As a company proprietor for over a years, I rely on software application and automation to improve procedures and deliver results. So when GoHighLevel arised on the scene couple of years back, it certainly caught my focus GoHighLevel GDPR Compliance Guide.
The concept was enticing– an all-in-one client management system with marketing, sales, and service devices integrated with each other. As a business owner always aiming to simplify and scale my business, it felt like a desire come to life on paper. Who wouldn’t desire a single solution that does it all?
Yet in this extensive GoHighLevel testimonial, I’ll take you inside my devastating journey of attempting (and failing) to switch over to this popular new software program. You’ll discover:
If you’re thinking about whether GoHighLevel is right for your own company needs, ideally you can learn from my excruciating mistakes and pumped up assumptions.
Looter: I do NOT advise GoHighLevel. If you need a CRM, begin with this checklist of finest CRMs instead. I use Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re seeking a sales, marketing, and task monitoring alternative to GoHighLevel, then right here are a few we recommend.
Backstory: Why I Thought About Changing from Keap
To comprehend what attracted me to GoHighLevel to begin with, you need context concerning my previous configuration. For over 5 years I had been happily counting on Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) to satisfy all my customer monitoring and automation requirements.
I located Keap instinctive to utilize and it managed whatever I required– CRM, email marketing, sales funnels, membership websites, and client assistance.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are made to assist small businesses keep their clients while including new ones easily. Automate follow-ups with emails and texts, ensuring leads and customers obtain the right messages at the correct time. Usage web site and social media sites forms to streamline lead follow-up, and handle your development with easy visit organizing and lead monitoring. Boost sales with automated pricing estimate, invoicing, and repayment handling, maximizing your time. With Keap, small companies can conserve 10 hours per week and boost earnings by 39%. Beginning with a 14-day free trial, no bank card needed.
Why we like Keap
Keap supplies a comprehensive client relationship administration (CRM) and marketing automation solution customized for small businesses and business owners. We appreciate Keap’s focus on improving sales processes and supporting client connections via effective automation tools. The system’s all-in-one method integrates CRM, e-mail marketing, invoicing, and task monitoring, making it especially eye-catching for services seeking to consolidate their technology pile.
Essentially, it simply worked dependably with very little difficulty or upkeep called for. My open and click-through rates were terrific (like 35% wonderful). Automations ran efficiently with no issues.
So why in the world was I attracted to uproot my entire operational structure from a system that worked to try something unverified and untried?
In knowledge I can admit I obtained seduced by the siren phone call of “shiny item disorder”. You know the sensation: when everybody’s talking about a new tool that will certainly reinvent your company … The turf typically looks greener beyond, and I asked yourself whether GoHighLevel may lower friction factors that I would certainly found out to endure over the years with Keap.
I resisted in the beginning, yet a few even more irritations led me to think possibly it was time for a change.
The Investment: Moving My Company to GoHighLevel
Earlier this year I made a decision to take the plunge. I signed up for HighLevel’s Company plan at $297/month, spending considerably greater than the $97/month starter price.
This had not been a decision I took lightly. I recognized switching over platforms was mosting likely to need migrating all my Keap data and basically rebuilding my whole tech framework from the ground up utilizing all of the GoHighLevel integrations readily available.
Below’s an introduction of simply a few of the effort required:
- By hand exporting 20,000+ email subscriber records
- Recreating lots of automations and workflows
- Relocating customer accounts, notes, and task data to the new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe payment integration
- Setting up landing pages, coupons, and sales funnels around once more
- Learning a completely international UX and interface style
All in, I spent around 30-40 tedious hours of configuration work transitioning everything over– and also taking care of shed productivity during the button.
However eventually, it was a calculated financial investment I wanted to make. I figured some temporary discomfort would repay with GoHighLevel giving a far better long-term solution for my business, Dripify. Oh exactly how wrong I was …
It just took me about a month of hands-on use to understand I had made a big mistake. The concerns started accumulating quickly, up until it reached a point I had to cut my losses and change back to Keap completely.
Allow’s go through the horrible problems I encountered.
Safety Issues & Several Vermin
Provided GoHighLevel positioned itself as an all-in-one automation platform, I took care to meticulously recreate every workflow from my old Keap account.
These included series for onboarding brand-new email customers, onboarding new clients, automating follow-ups for webinar enrollments, sending occasion tips, handling subscription expiries and a lot more.
Every little thing appeared to be operating fine … up until all of a sudden it had not been. One early morning, I awoke to locate 171 completely pointless e-mails had actually been sent out to individuals that must NOT have obtained them. This happened three days straight, with a different set of 160 people each day.
I desperately tried troubleshooting and reconstructing the automation from the ground up. However the trouble persisted.
When I frantically reached out to their assistance team, they vaguely asserted “web server issues” were responsible. But this explanation really did not make any feeling, since the errors continued taking place each morning like clockwork unassociated to any type of downtime.
In my mind, this huge failure was totally undesirable and simply didn’t work for my service. I have thousands of calls relying upon my automated campaigns running efficiently.
So if GoHighLevel was mosting likely to be totally unreliable, just how could I entrust mission-critical workflows and sensitive customer data to their modern technology?
The unintuitive user interface only worsened these issues …
Frustrating UX
Originating from Keap where everything was seamless and instinctive, GoHighLevel’s learning curve felt high and complex.
Basic jobs like modifying workflows involved digging with food selection systems that were all over the place. Secret setups were unexplainably scattered in completely different areas. Relocating between functions felt disjointed or confusing.
I’ll inform you what I mean by talking about their funnel builder as an instance. There were 3 different settings panels to handle general, private, and item configurations. Yet for some crazy reason, the web links to accessibility each of these core setups were spread out on opposite sides of the screen. What!?
As a person that values tidy, thoughtful style, this seriously annoyed me.
It reinforced that GoHighLevel still seemed like a work-in-progress as opposed to a polished product prepared for prime-time use. Their concerns seemed concentrated on cramming in every feature under the sun, with bad functionality as an afterthought.
And talking features, I soon recognized the low cost tag included costly concessions …
Misleading Pricing GoHighLevel GDPR Compliance Guide
One of GoHighLevel’s greatest selling points is the budget-friendly price for access to numerous features. Yet I promptly discovered this affordable base price was misleading.
They nickle-and-dimed customers with erratic costs for core functionality. Instantly my credit card declarations had unclear $10 costs from GoHighLevel occasionally.
As it ended up, you get charged each time you send out an email through their servers. So for high volume users, this added up to numerous dollars in unexpected prices.
Between these per-email costs and paying added for deliverability attachments like Mailgun, my “economical” GoHighLevel subscription wound up costing significantly MORE than my Keap plan.
The reduced sticker price was appealing, however simply not reasonable in practice. This bait-and-switch left a bad preference in my mouth.
Email Rates Suffered
The last dealbreaker was seeing my carefully nurtured email open prices drop almost overnight after changing to GoHighLevel.
Formerly, my audience engagement consistently struck 35-40% open rates in Keap month after month. But once I moved their documents over to GoHighLevel, performance tanked promptly to a pitiful 9% open price.
No matter how much I enhanced my sending practices or tried every troubleshooting trick, I can barely nudge open prices back right into the teens– still a 50%+ decrease from my previous benchmarks GoHighLevel GDPR Compliance Guide.
Let me repeat: my exact same audience and emails unexpectedly had horrible engagement. The only point I might think that would certainly be creating this was whatever was occurring behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a firm so depending on e-mail marketing, this was a big deal.
In between the crippling deliverability problems, concealed charges, broken features, and dreadful interface, I had finally reached my restriction …
Why I Give up GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Simply 45 days after moving my company to GoHighLevel, I recognized I had actually made a massive blunder. The disadvantages considerably outweighed any type of advantages.
No software is ideal, but the large volume of problems was past appropriate.
At the end of the day, software application comes down to trust fund. If I can’t trust it to deal with vital features effectively or think a supplier has my benefits in mind, then it’s time to leave– even after spending significant time, money, and initiative migrating.
So I made the difficult phone call to turn around training course and return back to Keap completely simply weeks after going all in on GoHighLevel. Let’s explore what I learned from this ordeal.
Trick Takeaways: What I Picked up from My GoHighLevel Error
My time with HighLevel can be summarized as a costly ill fortune. But in hindsight, it showed me a couple of key lessons:
- Adhere to what jobs. Do not upset what’s working unless something is definitively much better across the board. Modification brings danger.
- Veterinarian declares thoroughly. Marketing hype around brand-new software application commonly obscures bigger underlying imperfections. Deep due persistance is necessary.
- Choose simpleness over features. Properly designed tools must make your job life simpler, not more difficult and untidy.
- Transparency builds count on. Nontransparent pricing, unethical reseller terms, and finger-pointing to escape problems ruins count on.
- Look for impartial reviews. Pleased support examines imply much less if extreme problems imply bad total usability.
- Perfection is difficult. No single solution can flawlessly meet every special service demand. Discover the least-bad fit.
- Development over transformation. Step-by-step enhancements usually outweigh risky wholesale reinvention of what already works fine.
In short, I discovered to be a lot more cynical of “too excellent to be true” marketing cases and less attracted by the allure of shiny new things. The tools you utilize daily should earn depend on with transparency and performance, not glossy advertising.