As an agency proprietor for over a years, I rely on software application and automation to streamline procedures and supply outcomes. So when GoHighLevel arised on the scene couple of years back, it definitely captured my attention GoHighLevel Forms and Surveys.
The idea was appealing– an all-in-one customer management system with marketing, sales, and solution tools integrated with each other. As a business owner always aiming to streamline and scale my organization, it felt like a dream happened on paper. That would not want a single option that does it all?
Yet in this comprehensive GoHighLevel testimonial, I’ll take you inside my dreadful trip of attempting (and stopping working) to change to this preferred brand-new software. You’ll learn:
If you’re considering whether GoHighLevel is right for your own business needs, with any luck you can learn from my painful blunders and pumped up expectations.
Spoiler: I do NOT advise GoHighLevel. If you need a CRM, start with this listing of finest CRMs rather. I utilize Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re trying to find a sales, marketing, and project administration choice to GoHighLevel, after that right here are a few we recommend.
Backstory: Why I Thought About Switching Over from Keap
To understand what attracted me to GoHighLevel in the first place, you need context about my previous configuration. For over 5 years I had actually been gladly depending on Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) to satisfy all my client monitoring and automation needs.
I discovered Keap intuitive to make use of and it dealt with whatever I needed– CRM, e-mail marketing, sales funnels, subscription sites, and client support.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are created to assist small companies maintain their clients while including new ones easily. Automate follow-ups with e-mails and messages, making certain leads and customers receive the appropriate messages at the correct time. Usage site and social media forms to enhance lead follow-up, and handle your development with very easy consultation scheduling and lead monitoring. Boost sales with automated pricing quote, invoicing, and repayment processing, freeing up your time. With Keap, small businesses can save 10 hours weekly and rise earnings by 39%. Begin with a 14-day free trial, no bank card required.
Why we like Keap
Keap offers a thorough client connection administration (CRM) and marketing automation solution tailored for small businesses and business owners. We appreciate Keap’s focus on improving sales procedures and supporting client connections through powerful automation devices. The platform’s all-in-one approach incorporates CRM, email marketing, invoicing, and task management, making it especially eye-catching for organizations wanting to combine their tech stack.
Essentially, it just functioned reliably with marginal fuss or maintenance needed. My open and click-through prices were great (like 35% great). Automations ran efficiently without any concerns.
So why in the world was I tempted to uproot my entire functional foundation from a system that functioned to try something unverified and untried?
In knowledge I can admit I got attracted by the alarm telephone call of “shiny item disorder”. You understand the feeling: when every person’s speaking about a new tool that will change your company … The grass often looks greener beyond, and I wondered whether GoHighLevel could lower friction factors that I would certainly learned to tolerate throughout the years with Keap.
I stood up to at first, but a couple of even more frustrations led me to think possibly it was time for an adjustment.
The Investment: Migrating My Firm to GoHighLevel
Earlier this year I made a decision to take the plunge. I signed up for HighLevel’s Agency plan at $297/month, investing dramatically more than the $97/month starter expense.
This had not been a decision I ignored. I knew switching systems was mosting likely to need moving all my Keap data and basically rebuilding my whole tech framework from scratch using every one of the GoHighLevel integrations available.
Right here’s a summary of simply a few of the initiative called for:
- Manually exporting 20,000+ email customer records
- Recreating lots of automations and workflows
- Moving customer accounts, notes, and project data to the brand-new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe billing integration
- Establishing landing pages, promotions, and sales funnels around once more
- Learning a totally foreign UX and user interface layout
All in, I spent around 30-40 laborious hours of configuration work transitioning everything over– as well as managing lost performance during the switch.
However ultimately, it was a calculated financial investment I wanted to make. I figured some temporary discomfort would certainly repay with GoHighLevel giving a better long-term option for my company, Dripify. Oh exactly how incorrect I was …
It only took me about a month of hands-on use to recognize I had made a big error. The problems started accumulating quickly, until it got to a factor I had to cut my losses and switch back to Keap entirely.
Let’s go through the horrible troubles I ran into.
Protection Issues & Many Vermin
Offered GoHighLevel positioned itself as an all-in-one automation platform, I made sure to diligently recreate every workflow from my old Keap account.
These consisted of sequences for onboarding new e-mail customers, onboarding brand-new clients, automating follow-ups for webinar registrations, sending out occasion pointers, handling subscription expirations and a lot more.
Whatever seemed to be functioning fine … until instantly it had not been. One early morning, I awoke to discover 171 completely irrelevant emails had actually been sent out to users that ought to NOT have obtained them. This occurred 3 days straight, with a different batch of 160 people each day.
I frantically attempted troubleshooting and restoring the automation from the ground up. Yet the problem lingered.
When I frantically connected to their support team, they slightly claimed “server issues” were to blame. Yet this explanation didn’t make any type of sense, because the mistakes proceeded occurring each morning like clockwork unrelated to any type of downtime.
In my mind, this huge failing was entirely inappropriate and simply didn’t help my service. I have countless calls relying upon my automated campaigns running efficiently.
So if GoHighLevel was going to be completely unreliable, just how could I delegate mission-critical workflows and sensitive client information to their modern technology?
The unintuitive user interface only compounded these concerns …
Frustrating UX
Coming from Keap where everything was smooth and instinctive, GoHighLevel’s learning curve felt steep and complex.
Easy jobs like editing workflows included excavating with menu systems that were all over the place. Key settings were unexplainably spread in completely various areas. Relocating in between features really felt disjointed or complicated.
I’ll inform you what I suggest by discussing their funnel builder as an example. There were 3 different setups panels to manage general, individual, and item setups. Yet for some crazy reason, the web links to gain access to each of these core setups were spread out on contrary sides of the screen. What!?
As someone who values clean, thoughtful layout, this seriously irritated me.
It strengthened that GoHighLevel still seemed like a work-in-progress rather than a refined product ready for prime-time use. Their priorities seemed focused on stuffing in every feature imaginable, with inadequate usability as a second thought.
And talking features, I soon recognized the small cost tag featured expensive concessions …
Misleading Pricing GoHighLevel Forms and Surveys
One of GoHighLevel’s biggest marketing factors is the economical price for accessibility to many features. But I promptly learned this economical base price was misleading.
They nickle-and-dimed customers with erratic fees for core performance. Suddenly my bank card statements had vague $10 charges from GoHighLevel here and there.
As it ended up, you obtain charged every single time you send out an email via their servers. So for high quantity users, this added up to thousands of bucks in unexpected expenses.
Between these per-email charges and paying additional for deliverability add-ons like Mailgun, my “cost effective” GoHighLevel membership ended up costing significantly MORE than my Keap plan.
The reduced price tag was alluring, but simply not reasonable in practice. This bait-and-switch left a negative taste in my mouth.
Email Rates Suffered
The final dealbreaker was seeing my thoroughly supported email open prices plunge nearly over night after switching over to GoHighLevel.
Formerly, my audience engagement regularly hit 35-40% open rates in Keap month after month. Once I migrated their records over to GoHighLevel, performance tanked instantaneously to a pathetic 9% open price.
No matter how much I optimized my sending techniques or tried every repairing method, I can barely nudge open rates back into the teenagers– still a 50%+ decline from my previous standards GoHighLevel Forms and Surveys.
Let me repeat: my exact same audience and e-mails all of a sudden had awful interaction. The only point I might assume that would be triggering this was whatever was occurring behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a firm so dependent on e-mail marketing, this was a big deal.
In between the crippling deliverability concerns, concealed charges, damaged features, and awful user interface, I had lastly reached my restriction …
Why I Quit GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Simply 45 days after moving my company to GoHighLevel, I understood I had made a significant mistake. The cons substantially surpassed any kind of benefits.
No software program is best, however the large quantity of problems was past acceptable.
At the end of the day, software boils down to count on. If I can’t trust it to handle vital functions effectively or think a vendor has my best interests in mind, after that it’s time to walk away– also after investing significant time, money, and initiative moving.
So I made the hard call to reverse course and return back to Keap totally just weeks after going done in on GoHighLevel. Let’s discover what I gained from this ordeal.
Trick Takeaways: What I Learned From My GoHighLevel Mistake
My time with HighLevel can be summed up as a pricey accident. Yet in knowledge, it showed me a few essential lessons:
- Stay with what works. Don’t upset what’s working unless something is definitively much better across the board. Change brings risk.
- Vet claims thoroughly. Marketing buzz around new software commonly obscures bigger underlying problems. Deep due diligence is essential.
- Choose simplicity over features. Properly designed tools ought to make your job life less complicated, not a lot more difficult and untidy.
- Openness develops trust. Opaque pricing, questionable reseller terms, and finger-pointing to escape problems ruins depend on.
- Seek honest reviews. Happy support evaluates imply much less if excessive issues imply poor overall use.
- Perfection is impossible. No single solution can perfectly fulfill every special company demand. Find the least-bad fit.
- Evolution over transformation. Step-by-step renovations generally exceed risky wholesale reinvention of what already functions fine.
Simply put, I learned to be much more doubtful of “as well good to be real” marketing cases and much less tempted by the attraction of shiny new items. The devices you make use of daily need to earn trust with openness and performance, not glossy advertising.