As a company proprietor for over a decade, I rely upon software and automation to enhance procedures and deliver outcomes. So when GoHighLevel arised on the scene few years back, it absolutely captured my attention GoHighLevel For Tree Service.
The concept was enticing– an all-in-one customer management system with marketing, sales, and solution tools integrated together. As an entrepreneur always seeking to simplify and scale my organization, it seemed like a dream come true on paper. That wouldn’t want a single option that does it all?
However in this thorough GoHighLevel review, I’ll take you inside my disastrous trip of attempting (and failing) to switch to this preferred new software application. You’ll discover:
If you’re taking into consideration whether GoHighLevel is right for your very own organization needs, ideally you can learn from my excruciating mistakes and pumped up expectations.
Looter: I do NOT recommend GoHighLevel. If you need a CRM, begin with this list of ideal CRMs rather. I use Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re trying to find a sales, marketing, and task management option to GoHighLevel, then here are a few we advise.
Backstory: Why I Took Into Consideration Switching from Keap
To recognize what attracted me to GoHighLevel in the first place, you require context concerning my previous setup. For over 5 years I had actually been gladly depending on Keap (previously Infusionsoft) to fulfill all my client administration and automation demands.
I found Keap intuitive to use and it managed everything I needed– CRM, e-mail marketing, sales funnels, subscription sites, and customer assistance.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are designed to assist small businesses keep their clients while adding brand-new ones easily. Automate follow-ups with e-mails and texts, making sure leads and clients receive the ideal messages at the right time. Use website and social networks types to enhance lead follow-up, and handle your development with simple visit scheduling and lead tracking. Boost sales with automated pricing quote, invoicing, and settlement handling, maximizing your time. With Keap, small companies can save 10 hours per week and rise income by 39%. Beginning with a 14-day free trial, no credit card needed.
Why we like Keap
Keap provides a detailed customer partnership administration (CRM) and marketing automation service customized for small companies and business owners. We appreciate Keap’s focus on enhancing sales processes and nurturing customer relationships with powerful automation devices. The platform’s all-in-one method combines CRM, e-mail marketing, invoicing, and job monitoring, making it especially eye-catching for companies seeking to settle their technology stack.
Generally, it just worked reliably with marginal hassle or maintenance required. My open and click-through prices were fantastic (like 35% terrific). Automations ran efficiently with no concerns.
So why in the world was I tempted to uproot my entire functional structure from a system that worked to try something unverified and untested?
In hindsight I can admit I obtained attracted by the siren telephone call of “glossy object disorder”. You know the sensation: when everyone’s discussing a brand-new device that will reinvent your organization … The turf usually looks greener on the other side, and I asked yourself whether GoHighLevel may reduce friction factors that I ‘d discovered to tolerate throughout the years with Keap.
I stood up to initially, but a few even more irritations led me to assume maybe it was time for an adjustment.
The Investment: Migrating My Company to GoHighLevel
Previously this year I chose to start. I registered for HighLevel’s Company plan at $297/month, spending significantly more than the $97/month starter price.
This had not been a decision I took lightly. I knew changing platforms was going to require moving all my Keap information and essentially restoring my whole technology framework from square one using every one of the GoHighLevel integrations offered.
Below’s a summary of simply some of the initiative needed:
- By hand exporting 20,000+ e-mail customer documents
- Recreating lots of automations and workflows
- Moving customer accounts, notes, and job data to the brand-new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe invoicing integration
- Establishing landing pages, promotions, and sales funnels around once more
- Learning a totally foreign UX and interface layout
Done in, I spent around 30-40 laborious hours of arrangement work transitioning everything over– as well as dealing with lost efficiency throughout the switch.
But ultimately, it was a computed investment I was willing to make. I figured some temporary pain would certainly settle with GoHighLevel offering a much better lasting remedy for my company, Dripify. Oh just how wrong I was …
It just took me concerning a month of hands-on use to recognize I had made a huge error. The problems began accumulating promptly, till it reached a point I needed to cut my losses and change back to Keap completely.
Let’s walk through the nightmarish issues I experienced.
Security Issues & Numerous Bugs
Offered GoHighLevel placed itself as an all-in-one automation system, I took care to thoroughly recreate every workflow from my old Keap account.
These included series for onboarding brand-new e-mail customers, onboarding new clients, automating follow-ups for webinar registrations, sending out event suggestions, managing membership expiries and much more.
Whatever appeared to be functioning fine … until instantly it had not been. One early morning, I woke up to locate 171 totally unnecessary e-mails had actually been sent out to individuals that must NOT have received them. This took place three days straight, with a different batch of 160 people every day.
I desperately attempted troubleshooting and rebuilding the automation from square one. Yet the problem persisted.
When I frantically connected to their support team, they slightly asserted “web server problems” were to blame. But this description didn’t make any sense, given that the mistakes proceeded occurring each early morning like clockwork unrelated to any type of downtime.
In my mind, this large failing was completely inappropriate and just didn’t benefit my company. I have thousands of contacts relying upon my automated campaigns running smoothly.
So if GoHighLevel was going to be totally unreliable, how could I turn over mission-critical workflows and sensitive customer information to their modern technology?
The unintuitive user interface only compounded these concerns …
Discouraging UX
Originating from Keap where everything was smooth and user-friendly, GoHighLevel’s learning curve felt high and complex.
Easy jobs like modifying workflows entailed excavating via menu systems that were all over the place. Key setups were unexplainably spread in completely various sections. Relocating between functions really felt disjointed or complicated.
I’ll inform you what I mean by discussing their funnel builder as an example. There were 3 separate setups panels to handle general, specific, and item arrangements. Yet for some crazy factor, the links to accessibility each of these core settings were expanded on contrary sides of the screen. What!?
As a person that values clean, thoughtful design, this seriously annoyed me.
It strengthened that GoHighLevel still felt like a work-in-progress instead of a sleek product ready for prime-time usage. Their concerns appeared concentrated on stuffing in every feature under the sun, with bad use as a second thought.
And speaking of features, I quickly recognized the affordable price tag included costly compromises …
Deceptive Pricing GoHighLevel For Tree Service
One of GoHighLevel’s most significant marketing factors is the budget-friendly cost for accessibility to a lot of features. But I quickly learned this low-cost base price was misleading.
They nickle-and-dimed individuals with sporadic charges for core performance. Instantly my charge card statements had unclear $10 charges from GoHighLevel here and there.
As it ended up, you get charged each time you send an email via their web servers. So for high volume users, this amounted to numerous dollars in unanticipated costs.
Between these per-email costs and paying extra for deliverability add-ons like Mailgun, my “budget friendly” GoHighLevel registration wound up costing significantly MORE than my Keap plan.
The reduced price tag was appealing, yet just not practical in practice. This bait-and-switch left a negative preference in my mouth.
Email Fees Suffered
The final dealbreaker was seeing my meticulously supported e-mail open prices drop almost overnight after switching over to GoHighLevel.
Formerly, my target market interaction constantly hit 35-40% open prices in Keap month after month. Once I moved their documents over to GoHighLevel, performance tanked instantaneously to a pathetic 9% open price.
No matter how much I maximized my sending out practices or tried every fixing technique, I might hardly nudge open rates back into the teens– still a 50%+ decline from my previous benchmarks GoHighLevel For Tree Service.
Let me repeat: my exact same target market and emails suddenly had awful interaction. The only thing I could believe that would certainly be creating this was whatever was occurring behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a company so depending on e-mail marketing, this was a big deal.
In between the crippling deliverability problems, concealed fees, damaged features, and dreadful interface, I had ultimately reached my restriction …
Why I Give up GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Just 45 days after migrating my agency to GoHighLevel, I understood I had actually made a big error. The disadvantages substantially outweighed any type of advantages.
No software application is perfect, however the large volume of problems was past acceptable.
At the end of the day, software program boils down to trust. If I can’t trust it to handle important features effectively or believe a vendor has my benefits in mind, then it’s time to leave– even after spending considerable time, cash, and effort moving.
So I made the hard contact us to reverse program and return back to Keap entirely just weeks after going done in on GoHighLevel. Allow’s discover what I gained from this ordeal.
Key Takeaways: What I Gained from My GoHighLevel Mistake
My time with HighLevel can be summarized as a pricey ill fortune. Yet in hindsight, it instructed me a few essential lessons:
- Adhere to what jobs. Do not upset what’s functioning unless something is definitively far better across the board. Change brings risk.
- Vet declares extensively. Marketing hype around new software commonly covers bigger underlying defects. Deep due persistance is essential.
- Select simpleness over features. Properly designed tools should make your work life much easier, not much more difficult and untidy.
- Transparency constructs trust. Nontransparent pricing, shady reseller terms, and finger-pointing to evade issues damages trust fund.
- Seek impartial evaluations. Pleased assistance evaluates imply less if extreme concerns imply bad general usability.
- Perfection is difficult. No solitary option can flawlessly satisfy every distinct organization need. Discover the least-bad fit.
- Evolution over change. Incremental improvements generally outweigh dangerous wholesale reinvention of what already functions fine.
In other words, I learned to be more unconvinced of “as well excellent to be real” marketing cases and less attracted by the attraction of shiny brand-new objects. The devices you make use of daily must earn trust through openness and performance, not glossy advertising.