As a company owner for over a decade, I rely upon software and automation to simplify operations and supply results. So when GoHighLevel emerged on the scene few years back, it certainly captured my focus GoHighLevel For Photographers.
The idea was appealing– an all-in-one client management system with marketing, sales, and service tools integrated together. As a business owner always seeking to simplify and scale my business, it looked like a dream come to life on paper. Who would not desire a solitary solution that does it all?
However in this extensive GoHighLevel evaluation, I’ll take you inside my devastating trip of trying (and failing) to switch to this popular brand-new software program. You’ll discover:
If you’re considering whether GoHighLevel is right for your own service demands, hopefully you can pick up from my painful mistakes and inflated assumptions.
Spoiler: I do NOT suggest GoHighLevel. If you require a CRM, begin with this listing of finest CRMs instead. I use Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re seeking a sales, marketing, and job monitoring option to GoHighLevel, after that right here are a couple of we recommend.
Backstory: Why I Took Into Consideration Changing from Keap
To understand what attracted me to GoHighLevel in the first place, you require context regarding my previous arrangement. For over 5 years I had actually been happily counting on Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) to meet all my customer monitoring and automation demands.
I found Keap instinctive to make use of and it handled every little thing I needed– CRM, e-mail marketing, sales funnels, subscription websites, and customer assistance.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are developed to help small companies maintain their clients while including brand-new ones effortlessly. Automate follow-ups with e-mails and texts, making certain leads and customers receive the best messages at the right time. Use site and social media sites types to improve lead follow-up, and manage your growth with very easy consultation scheduling and lead monitoring. Boost sales with automated estimating, invoicing, and payment processing, freeing up your time. With Keap, small companies can conserve 10 hours per week and increase profits by 39%. Start with a 14-day free trial, no charge card needed.
Why we like Keap
Keap provides a comprehensive customer connection administration (CRM) and marketing automation service customized for small companies and business owners. We value Keap’s concentrate on improving sales processes and supporting client connections with powerful automation devices. The platform’s all-in-one strategy integrates CRM, email marketing, invoicing, and task monitoring, making it particularly eye-catching for companies aiming to consolidate their technology stack.
Generally, it simply functioned accurately with minimal hassle or maintenance required. My open and click-through prices were fantastic (like 35% great). Automations ran smoothly without any problems.
So why in the world was I attracted to uproot my entire functional foundation from a system that worked to try something unproven and untried?
In hindsight I can confess I obtained attracted by the siren phone call of “glossy things syndrome”. You understand the feeling: when everybody’s talking about a new device that will change your organization … The grass usually looks greener on the other side, and I wondered whether GoHighLevel may decrease rubbing points that I ‘d discovered to endure for many years with Keap.
I resisted initially, but a couple of even more stress led me to assume perhaps it was time for a modification.
The Financial investment: Moving My Agency to GoHighLevel
Earlier this year I decided to start. I signed up for HighLevel’s Agency plan at $297/month, spending dramatically greater than the $97/month starter expense.
This had not been a decision I ignored. I knew switching systems was going to need migrating all my Keap information and essentially restoring my whole technology facilities from square one making use of every one of the GoHighLevel integrations offered.
Right here’s an introduction of just some of the initiative called for:
- Manually exporting 20,000+ email customer records
- Recreating dozens of automations and workflows
- Relocating client profiles, notes, and job data to the brand-new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe invoicing integration
- Setting up landing pages, promos, and sales funnels all over once more
- Learning a completely international UX and user interface style
Done in, I invested around 30-40 tedious hours of configuration job transitioning everything over– not to mention dealing with lost performance during the button.
Yet inevitably, it was a calculated investment I wanted to make. I figured some short-term pain would pay off with GoHighLevel supplying a much better long-term solution for my service, Dripify. Oh just how wrong I was …
It just took me concerning a month of hands-on use to realize I had made a big error. The issues began piling up promptly, up until it reached a point I needed to cut my losses and change back to Keap totally.
Allow’s walk through the nightmarish problems I experienced.
Security Issues & Numerous Vermin
Offered GoHighLevel placed itself as an all-in-one automation system, I made sure to carefully recreate every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These consisted of sequences for onboarding brand-new email subscribers, onboarding brand-new customers, automating follow-ups for webinar enrollments, sending out occasion tips, handling subscription expiries and far more.
Every little thing seemed to be functioning penalty … until suddenly it had not been. One early morning, I awoke to discover 171 totally pointless emails had been sent out to users who ought to NOT have actually obtained them. This happened three days in a row, with a various batch of 160 individuals daily.
I frantically attempted fixing and restoring the automation from scratch. But the trouble continued.
When I seriously reached out to their support group, they vaguely claimed “web server issues” were at fault. But this explanation really did not make any feeling, because the mistakes proceeded taking place each early morning like clockwork unconnected to any kind of downtime.
In my mind, this substantial failure was completely inappropriate and just didn’t work for my business. I have hundreds of contacts relying upon my automated campaigns running efficiently.
So if GoHighLevel was mosting likely to be absolutely undependable, how could I entrust mission-critical workflows and delicate customer data to their modern technology?
The unintuitive interface only compounded these issues …
Irritating UX
Coming from Keap where every little thing was smooth and user-friendly, GoHighLevel’s learning curve really felt high and complex.
Easy jobs like modifying workflows entailed excavating via menu systems that were all over the place. Secret setups were unexplainably scattered in absolutely different sections. Relocating between functions felt disjointed or confusing.
I’ll tell you what I mean by talking about their funnel builder as an example. There were 3 different setups panels to handle total, individual, and product arrangements. Yet for some crazy reason, the web links to gain access to each of these core settings were spread out on contrary sides of the screen. What!?
As someone that values tidy, thoughtful design, this seriously irritated me.
It strengthened that GoHighLevel still seemed like a work-in-progress rather than a sleek item ready for prime-time usage. Their top priorities appeared concentrated on packing in every feature imaginable, with poor use as an afterthought.
And talking features, I quickly recognized the small cost tag included pricey compromises …
Deceptive Pricing GoHighLevel For Photographers
One of GoHighLevel’s greatest selling factors is the cost effective cost for access to a lot of features. Yet I promptly discovered this cheap base expense was misleading.
They nickle-and-dimed individuals with occasional charges for core capability. Instantly my credit card statements had unclear $10 charges from GoHighLevel here and there.
As it turned out, you obtain charged every time you send out an e-mail via their servers. So for high volume users, this added up to hundreds of dollars in unexpected costs.
Between these per-email fees and paying added for deliverability add-ons like Mailgun, my “economical” GoHighLevel membership wound up costing significantly greater than my Keap plan.
The reduced sticker price was tempting, yet simply not practical in practice. This bait-and-switch left a negative preference in my mouth.
Email Fees Suffered
The last dealbreaker was seeing my very carefully supported e-mail open prices plunge practically over night after switching to GoHighLevel.
Formerly, my target market interaction consistently hit 35-40% open rates in Keap month after month. Once I migrated their documents over to GoHighLevel, performance tanked promptly to a pitiful 9% open price.
Regardless of just how much I enhanced my sending out practices or tried every fixing method, I might hardly nudge open prices back into the teens– still a 50%+ decline from my previous benchmarks GoHighLevel For Photographers.
Let me repeat: my exact same target market and e-mails instantly had awful involvement. The only point I might assume that would certainly be causing this was whatever was happening behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For an agency so based on email marketing, this was a big deal.
In between the debilitating deliverability concerns, hidden charges, damaged features, and awful user interface, I had actually ultimately reached my limitation …
Why I Give up GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Simply 45 days after migrating my company to GoHighLevel, I understood I had actually made a big mistake. The disadvantages substantially surpassed any type of benefits.
No software application is ideal, but the sheer volume of troubles was past appropriate.
At the end of the day, software application boils down to depend on. If I can’t trust it to take care of crucial features properly or think a supplier has my best interests in mind, then it’s time to walk away– even after investing considerable time, cash, and effort migrating.
So I made the challenging call to turn around course and return back to Keap completely just weeks after going done in on GoHighLevel. Let’s discover what I learned from this ordeal.
Secret Takeaways: What I Picked up from My GoHighLevel Mistake
My time with HighLevel can be summarized as a pricey accident. However in hindsight, it taught me a couple of key lessons:
- Stick to what jobs. Do not disturb what’s functioning unless something is definitively much better across the board. Modification brings threat.
- Veterinarian declares completely. Marketing hype around new software application commonly covers larger underlying imperfections. Deep due diligence is important.
- Choose simpleness over features. Well-designed tools should make your work life easier, not extra challenging and untidy.
- Transparency builds count on. Opaque pricing, shady reseller terms, and finger-pointing to escape troubles destroys depend on.
- Seek objective evaluations. Happy support examines imply much less if extreme concerns imply bad overall functionality.
- Excellence is impossible. No single remedy can perfectly meet every one-of-a-kind service requirement. Find the least-bad fit.
- Evolution over transformation. Incremental enhancements typically exceed dangerous wholesale reinvention of what already works fine.
In short, I found out to be more doubtful of “also good to be real” marketing insurance claims and much less tempted by the attraction of glossy new objects. The tools you utilize daily need to earn depend on with transparency and performance, not slick advertising.