As a company proprietor for over a years, I depend on software program and automation to streamline operations and deliver outcomes. So when GoHighLevel arised on the scene few years back, it most definitely captured my attention GoHighLevel For Travel Agents.
The idea was appealing– an all-in-one customer monitoring system with marketing, sales, and solution devices integrated with each other. As a business owner constantly wanting to simplify and scale my company, it appeared like a desire become a reality on paper. Who would not want a solitary option that does it all?
Yet in this comprehensive GoHighLevel evaluation, I’ll take you inside my tragic trip of attempting (and failing) to change to this preferred brand-new software application. You’ll find out:
If you’re thinking about whether GoHighLevel is right for your very own service requirements, with any luck you can pick up from my agonizing errors and inflated expectations.
Looter: I do NOT suggest GoHighLevel. If you need a CRM, start with this listing of ideal CRMs instead. I utilize Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re searching for a sales, marketing, and task management alternative to GoHighLevel, after that right here are a few we advise.
Backstory: Why I Took Into Consideration Changing from Keap
To comprehend 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 upon Keap (previously Infusionsoft) to meet all my client monitoring and automation demands.
I discovered Keap instinctive to make use of and it took care of everything I needed– CRM, e-mail marketing, sales funnels, membership websites, and client assistance.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are made to assist small companies maintain their clients while adding brand-new ones easily. Automate follow-ups with emails and messages, making sure leads and clients obtain the best messages at the correct time. Usage site and social networks types to streamline lead follow-up, and handle your development with very easy consultation organizing and lead monitoring. Boost sales with automated estimating, invoicing, and payment handling, liberating your time. With Keap, small companies can conserve 10 hours per week and rise earnings by 39%. Start with a 14-day free trial, no credit card required.
Why we like Keap
Keap uses a detailed consumer connection administration (CRM) and marketing automation solution tailored for local business and business owners. We value Keap’s concentrate on enhancing sales procedures and supporting customer relationships through powerful automation devices. The platform’s all-in-one method integrates CRM, email marketing, invoicing, and task monitoring, making it particularly attractive for businesses wanting to combine their tech stack.
Essentially, it just worked accurately with marginal fuss or maintenance called for. My open and click-through prices were excellent (like 35% wonderful). Automations ran efficiently without issues.
So why on earth was I attracted to uproot my whole operational foundation from a system that worked to attempt something unproven and untested?
In knowledge I can admit I obtained attracted by the alarm telephone call of “shiny things syndrome”. You understand the feeling: when every person’s discussing a new device that will reinvent your service … The turf usually looks greener on the other side, and I asked yourself whether GoHighLevel could lower rubbing factors that I would certainly found out to tolerate throughout the years with Keap.
I withstood at first, yet a couple of even more stress led me to believe maybe it was time for a change.
The Financial investment: Moving My Agency to GoHighLevel
Earlier this year I made a decision to take the plunge. I enrolled in HighLevel’s Firm plan at $297/month, investing significantly more than the $97/month starter price.
This had not been a choice I took lightly. I recognized changing platforms was mosting likely to need moving all my Keap data and essentially restoring my whole tech infrastructure from the ground up making use of all of the GoHighLevel integrations readily available.
Below’s a summary of just a few of the effort called for:
- Manually exporting 20,000+ email client documents
- Recreating loads of automations and workflows
- Relocating client profiles, notes, and job data to the brand-new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe payment integration
- Establishing landing pages, coupons, and sales funnels around again
- Learning a totally foreign UX and user interface layout
Done in, I spent around 30-40 laborious hours of setup job transitioning everything over– not to mention dealing with shed performance throughout the switch.
Yet ultimately, it was a computed investment I was willing to make. I figured some short-term pain would settle with GoHighLevel offering a far better long-lasting service for my organization, Dripify. Oh just how wrong I was …
It just took me regarding a month of hands-on use to recognize I had actually made a large blunder. The concerns began accumulating rapidly, up until it got to a point I had to cut my losses and switch over back to Keap entirely.
Let’s walk through the nightmarish troubles I encountered.
Security Issues & Several Bugs
Provided GoHighLevel placed itself as an all-in-one automation system, I took care to diligently recreate every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These consisted of series for onboarding brand-new email clients, onboarding brand-new customers, automating follow-ups for webinar enrollments, sending out event reminders, handling subscription expiries and far more.
Every little thing appeared to be functioning fine … till suddenly it wasn’t. One morning, I woke up to discover 171 completely pointless e-mails had actually been sent to customers who need to NOT have received them. This took place three days in a row, with a various batch of 160 people every day.
I frantically attempted fixing and rebuilding the automation from square one. However the problem lingered.
When I seriously reached out to their support group, they slightly asserted “web server concerns” were at fault. But this explanation really did not make any sense, given that the errors proceeded taking place each morning like clockwork unassociated to any downtime.
In my mind, this massive failure was entirely inappropriate and simply really did not benefit my business. I have thousands of contacts relying on my automated campaigns running smoothly.
So if GoHighLevel was going to be completely unstable, how could I entrust mission-critical workflows and delicate client data to their innovation?
The unintuitive user interface only compounded these concerns …
Frustrating UX
Coming from Keap where whatever was seamless and user-friendly, GoHighLevel’s learning curve felt steep and complicated.
Simple jobs like modifying workflows involved excavating via food selection systems that were all over the place. Key setups were unexplainably scattered in totally different areas. Relocating in between functions really felt disjointed or complex.
I’ll inform you what I imply by talking about their funnel builder as an instance. There were 3 different setups panels to take care of total, private, and product arrangements. Yet for some crazy reason, the web links to accessibility each of these core settings were spread out on contrary sides of the display. What!?
As somebody that values clean, thoughtful design, this seriously frustrated me.
It strengthened that GoHighLevel still felt like a work-in-progress rather than a polished product ready for prime-time usage. Their priorities appeared focused on cramming in every feature imaginable, with poor use as a second thought.
And talking features, I soon understood the low cost tag came with costly compromises …
Misleading Pricing GoHighLevel For Travel Agents
One of GoHighLevel’s most significant selling factors is the affordable cost for accessibility to many features. Yet I quickly discovered this cheap base price was deceitful.
They nickle-and-dimed individuals with occasional costs for core performance. Instantly my credit card declarations had unclear $10 fees from GoHighLevel here and there.
As it turned out, you get billed every single time you send out an e-mail via their web servers. So for high quantity customers, this amounted to thousands of dollars in unexpected prices.
Between these per-email fees and paying extra for deliverability attachments like Mailgun, my “economical” GoHighLevel membership wound up setting you back dramatically greater than my Keap plan.
The reduced price tag was appealing, yet just not reasonable in practice. This bait-and-switch left a poor taste in my mouth.
Email Fees Suffered
The final dealbreaker was seeing my very carefully nurtured e-mail open rates plummet almost overnight after switching to GoHighLevel.
Formerly, my audience engagement continually hit 35-40% open prices in Keap month after month. But once I migrated their records over to GoHighLevel, efficiency tanked instantly to a pathetic 9% open price.
No matter how much I enhanced my sending out methods or tried every troubleshooting trick, I can hardly push open prices back right into the teenagers– still a 50%+ decline from my previous criteria GoHighLevel For Travel Agents.
Let me repeat: my exact same audience and emails all of a sudden had terrible interaction. The only thing I might think that would certainly be triggering this was whatever was happening behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a company so depending on e-mail marketing, this was a big deal.
In between the crippling deliverability concerns, hidden charges, busted features, and dreadful interface, I had ultimately reached my restriction …
Why I Quit GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Simply 45 days after migrating my agency to GoHighLevel, I recognized I had actually made a significant mistake. The disadvantages drastically outweighed any kind of advantages.
No software is ideal, yet the sheer quantity of problems was beyond appropriate.
At the end of the day, software comes down to count on. If I can not trust it to deal with essential functions effectively or think a supplier has my benefits in mind, after that it’s time to walk away– even after investing considerable time, money, and initiative moving.
So I made the hard contact us to reverse program and return back to Keap entirely simply weeks after going done in on GoHighLevel. Allow’s discover what I learned from this fiasco.
Trick Takeaways: What I Gained from My GoHighLevel Mistake
My time with HighLevel can be summarized as an expensive accident. But in knowledge, it educated me a few key lessons:
- Adhere to what jobs. Do not disturb what’s functioning unless something is definitively much better across the board. Change brings risk.
- Vet asserts completely. Marketing hype around brand-new software application typically covers larger underlying defects. Deep due persistance is vital.
- Choose simpleness over features. Properly designed devices must make your work life much easier, not a lot more complex and unpleasant.
- Openness develops trust fund. Opaque pricing, unethical reseller terms, and finger-pointing to avert troubles damages trust fund.
- Look for unbiased evaluations. Pleased assistance evaluates mean less if extreme concerns indicate poor overall use.
- Excellence is impossible. No single service can completely satisfy every special organization requirement. Find the least-bad fit.
- Evolution over revolution. Step-by-step enhancements usually outweigh dangerous wholesale reinvention of what currently works fine.
Simply put, I found out to be extra hesitant of “as well great to be true” marketing cases and less tempted by the attraction of glossy brand-new objects. The devices you make use of daily must earn trust fund through openness and performance, not glossy advertising.