As a firm owner for over a decade, I rely upon software and automation to simplify procedures and provide results. So when GoHighLevel arised on the scene couple of years back, it certainly captured my interest GoHighLevel GoDaddy.
The idea was enticing– an all-in-one customer monitoring platform with marketing, sales, and service tools incorporated with each other. As an entrepreneur always looking to simplify and scale my service, it felt like a desire come to life on paper. That wouldn’t desire a solitary remedy that does it all?
However in this extensive GoHighLevel review, I’ll take you inside my tragic trip of trying (and failing) to change to this preferred new software application. You’ll find out:
If you’re taking into consideration whether GoHighLevel is right for your own organization requirements, with any luck you can learn from my excruciating blunders and blew up expectations.
Spoiler: I do NOT advise GoHighLevel. If you require a CRM, start with this checklist of ideal CRMs rather. I utilize Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re trying to find a sales, marketing, and job administration option to GoHighLevel, after that here are a couple of we suggest.
Backstory: Why I Considered Changing from Keap
To recognize what attracted me to GoHighLevel in the first place, you require context about my previous arrangement. For over 5 years I had been gladly counting on Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) to satisfy all my customer management and automation needs.
I found Keap instinctive to use and it dealt with everything I required– CRM, email marketing, sales funnels, subscription websites, and customer support.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are developed to assist small companies keep their customers while adding new ones effortlessly. Automate follow-ups with e-mails and texts, making sure leads and customers get the appropriate messages at the right time. Usage website and social media kinds to simplify lead follow-up, and manage your growth with easy consultation organizing and lead tracking. Boost sales with automated estimating, invoicing, and repayment handling, freeing up your time. With Keap, local business can conserve 10 hours each week and increase profits by 39%. Beginning with a 14-day free trial, no credit card required.
Why we like Keap
Keap uses a detailed client relationship administration (CRM) and marketing automation solution tailored for local business and business owners. We appreciate Keap’s concentrate on improving sales processes and nurturing customer partnerships via powerful automation tools. The system’s all-in-one method combines CRM, email marketing, invoicing, and job management, making it particularly appealing for businesses seeking to settle their tech pile.
For the most part, it just worked accurately with marginal hassle or maintenance needed. My open and click-through rates were fantastic (like 35% fantastic). Automations ran efficiently without any problems.
So why in the world was I tempted to uproot my whole functional foundation from a system that worked to attempt something unverified and untested?
In knowledge I can confess I got attracted by the siren phone call of “shiny object syndrome”. You understand the feeling: when everybody’s speaking about a new device that will certainly transform your business … The turf frequently looks greener beyond, and I wondered whether GoHighLevel might lower rubbing points that I ‘d discovered to tolerate for many years with Keap.
I resisted initially, however a few even more aggravations led me to believe perhaps it was time for a change.
The Financial investment: Migrating My Firm to GoHighLevel
Previously this year I decided to take the plunge. I signed up for HighLevel’s Agency plan at $297/month, spending dramatically greater than the $97/month starter cost.
This wasn’t a decision I ignored. I recognized switching platforms was going to require migrating all my Keap data and basically rebuilding my whole tech framework from the ground up using every one of the GoHighLevel integrations readily available.
Below’s a summary of just a few of the initiative required:
- Manually exporting 20,000+ e-mail subscriber records
- Recreating dozens of automations and workflows
- Relocating customer profiles, notes, and task data to the brand-new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe invoicing integration
- Establishing landing pages, promos, and sales funnels all over once more
- Learning an entirely foreign UX and user interface style
All in, I spent around 30-40 tiresome hours of arrangement job transitioning whatever over– as well as taking care of shed productivity during the button.
Yet ultimately, it was a calculated financial investment I agreed to make. I figured some short-term pain would repay with GoHighLevel offering a better long-lasting solution for my business, Dripify. Oh just how wrong I was …
It only took me concerning a month of hands-on use to realize I had made a big mistake. The concerns started piling up promptly, till it got to a point I had to reduce my losses and switch back to Keap totally.
Let’s walk through the horrible troubles I experienced.
Safety Issues & Many Bugs
Given GoHighLevel placed itself as an all-in-one automation system, I made sure to meticulously recreate every workflow from my old Keap account.
These consisted of series for onboarding new email subscribers, onboarding new clients, automating follow-ups for webinar registrations, sending event suggestions, taking care of subscription expiries and far more.
Everything appeared to be working penalty … until all of a sudden it had not been. One early morning, I awoke to locate 171 totally pointless e-mails had actually been sent out to users that must NOT have actually obtained them. This occurred 3 days straight, with a different batch of 160 individuals every day.
I desperately attempted troubleshooting and rebuilding the automation from scratch. However the problem continued.
When I seriously reached out to their support group, they vaguely declared “web server problems” were at fault. But this description really did not make any feeling, considering that the mistakes proceeded happening each early morning like clockwork unrelated to any downtime.
In my mind, this large failure was entirely undesirable and simply really did not help my business. I have thousands of get in touches with relying on my automated campaigns running efficiently.
So if GoHighLevel was going to be completely unreliable, how could I entrust mission-critical workflows and sensitive customer information to their technology?
The unintuitive user interface just compounded these issues …
Aggravating UX
Coming from Keap where everything was smooth and intuitive, GoHighLevel’s learning contour felt steep and complicated.
Basic jobs like editing and enhancing workflows involved digging via food selection systems that were all over the place. Key settings were unexplainably spread in entirely various sections. Relocating between functions felt disjointed or complicated.
I’ll tell you what I mean by discussing their funnel builder as an example. There were 3 different settings panels to manage overall, private, and product arrangements. Yet for some insane factor, the web links to access each of these core settings were expanded on opposite sides of the screen. What!?
As somebody who values tidy, thoughtful design, this seriously irritated me.
It enhanced that GoHighLevel still seemed like a work-in-progress rather than a polished product prepared for prime-time use. Their concerns appeared concentrated on stuffing in every feature under the sun, with bad use as an afterthought.
And talking features, I soon realized the low price tag included costly compromises …
Deceptive Pricing GoHighLevel GoDaddy
Among GoHighLevel’s biggest selling points is the economical rate for accessibility to a lot of features. But I swiftly discovered this inexpensive base price was deceptive.
They nickle-and-dimed customers with erratic costs for core functionality. Suddenly my charge card statements had vague $10 charges from GoHighLevel occasionally.
As it turned out, you get charged every single time you send out an email through their web servers. So for high quantity individuals, this amounted to hundreds of dollars in unanticipated costs.
In between these per-email costs and paying extra for deliverability attachments like Mailgun, my “affordable” GoHighLevel membership wound up setting you back considerably MORE than my Keap plan.
The low price tag was tempting, however simply not practical in practice. This bait-and-switch left a negative preference in my mouth.
Email Rates Suffered
The last dealbreaker was seeing my very carefully nurtured e-mail open rates plummet nearly overnight after switching to GoHighLevel.
Previously, my audience involvement regularly hit 35-40% open rates in Keap month after month. But once I moved their records over to GoHighLevel, efficiency tanked quickly to a worthless 9% open rate.
No matter how much I maximized my sending practices or tried every repairing method, I could barely push open prices back into the teens– still a 50%+ decrease from my previous standards GoHighLevel GoDaddy.
Let me repeat: my exact same audience and e-mails unexpectedly had horrible involvement. The only point I could assume that would be triggering this was whatever was occurring behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a firm so depending on email marketing, this was a big deal.
In between the crippling deliverability issues, hidden costs, broken features, and awful interface, I had actually ultimately reached my limit …
Why I Quit GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Simply 45 days after migrating my company to GoHighLevel, I understood I had made a huge mistake. The disadvantages drastically exceeded any advantages.
No software is excellent, however the large quantity of troubles was beyond acceptable.
At the end of the day, software application comes down to depend on. If I can not trust it to take care of critical functions effectively or believe a supplier has my benefits in mind, after that it’s time to walk away– even after spending significant time, money, and initiative migrating.
So I made the tough phone call to turn around training course and return back to Keap totally simply weeks after going done in on GoHighLevel. Let’s explore what I learned from this fiasco.
Secret Takeaways: What I Picked up from My GoHighLevel Error
My time with HighLevel can be summed up as a costly accident. Yet in hindsight, it instructed me a few key lessons:
- Stay with what works. Do not disturb what’s working unless something is definitively far better across the board. Change brings danger.
- Veterinarian declares extensively. Marketing buzz around new software often covers bigger underlying imperfections. Deep due persistance is important.
- Select simplicity over features. Well-designed tools need to make your job life much easier, not much more complicated and untidy.
- Openness develops count on. Nontransparent pricing, shady reseller terms, and finger-pointing to escape issues ruins trust fund.
- Seek impartial reviews. Delighted assistance evaluates imply much less if too much issues indicate inadequate general functionality.
- Perfection is impossible. No solitary remedy can perfectly fulfill every unique company requirement. Discover the least-bad fit.
- Evolution over revolution. Incremental improvements usually surpass high-risk wholesale reinvention of what already functions penalty.
Simply put, I found out to be much more hesitant of “as well great to be true” marketing cases and much less attracted by the attraction of glossy brand-new objects. The tools you use daily ought to gain depend on through openness and efficiency, not glossy advertising.