As an agency owner for over a decade, I count on software and automation to enhance operations and supply results. So when GoHighLevel emerged on the scene couple of years back, it certainly caught my focus GoHighLevel For Real Estate Agents.
The idea was appealing– an all-in-one client management platform with marketing, sales, and service tools integrated with each other. As an entrepreneur always seeking to streamline and scale my organization, it looked like a dream come true on paper. That wouldn’t desire a solitary remedy that does it all?
But in this extensive GoHighLevel review, I’ll take you inside my tragic journey of trying (and stopping working) to change to this popular new software application. You’ll learn:
If you’re considering whether GoHighLevel is right for your very own company demands, ideally you can gain from my uncomfortable errors and inflated assumptions.
Spoiler: I do NOT advise GoHighLevel. If you need a CRM, start with this checklist of ideal CRMs rather. I make use of Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re looking for a sales, marketing, and project administration option to GoHighLevel, then here are a couple of we advise.
Backstory: Why I Thought About Changing from Keap
To recognize what attracted me to GoHighLevel in the first place, you need context about my previous arrangement. For over 5 years I had been happily counting on Keap (previously Infusionsoft) to meet all my customer management and automation needs.
I located Keap user-friendly to make use of and it handled everything I required– CRM, email marketing, sales funnels, subscription sites, and customer assistance.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are developed to aid local business maintain their customers while including new ones easily. Automate follow-ups with e-mails and messages, guaranteeing leads and clients receive the ideal messages at the correct time. Usage site and social networks forms to enhance lead follow-up, and manage your development with simple appointment scheduling and lead monitoring. Boost sales with automated estimating, invoicing, and payment handling, maximizing your time. With Keap, small companies can save 10 hours per week and rise revenue by 39%. Beginning with a 14-day free trial, no credit card needed.
Why we like Keap
Keap supplies an extensive client relationship management (CRM) and marketing automation remedy customized for small businesses and business owners. We value Keap’s concentrate on streamlining sales processes and supporting consumer connections through effective automation devices. The platform’s all-in-one strategy integrates CRM, email marketing, invoicing, and task management, making it especially attractive for organizations looking to combine their technology pile.
Generally, it simply functioned accurately with very little difficulty or upkeep needed. My open and click-through prices were wonderful (like 35% excellent). Automations ran smoothly with no problems.
So why in the world was I tempted to uproot my whole operational foundation from a system that worked to try something unproven and untested?
In hindsight I can confess I got attracted by the siren phone call of “glossy item disorder”. You recognize the sensation: when everybody’s talking about a new tool that will reinvent your service … The yard frequently looks greener beyond, and I wondered whether GoHighLevel could reduce rubbing factors that I ‘d learned to endure over the years with Keap.
I resisted in the beginning, yet a couple of even more aggravations led me to think perhaps it was time for a change.
The Investment: Migrating My Firm to GoHighLevel
Earlier this year I chose to take the plunge. I enrolled in HighLevel’s Company plan at $297/month, investing dramatically greater than the $97/month starter cost.
This had not been a decision I took lightly. I recognized switching over systems was mosting likely to require migrating all my Keap information and essentially reconstructing my entire technology infrastructure from scratch using all of the GoHighLevel integrations readily available.
Here’s an introduction of simply several of the initiative called for:
- Manually exporting 20,000+ email client records
- Recreating lots of automations and workflows
- Relocating customer profiles, notes, and project information to the new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe invoicing integration
- Establishing landing pages, coupons, and sales funnels all over once again
- Learning a totally international UX and interface style
All in, I spent around 30-40 laborious hours of setup work transitioning every little thing over– not to mention handling shed efficiency throughout the switch.
Yet eventually, it was a computed investment I wanted to make. I figured some short-term discomfort would repay with GoHighLevel providing a much better long-term solution for my business, Dripify. Oh just how incorrect I was …
It only took me about a month of hands-on use to understand I had actually made a big error. The concerns started accumulating quickly, up until it reached a point I had to cut my losses and switch over back to Keap entirely.
Allow’s walk through the nightmarish troubles I came across.
Protection Issues & Numerous Vermin
Offered GoHighLevel placed itself as an all-in-one automation platform, I took care to carefully recreate every workflow from my old Keap account.
These included series for onboarding new email subscribers, onboarding new customers, automating follow-ups for webinar registrations, sending event pointers, taking care of subscription expiries and far more.
Whatever seemed to be working fine … up until unexpectedly it wasn’t. One morning, I awoke to locate 171 completely unimportant e-mails had been sent out to customers that should NOT have actually gotten them. This took place 3 days straight, with a different set of 160 people each day.
I hysterically tried repairing and rebuilding the automation from square one. However the trouble continued.
When I frantically connected to their assistance team, they vaguely declared “server issues” were at fault. However this description really did not make any sense, given that the mistakes continued happening each early morning like clockwork unassociated to any type of downtime.
In my mind, this large failure was entirely inappropriate and just really did not work for my business. I have hundreds of get in touches with relying upon my automated campaigns running efficiently.
So if GoHighLevel was mosting likely to be totally undependable, how could I delegate mission-critical workflows and delicate client information to their innovation?
The unintuitive user interface only compounded these problems …
Irritating UX
Coming from Keap where whatever was seamless and intuitive, GoHighLevel’s learning curve felt high and difficult.
Easy tasks like editing and enhancing workflows involved excavating through food selection systems that were all over the place. Key setups were unexplainably spread in entirely different areas. Relocating in between features felt disjointed or complicated.
I’ll inform you what I suggest by speaking about their funnel builder as an instance. There were 3 separate setups panels to handle total, individual, and product configurations. Yet for some crazy factor, the web links to accessibility each of these core settings were spread out on opposite sides of the screen. What!?
As someone who values tidy, thoughtful style, this seriously upset me.
It strengthened that GoHighLevel still seemed like a work-in-progress instead of a sleek item prepared for prime-time use. Their priorities seemed focused on stuffing in every feature imaginable, with poor use as a second thought.
And speaking of features, I soon realized the small cost tag included costly compromises …
Deceptive Pricing GoHighLevel For Real Estate Agents
Among GoHighLevel’s biggest selling factors is the budget friendly rate for access to a lot of features. But I rapidly learned this inexpensive base expense was misleading.
They nickle-and-dimed individuals with occasional charges for core capability. All of a sudden my credit card declarations had obscure $10 fees from GoHighLevel here and there.
As it ended up, you get billed each time you send an e-mail with their web servers. So for high volume customers, this added up to thousands of bucks in unexpected prices.
Between these per-email costs and paying additional for deliverability add-ons like Mailgun, my “inexpensive” GoHighLevel membership ended up costing considerably greater than my Keap plan.
The reduced sticker price was appealing, but just not reasonable in practice. This bait-and-switch left a poor preference in my mouth.
Email Fees Suffered
The final dealbreaker was seeing my very carefully supported e-mail open rates plummet almost over night after switching to GoHighLevel.
Formerly, my target market engagement consistently hit 35-40% open rates in Keap month after month. But once I migrated their documents over to GoHighLevel, performance tanked instantaneously to a pathetic 9% open price.
No matter just how much I optimized my sending out methods or attempted every troubleshooting trick, I can hardly nudge open prices back into the teens– still a 50%+ decrease from my previous standards GoHighLevel For Real Estate Agents.
Let me repeat: my exact same audience and e-mails suddenly had terrible involvement. The only thing I can think that would be causing this was whatever was occurring behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For an agency so dependent on e-mail marketing, this was a big deal.
In between the crippling deliverability issues, concealed charges, damaged features, and awful interface, I had actually lastly reached my restriction …
Why I Stop GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Simply 45 days after migrating my agency to GoHighLevel, I recognized I had actually made a significant blunder. The cons dramatically surpassed any kind of benefits.
No software program is best, yet the large volume of issues was past appropriate.
At the end of the day, software program comes down to trust fund. If I can’t trust it to deal with crucial features properly or believe a vendor has my benefits in mind, then it’s time to walk away– also after investing significant time, money, and effort moving.
So I made the difficult call to reverse course and return back to Keap completely simply weeks after going done in on GoHighLevel. Allow’s explore what I gained from this fiasco.
Secret Takeaways: What I Gained from My GoHighLevel Blunder
My time with HighLevel can be summarized as a pricey accident. But in knowledge, it instructed me a few crucial lessons:
- Stay with what works. Don’t upset what’s working unless something is definitively much better across the board. Adjustment brings risk.
- Vet claims completely. Marketing hype around new software application usually obscures bigger underlying imperfections. Deep due diligence is important.
- Pick simplicity over features. Well-designed devices should make your job life less complicated, not much more complex and messy.
- Transparency builds trust. Nontransparent pricing, questionable reseller terms, and finger-pointing to avert issues destroys depend on.
- Seek impartial evaluations. Delighted assistance assesses imply much less if too much problems imply poor total use.
- Excellence is impossible. No single solution can completely meet every distinct organization need. Locate the least-bad fit.
- Evolution over change. Step-by-step enhancements commonly exceed high-risk wholesale reinvention of what currently functions fine.
In other words, I discovered to be more unconvinced of “also excellent to be true” marketing claims and less tempted by the allure of shiny new items. The devices you utilize daily need to gain depend on via transparency and performance, not glossy advertising.