As a firm owner for over a decade, I rely on software application and automation to streamline operations and supply results. So when GoHighLevel arised on the scene few years back, it most definitely captured my interest GoHighLevel For Restaurants.
The concept was enticing– an all-in-one client management system with marketing, sales, and solution devices incorporated together. As a business owner always seeking to streamline and scale my company, it appeared like a desire happened theoretically. Who would not desire a solitary service that does it all?
Yet in this comprehensive GoHighLevel evaluation, I’ll take you inside my tragic trip of trying (and failing) to switch to this preferred new software. You’ll find out:
If you’re considering whether GoHighLevel is right for your own service requirements, hopefully you can learn from my painful errors and inflated expectations.
Spoiler: I do NOT recommend GoHighLevel. If you need a CRM, begin with this checklist of ideal CRMs rather. I make use of Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re trying to find a sales, marketing, and task administration choice to GoHighLevel, then below are a few we suggest.
Backstory: Why I Considered Switching Over 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 been gladly relying on Keap (previously Infusionsoft) to fulfill all my customer administration and automation needs.
I located Keap user-friendly to make use of and it managed whatever I required– CRM, e-mail marketing, sales funnels, subscription websites, and customer support.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are created to aid small companies maintain their customers while adding brand-new ones easily. Automate follow-ups with e-mails and messages, guaranteeing leads and customers receive the best messages at the right time. Usage website and social media types to streamline lead follow-up, and manage your development with very easy consultation scheduling and lead monitoring. Boost sales with automated quoting, invoicing, and payment handling, maximizing your time. With Keap, small businesses can conserve 10 hours weekly and rise profits by 39%. Beginning with a 14-day free trial, no credit card called for.
Why we like Keap
Keap provides an extensive consumer connection administration (CRM) and marketing automation solution customized for small companies and business owners. We value Keap’s concentrate on streamlining sales procedures and supporting customer relationships via effective automation devices. The system’s all-in-one strategy combines CRM, email marketing, invoicing, and task administration, making it particularly attractive for businesses wanting to consolidate their technology pile.
Essentially, it simply functioned accurately with very little difficulty or upkeep called for. My open and click-through prices were wonderful (like 35% excellent). Automations ran efficiently with no problems.
So why in the world was I tempted to uproot my entire functional structure from a system that functioned to attempt something unverified and untried?
In hindsight I can confess I obtained seduced by the alarm call of “shiny object disorder”. You know the sensation: when everyone’s speaking about a brand-new tool that will certainly revolutionize your service … The turf commonly looks greener beyond, and I wondered whether GoHighLevel might decrease friction factors that I would certainly discovered to endure for many years with Keap.
I withstood in the beginning, yet a few even more frustrations led me to think perhaps it was time for a modification.
The Financial investment: Migrating My Agency to GoHighLevel
Previously this year I determined to start. I signed up for HighLevel’s Agency plan at $297/month, investing considerably greater than the $97/month starter expense.
This wasn’t a choice I took lightly. I recognized switching over platforms was going to call for migrating all my Keap information and basically restoring my whole technology infrastructure from scratch making use of all of the GoHighLevel integrations offered.
Right here’s an overview of just some of the initiative needed:
- Manually exporting 20,000+ e-mail client records
- Recreating dozens of automations and workflows
- Relocating client profiles, notes, and task information to the new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe invoicing integration
- Setting up landing pages, promos, and sales funnels around once again
- Learning a totally foreign UX and user interface layout
All in, I invested around 30-40 tedious hours of setup job transitioning every little thing over– as well as managing shed efficiency during the button.
But ultimately, it was a calculated investment I wanted to make. I figured some temporary pain would certainly repay with GoHighLevel offering a far better long-term solution for my service, Dripify. Oh exactly how incorrect I was …
It just took me concerning a month of hands-on use to understand I had made a big error. The issues started piling up quickly, until it reached a point I had to reduce my losses and change back to Keap entirely.
Let’s walk through the horrible troubles I experienced.
Protection Issues & Many Vermin
Provided GoHighLevel placed itself as an all-in-one automation platform, I made sure to diligently recreate each and every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These consisted of sequences for onboarding brand-new email clients, onboarding new customers, automating follow-ups for webinar enrollments, sending out event reminders, managing subscription expiries and a lot more.
Whatever appeared to be working fine … up until suddenly it wasn’t. One morning, I woke up to locate 171 completely unnecessary e-mails had been sent out to users who must NOT have actually gotten them. This happened three days straight, with a different batch of 160 individuals each day.
I anxiously tried repairing and reconstructing the automation from square one. But the trouble persisted.
When I seriously reached out to their support team, they slightly claimed “server concerns” were to blame. Yet this explanation didn’t make any kind of feeling, given that the errors continued occurring each morning like clockwork unassociated to any downtime.
In my mind, this enormous failure was completely unacceptable and just didn’t benefit my organization. I have thousands of contacts relying on my automated campaigns running smoothly.
So if GoHighLevel was going to be totally unstable, exactly how could I delegate mission-critical workflows and delicate customer data to their innovation?
The unintuitive user interface just intensified these concerns …
Aggravating UX
Coming from Keap where everything was seamless and instinctive, GoHighLevel’s learning curve felt steep and challenging.
Basic tasks like editing workflows involved digging with food selection systems that were all over the place. Secret settings were unexplainably scattered in absolutely different areas. Moving in between functions really felt disjointed or complex.
I’ll inform you what I imply by speaking about their funnel builder as an instance. There were 3 separate settings panels to handle overall, specific, and item setups. Yet for some crazy factor, the web links to accessibility each of these core setups were expanded on opposite sides of the display. What!?
As someone that values tidy, thoughtful design, this seriously frustrated me.
It enhanced that GoHighLevel still felt like a work-in-progress rather than a sleek product all set for prime-time use. Their priorities appeared focused on packing in every feature under the sun, with poor use as a second thought.
And talking features, I quickly realized the low cost tag came with expensive compromises …
Deceptive Pricing GoHighLevel For Restaurants
One of GoHighLevel’s biggest selling points is the budget friendly rate for accessibility to numerous features. However I rapidly learned this economical base price was deceitful.
They nickle-and-dimed customers with occasional fees for core performance. Unexpectedly my credit card statements had obscure $10 costs from GoHighLevel here and there.
As it turned out, you get charged whenever you send out an email via their web servers. So for high volume individuals, this added up to numerous dollars in unexpected expenses.
Between these per-email fees and paying extra for deliverability add-ons like Mailgun, my “budget friendly” GoHighLevel subscription wound up costing substantially greater than my Keap plan.
The reduced price tag was alluring, however just not practical in practice. This bait-and-switch left a bad preference in my mouth.
Email Rates Suffered
The last dealbreaker was seeing my thoroughly nurtured e-mail open prices plummet almost overnight after changing to GoHighLevel.
Previously, my target market involvement continually struck 35-40% open prices in Keap month after month. But once I migrated their records over to GoHighLevel, performance tanked instantaneously to a pathetic 9% open price.
Regardless of just how much I optimized my sending practices or attempted every fixing method, I can barely push open rates back into the teens– still a 50%+ decline from my previous criteria GoHighLevel For Restaurants.
Let me repeat: my exact same audience and emails instantly had terrible interaction. The only point I could believe that would certainly be causing this was whatever was occurring behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a company so based on email marketing, this was a big deal.
Between the debilitating deliverability concerns, concealed costs, busted features, and awful interface, I had actually ultimately reached my limitation …
Why I Stop GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Just 45 days after migrating my firm to GoHighLevel, I understood I had made a significant blunder. The disadvantages considerably outweighed any kind of benefits.
No software is perfect, yet the large volume of problems was beyond appropriate.
At the end of the day, software boils down to trust. If I can’t trust it to handle essential features competently or think a vendor has my best interests in mind, then it’s time to walk away– also after spending considerable time, money, and effort migrating.
So I made the tough phone call to turn around course and return back to Keap entirely simply weeks after going done in on GoHighLevel. Let’s discover what I picked up from this ordeal.
Secret Takeaways: What I Gained from My GoHighLevel Mistake
My time with HighLevel can be summed up as an expensive ill fortune. However in knowledge, it instructed me a couple of crucial lessons:
- Adhere to what works. Don’t upset what’s functioning unless something is definitively better across the board. Adjustment brings risk.
- Vet claims thoroughly. Marketing buzz around brand-new software program frequently obscures larger underlying problems. Deep due diligence is essential.
- Select simpleness over features. Well-designed devices must make your job life much easier, not more complicated and untidy.
- Openness builds trust fund. Opaque pricing, questionable reseller terms, and finger-pointing to avert issues damages trust.
- Look for honest testimonials. Delighted assistance reviews indicate much less if excessive issues suggest bad overall functionality.
- Perfection is difficult. No solitary option can completely fulfill every unique company need. Discover the least-bad fit.
- Evolution over transformation. Step-by-step enhancements usually surpass dangerous wholesale reinvention of what currently works fine.
In short, I learned to be extra unconvinced of “too excellent to be true” marketing claims and less tempted by the attraction of shiny new objects. The devices you make use of daily need to gain depend on via transparency and efficiency, not slick advertising.