As a firm owner for over a years, I depend on software and automation to streamline operations and provide results. So when GoHighLevel emerged on the scene few years back, it absolutely captured my attention GoHighLevel For Property Management.
The concept was enticing– an all-in-one client administration platform with marketing, sales, and service devices incorporated with each other. As a business owner always wanting to simplify and scale my company, it seemed like a dream happened theoretically. Who would not desire a single remedy that does it all?
But in this comprehensive GoHighLevel testimonial, I’ll take you inside my disastrous trip of trying (and falling short) to switch to this popular new software application. You’ll discover:
If you’re considering whether GoHighLevel is right for your very own service needs, hopefully you can gain from my uncomfortable errors and inflated assumptions.
Spoiler: I do NOT suggest GoHighLevel. If you need a CRM, begin with this list of ideal CRMs instead. I use Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re searching for a sales, marketing, and task administration alternative to GoHighLevel, then here are a few we advise.
Backstory: Why I Took Into Consideration Switching Over from Keap
To recognize what attracted me to GoHighLevel to begin with, you require context concerning my previous arrangement. For over 5 years I had been gladly relying on Keap (previously Infusionsoft) to satisfy all my customer monitoring and automation requirements.
I discovered Keap intuitive to utilize and it handled everything I required– CRM, email marketing, sales funnels, membership sites, and customer support.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are made to aid small businesses maintain their customers while adding brand-new ones effortlessly. Automate follow-ups with e-mails and texts, ensuring leads and customers obtain the appropriate messages at the correct time. Use site and social networks types to streamline lead follow-up, and handle your growth with easy consultation organizing and lead monitoring. Boost sales with automated pricing estimate, invoicing, and payment processing, maximizing your time. With Keap, small companies can save 10 hours weekly and rise income by 39%. Beginning with a 14-day free trial, no credit card required.
Why we like Keap
Keap supplies a comprehensive customer partnership management (CRM) and marketing automation remedy customized for small companies and business owners. We appreciate Keap’s focus on simplifying sales procedures and nurturing consumer connections through powerful automation tools. The platform’s all-in-one technique combines CRM, e-mail marketing, invoicing, and task administration, making it particularly appealing for companies aiming to combine their technology stack.
Generally, it just functioned accurately with marginal hassle or maintenance called for. My open and click-through rates were terrific (like 35% wonderful). Automations ran smoothly with no issues.
So why in the world was I lured to uproot my whole operational foundation from a system that worked to attempt something unverified and untried?
In knowledge I can admit I got attracted by the alarm phone call of “glossy object disorder”. You recognize the sensation: when everybody’s speaking about a new tool that will certainly reinvent your organization … The grass frequently looks greener beyond, and I asked yourself whether GoHighLevel could lower rubbing factors that I would certainly discovered to tolerate over the years with Keap.
I withstood at first, yet a couple of even more frustrations led me to assume possibly it was time for an adjustment.
The Financial investment: Moving My Agency to GoHighLevel
Previously this year I chose to start. I enrolled in HighLevel’s Firm plan at $297/month, investing significantly greater than the $97/month starter cost.
This had not been a decision I ignored. I recognized switching over systems was going to need migrating all my Keap data and essentially rebuilding my whole technology framework from the ground up making use of all of the GoHighLevel integrations offered.
Below’s a summary of just several of the effort called for:
- Manually exporting 20,000+ email customer documents
- Recreating dozens of automations and workflows
- Moving client accounts, notes, and job information to the brand-new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe billing integration
- Setting up landing pages, promos, and sales funnels throughout again
- Learning a completely international UX and interface style
Done in, I spent around 30-40 laborious hours of setup job transitioning whatever over– in addition to handling shed efficiency throughout the switch.
Yet eventually, it was a calculated investment I agreed to make. I figured some short-term pain would settle with GoHighLevel providing a much better long-lasting solution for my organization, Dripify. Oh exactly how incorrect I was …
It only took me about a month of hands-on use to realize I had actually made a large blunder. The problems began piling up promptly, till it reached a point I had to cut my losses and change back to Keap entirely.
Let’s walk through the nightmarish issues I experienced.
Safety Issues & Several Vermin
Given GoHighLevel positioned itself as an all-in-one automation system, I made sure to thoroughly recreate every workflow from my old Keap account.
These included series for onboarding new e-mail subscribers, onboarding brand-new customers, automating follow-ups for webinar registrations, sending occasion suggestions, managing membership expiries and much more.
Everything appeared to be working penalty … until suddenly it wasn’t. One early morning, I awoke to locate 171 completely unnecessary emails had actually been sent to customers who need to NOT have actually received them. This happened three days in a row, with a various set of 160 people daily.
I hysterically attempted fixing and reconstructing the automation from square one. But the trouble persisted.
When I seriously connected to their support group, they slightly asserted “server problems” were to blame. Yet this explanation didn’t make any feeling, considering that the mistakes proceeded occurring each morning like clockwork unassociated to any kind of downtime.
In my mind, this massive failure was completely inappropriate and simply didn’t work for my service. I have hundreds of contacts depending on my automated campaigns running smoothly.
So if GoHighLevel was going to be totally unstable, how could I leave mission-critical workflows and sensitive client data to their technology?
The unintuitive interface just compounded these concerns …
Discouraging UX
Coming from Keap where every little thing was smooth and instinctive, GoHighLevel’s learning curve felt steep and complex.
Straightforward jobs like editing workflows involved excavating via menu systems that were all over the place. Key settings were unexplainably scattered in completely different sections. Relocating between features felt disjointed or complicated.
I’ll inform you what I indicate by discussing their funnel builder as an instance. There were 3 separate setups panels to manage overall, private, and item setups. Yet for some insane reason, the web links to access each of these core settings were expanded on opposite sides of the display. What!?
As someone that values clean, thoughtful layout, this seriously upset me.
It strengthened that GoHighLevel still felt like a work-in-progress instead of a sleek item all set for prime-time usage. Their priorities seemed concentrated on packing in every feature imaginable, with poor usability as a second thought.
And speaking of features, I quickly realized the low cost tag included pricey compromises …
Misleading Pricing GoHighLevel For Property Management
Among GoHighLevel’s greatest marketing factors is the budget friendly price for access to so many features. But I promptly discovered this affordable base expense was deceptive.
They nickle-and-dimed individuals with erratic costs for core capability. Instantly my bank card declarations had unclear $10 fees from GoHighLevel here and there.
As it ended up, you get billed each time you send out an e-mail with their web servers. So for high quantity individuals, this amounted to thousands of dollars in unexpected costs.
Between these per-email fees and paying added for deliverability attachments like Mailgun, my “budget friendly” GoHighLevel subscription ended up costing dramatically MORE than my Keap plan.
The low sticker price was tempting, however simply not practical in practice. This bait-and-switch left a bad taste in my mouth.
Email Rates Suffered
The final dealbreaker was seeing my meticulously nurtured email open prices plummet virtually overnight after switching to GoHighLevel.
Previously, my audience involvement consistently struck 35-40% open rates in Keap month after month. But once I migrated their records over to GoHighLevel, efficiency tanked instantly to a worthless 9% open rate.
Regardless of how much I enhanced my sending out practices or tried every repairing method, I can hardly nudge open prices back right into the teenagers– still a 50%+ decline from my previous benchmarks GoHighLevel For Property Management.
Let me repeat: my exact same target market and e-mails unexpectedly had awful engagement. The only point I can think that would certainly be causing this was whatever was happening behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For an agency so dependent on email marketing, this was a big deal.
In between the crippling deliverability problems, hidden costs, broken features, and horrible user interface, I had finally reached my limit …
Why I Give up GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Just 45 days after moving my agency to GoHighLevel, I understood I had actually made a big error. The disadvantages drastically outweighed any kind of benefits.
No software program is ideal, yet the large quantity of problems was past acceptable.
At the end of the day, software program boils down to depend on. If I can not trust it to deal with crucial features effectively or think a supplier has my best interests in mind, then it’s time to leave– also after investing considerable time, money, and effort migrating.
So I made the hard phone call to reverse training course and return back to Keap totally simply weeks after going done in on GoHighLevel. Let’s explore what I gained from this debacle.
Trick Takeaways: What I Gained from My GoHighLevel Mistake
My time with HighLevel can be summed up as an expensive accident. Yet in knowledge, it educated me a few essential lessons:
- Adhere to what works. Do not disturb what’s functioning unless something is definitively far better across the board. Change brings threat.
- Vet declares completely. Marketing hype around brand-new software frequently covers larger underlying defects. Deep due persistance is essential.
- Pick simpleness over features. Properly designed tools ought to make your work life much easier, not a lot more challenging and untidy.
- Openness constructs trust. Nontransparent pricing, unethical reseller terms, and finger-pointing to evade issues destroys count on.
- Look for impartial evaluations. Delighted assistance evaluates indicate less if too much concerns indicate inadequate overall usability.
- Perfection is impossible. No solitary option can perfectly fulfill every one-of-a-kind company demand. Find the least-bad fit.
- Evolution over transformation. Incremental enhancements typically exceed dangerous wholesale reinvention of what already works fine.
In other words, I learned to be a lot more unconvinced of “also excellent to be real” marketing insurance claims and much less lured by the allure of shiny brand-new objects. The tools you make use of daily need to earn trust through transparency and efficiency, not glossy advertising.