As an agency owner for over a decade, I depend on software application and automation to simplify procedures and deliver outcomes. So when GoHighLevel arised on the scene couple of years back, it most definitely caught my attention GoHighLevel For Plumbers.
The idea was enticing– an all-in-one customer management system with marketing, sales, and service devices integrated with each other. As a business owner constantly wanting to streamline and scale my company, it appeared like a dream happened theoretically. Who wouldn’t desire a solitary service that does it all?
But in this thorough GoHighLevel evaluation, I’ll take you inside my tragic trip of trying (and failing) to change to this popular new software. You’ll discover:
If you’re considering whether GoHighLevel is right for your very own organization requirements, with any luck you can pick up from my excruciating mistakes and blew up expectations.
Looter: I do NOT recommend GoHighLevel. If you require a CRM, start with this checklist of best CRMs rather. I make use of Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re looking for a sales, marketing, and project monitoring option to GoHighLevel, then here are a couple of we suggest.
Backstory: Why I Thought About Changing from Keap
To understand what attracted me to GoHighLevel in the first place, you need context about my previous configuration. For over 5 years I had actually been happily relying upon Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) to satisfy all my customer monitoring and automation requirements.
I located Keap intuitive to use and it dealt with whatever I required– CRM, e-mail marketing, sales funnels, membership sites, and customer support.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are created to aid small businesses keep their clients while including new ones easily. Automate follow-ups with emails and messages, ensuring leads and customers receive the right messages at the correct time. Usage web site and social networks types to improve lead follow-up, and handle your development with very easy consultation organizing and lead monitoring. Boost sales with automated pricing estimate, invoicing, and payment processing, maximizing your time. With Keap, small businesses can save 10 hours weekly and increase earnings by 39%. Start with a 14-day free trial, no bank card needed.
Why we like Keap
Keap provides a detailed customer connection monitoring (CRM) and marketing automation option tailored for small companies and business owners. We appreciate Keap’s concentrate on improving sales processes and nurturing client relationships via powerful automation tools. The system’s all-in-one strategy integrates CRM, email marketing, invoicing, and task administration, making it specifically attractive for services looking to settle their tech stack.
Generally, it just functioned dependably with minimal fuss or upkeep needed. My open and click-through prices were wonderful (like 35% wonderful). Automations ran smoothly with no issues.
So why in the world was I lured to uproot my entire functional foundation from a system that functioned to try something unproven and untried?
In knowledge I can confess I got attracted by the siren phone call of “shiny item syndrome”. You recognize the sensation: when everybody’s talking about a brand-new device that will revolutionize your company … The yard usually looks greener on the other side, and I asked yourself whether GoHighLevel might reduce rubbing points that I would certainly learned to endure over the years with Keap.
I resisted in the beginning, but a few even more irritations led me to believe perhaps it was time for an adjustment.
The Financial investment: Moving My Company to GoHighLevel
Previously this year I decided to take the plunge. I registered for HighLevel’s Company plan at $297/month, investing considerably greater than the $97/month starter expense.
This had not been a choice I took lightly. I understood switching over systems was mosting likely to call for migrating all my Keap information and basically restoring my entire technology facilities from scratch utilizing all of the GoHighLevel integrations offered.
Here’s an introduction of just several of the effort needed:
- By hand exporting 20,000+ email client 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, promos, and sales funnels throughout once more
- Learning an entirely foreign UX and user interface design
Done in, I invested around 30-40 laborious hours of arrangement work transitioning whatever over– and also taking care of shed productivity during the switch.
Yet inevitably, it was a computed investment I was willing to make. I figured some temporary discomfort would settle with GoHighLevel giving a better long-term remedy for my service, Dripify. Oh how incorrect I was …
It only took me regarding a month of hands-on usage to realize I had made a big mistake. The problems began accumulating rapidly, till it got to a point I needed to cut my losses and change back to Keap totally.
Let’s walk through the horrible issues I experienced.
Safety And Security Issues & Many Vermin
Provided GoHighLevel placed itself as an all-in-one automation system, I made sure to diligently recreate each and every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These consisted of sequences for onboarding new email subscribers, onboarding new clients, automating follow-ups for webinar enrollments, sending out event pointers, taking care of membership expirations and far more.
Whatever seemed to be functioning fine … until suddenly it had not been. One early morning, I awoke to discover 171 totally irrelevant emails had been sent out to customers who should NOT have obtained them. This occurred three days straight, with a different batch of 160 people daily.
I frantically attempted repairing and restoring the automation from scratch. Yet the trouble lingered.
When I desperately reached out to their support team, they vaguely claimed “server issues” were at fault. However this explanation really did not make any type of feeling, since the errors proceeded taking place each early morning like clockwork unconnected to any downtime.
In my mind, this large failing was totally undesirable and just really did not help my organization. I have hundreds of get in touches with counting on my automated campaigns running efficiently.
So if GoHighLevel was going to be completely unstable, just how could I entrust mission-critical workflows and delicate client data to their technology?
The unintuitive interface only worsened these concerns …
Irritating UX
Coming from Keap where everything was seamless and user-friendly, GoHighLevel’s learning contour really felt steep and difficult.
Basic jobs like modifying workflows involved digging with menu systems that were all over the place. Trick settings were unexplainably spread in completely different sections. Moving in between features felt disjointed or confusing.
I’ll inform you what I mean by speaking about their funnel builder as an instance. There were 3 different setups panels to manage total, specific, and product setups. Yet for some insane factor, the links to gain access to each of these core settings were expanded on opposite sides of the display. What!?
As someone that values tidy, thoughtful layout, this seriously frustrated me.
It reinforced that GoHighLevel still felt like a work-in-progress rather than a sleek item ready for prime-time usage. Their priorities seemed concentrated on packing in every feature imaginable, with poor usability as an afterthought.
And talking features, I soon understood the affordable price tag included pricey concessions …
Deceptive Pricing GoHighLevel For Plumbers
Among GoHighLevel’s largest selling factors is the affordable rate for accessibility to a lot of features. But I rapidly discovered this economical base price was deceptive.
They nickle-and-dimed users with sporadic fees for core performance. Unexpectedly my charge card statements had unclear $10 fees from GoHighLevel occasionally.
As it turned out, you get billed every time you send out an e-mail via their web servers. So for high volume users, this added up to thousands of dollars in unexpected costs.
In between these per-email costs and paying extra for deliverability add-ons like Mailgun, my “budget friendly” GoHighLevel membership wound up setting you back considerably MORE than my Keap plan.
The reduced price tag was tempting, but simply not reasonable in practice. This bait-and-switch left a poor preference in my mouth.
Email Rates Suffered
The final dealbreaker was seeing my very carefully supported e-mail open prices plunge nearly overnight after switching to GoHighLevel.
Formerly, my target market engagement constantly hit 35-40% open rates in Keap month after month. Once I moved their documents over to GoHighLevel, performance tanked immediately to a pitiful 9% open price.
No matter how much I enhanced my sending practices or tried every repairing technique, I can hardly nudge open rates back right into the teenagers– still a 50%+ decrease from my previous standards GoHighLevel For Plumbers.
Let me repeat: my exact same target market and e-mails suddenly had dreadful interaction. The only thing I could think that would be triggering this was whatever was taking place behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a company so depending on email marketing, this was a big deal.
Between the debilitating deliverability problems, hidden fees, busted features, and dreadful interface, I had ultimately reached my restriction …
Why I Quit GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Just 45 days after moving my firm to GoHighLevel, I recognized I had actually made a massive blunder. The disadvantages considerably exceeded any type of benefits.
No software is ideal, yet the large quantity of issues was past appropriate.
At the end of the day, software program boils down to trust fund. If I can not trust it to manage critical features competently or believe a supplier has my benefits in mind, then it’s time to leave– even after spending significant time, money, and initiative moving.
So I made the hard call to turn around program and return back to Keap entirely just weeks after going all in on GoHighLevel. Let’s explore what I gained from this debacle.
Key Takeaways: What I Gained from My GoHighLevel Blunder
My time with HighLevel can be summarized as an expensive misadventure. However in hindsight, it instructed me a few vital lessons:
- Stay with what works. Don’t upset what’s working unless something is definitively much better across the board. Modification brings threat.
- Veterinarian asserts completely. Marketing hype around new software application frequently covers bigger underlying problems. Deep due diligence is necessary.
- Select simplicity over features. Properly designed tools ought to make your job life less complicated, not more difficult and messy.
- Openness constructs depend on. Opaque pricing, questionable reseller terms, and finger-pointing to avert troubles destroys depend on.
- Seek unbiased evaluations. Delighted assistance reviews mean less if excessive concerns suggest poor general use.
- Perfection is impossible. No solitary solution can flawlessly fulfill every distinct service need. Locate the least-bad fit.
- Advancement over transformation. Step-by-step renovations typically outweigh dangerous wholesale reinvention of what already functions penalty.
Simply put, I learned to be more unconvinced of “too great to be real” marketing insurance claims and less attracted by the allure of shiny brand-new things. The devices you utilize daily should make trust fund via transparency and efficiency, not slick advertising.