people every day.
I anxiously attempted repairing and restoring the automation from square one. Yet the issue continued.
When I desperately connected to their support team, they slightly claimed “web server problems” were to blame. Yet this explanation didn’t make any feeling, given that the errors continued taking place each morning like clockwork unrelated to any type of downtime.
In my mind, this huge failing was completely unacceptable and simply really did not help my company. I have countless contacts relying on my automated campaigns running smoothly.
So if GoHighLevel was going to be totally unreliable, how could I delegate mission-critical workflows and sensitive client data to their technology?
The unintuitive interface just worsened these issues …
Irritating UX
Originating from Keap where whatever was seamless and user-friendly, GoHighLevel’s learning curve felt steep and difficult.
Basic jobs like editing and enhancing workflows included digging through food selection systems that were all over the place. Key setups were unexplainably spread in entirely different sections. Moving in between features really felt disjointed or complicated.
I’ll inform you what I mean by speaking about their funnel builder as an example. There were 3 separate setups panels to handle total, private, and item configurations. Yet for some crazy reason, the links to gain access to each of these core settings were expanded on contrary sides of the screen. What!?
As a person who values clean, thoughtful style, this seriously irritated me.
It strengthened that GoHighLevel still felt like a work-in-progress instead of a sleek product ready for prime-time use. Their priorities seemed focused on packing in every feature imaginable, with bad usability as an afterthought.
And speaking of features, I soon recognized the low price tag came with expensive compromises …
Deceptive Pricing GoHighLevel For Nonprofit Organizations
One of GoHighLevel’s biggest selling points is the budget friendly cost for accessibility to a lot of features. Yet I promptly learned this inexpensive base expense was deceptive.
They nickle-and-dimed customers with occasional charges for core capability. All of a sudden my bank card statements had obscure $10 costs from GoHighLevel here and there.
As it turned out, you obtain charged each time you send out an email via their servers. So for high volume customers, this amounted to thousands of dollars in unforeseen expenses.
Between these per-email costs and paying extra for deliverability add-ons like Mailgun, my “economical” GoHighLevel subscription wound up costing significantly greater than my Keap plan.
The reduced sticker price was appealing, yet simply not practical in practice. This bait-and-switch left a negative preference in my mouth.
Email Rates Suffered
The final dealbreaker was seeing my very carefully supported e-mail open rates drop almost overnight after switching to GoHighLevel.
Formerly, my target market interaction consistently hit 35-40% open prices in Keap month after month. Once I moved their documents over to GoHighLevel, efficiency tanked immediately to a pitiful 9% open price.
Despite how much I optimized my sending methods or attempted every fixing method, I can barely nudge open rates back right into the teenagers– still a 50%+ decline from my previous standards GoHighLevel For Nonprofit Organizations.
Let me repeat: my exact same target market and e-mails all of a sudden had horrible involvement. The only thing I can assume that would certainly be causing this was whatever was happening behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a company so dependent on e-mail marketing, this was a big deal.
In between the debilitating deliverability issues, hidden charges, broken features, and dreadful user interface, I had ultimately reached my limitation …
Why I Stop GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Simply 45 days after migrating my company to GoHighLevel, I knew I had actually made a huge mistake. The cons drastically surpassed any kind of advantages.
No software is perfect, however the large quantity of problems was beyond acceptable.
At the end of the day, software boils down to trust fund. If I can’t trust it to handle crucial features competently or believe a supplier has my best interests in mind, after that it’s time to leave– even after spending significant time, money, and effort migrating.
So I made the tough call to reverse program and return back to Keap totally just weeks after going done in on GoHighLevel. Allow’s explore what I picked up from this debacle.
Trick Takeaways: What I Gained from My GoHighLevel Mistake
My time with HighLevel can be summed up as a costly ill fortune. Yet in knowledge, it instructed me a few crucial lessons:
- Stay with what works. Do not distress what’s working unless something is definitively far better across the board. Modification brings risk.
- Veterinarian asserts thoroughly. Marketing hype around brand-new software typically obscures larger underlying problems. Deep due persistance is important.
- Pick simplicity over features. Properly designed tools ought to make your work life less complicated, not extra complicated and unpleasant.
- Transparency constructs trust fund. Nontransparent pricing, unethical reseller terms, and finger-pointing to avert troubles ruins trust fund.
- Seek objective evaluations. Pleased support examines suggest much less if too much problems indicate inadequate overall use.
- Excellence is impossible. No solitary solution can completely fulfill every distinct business need. Locate the least-bad fit.
- Development over change. Step-by-step improvements normally outweigh risky wholesale reinvention of what currently works penalty.
In short, I found out to be a lot more hesitant of “too great to be real” marketing cases and less attracted by the appeal of glossy brand-new items. The devices you make use of daily must earn depend on with transparency and efficiency, not glossy advertising.