As an agency owner for over a years, I rely upon software program and automation to streamline procedures and deliver results. So when GoHighLevel emerged on the scene couple of years back, it most definitely caught my attention GoHighLevel Google Drive Integration.
The idea was enticing– an all-in-one customer administration platform with marketing, sales, and solution tools integrated with each other. As an entrepreneur constantly wanting to streamline and scale my organization, it seemed like a desire become a reality on paper. That would not want a single service that does it all?
But in this in-depth GoHighLevel review, I’ll take you inside my devastating journey of trying (and stopping working) to change to this popular brand-new software. You’ll learn:
If you’re considering whether GoHighLevel is right for your own business demands, hopefully you can gain from my uncomfortable 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 make use of Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re seeking a sales, marketing, and project administration choice to GoHighLevel, after that here are a couple of we recommend.
Backstory: Why I Considered Switching Over from Keap
To understand what attracted me to GoHighLevel to begin with, you require context concerning my previous setup. For over 5 years I had actually been gladly relying upon Keap (previously Infusionsoft) to fulfill all my customer administration and automation requirements.
I located Keap user-friendly to utilize and it handled whatever I needed– CRM, e-mail marketing, sales funnels, subscription websites, and customer support.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are developed to aid small companies keep their customers while including new ones effortlessly. Automate follow-ups with emails and texts, ensuring leads and customers receive the right messages at the correct time. Use website and social media forms to simplify lead follow-up, and handle your growth with very easy consultation scheduling and lead monitoring. Boost sales with automated pricing estimate, invoicing, and settlement handling, freeing up your time. With Keap, small businesses can save 10 hours per week and boost profits by 39%. Beginning with a 14-day free trial, no credit card called for.
Why we like Keap
Keap offers an extensive consumer partnership administration (CRM) and marketing automation remedy tailored for local business and business owners. We value Keap’s focus on simplifying sales procedures and supporting consumer relationships with powerful automation tools. The system’s all-in-one approach combines CRM, e-mail marketing, invoicing, and job monitoring, making it particularly appealing for businesses seeking to settle their technology stack.
For the most part, it simply functioned dependably with minimal hassle or maintenance needed. My open and click-through prices were wonderful (like 35% wonderful). Automations ran efficiently without any issues.
So why on earth was I lured to uproot my entire operational foundation from a system that functioned to attempt something unproven and untested?
In hindsight I can confess I obtained attracted by the siren phone call of “glossy things syndrome”. You recognize the sensation: when everyone’s discussing a brand-new device that will change your business … The turf frequently looks greener on the other side, and I asked yourself whether GoHighLevel could reduce rubbing factors that I would certainly discovered to endure for many years with Keap.
I withstood at first, yet a few more stress led me to assume possibly it was time for a change.
The Investment: Moving My Firm to GoHighLevel
Previously this year I decided to start. I signed up for HighLevel’s Company plan at $297/month, investing considerably greater than the $97/month starter cost.
This wasn’t a choice I took lightly. I recognized switching over systems was going to require migrating all my Keap information and basically restoring my entire tech facilities from square one making use of all of the GoHighLevel integrations available.
Right here’s a review of just some of the effort called for:
- Manually exporting 20,000+ email client documents
- Recreating loads of automations and workflows
- Relocating customer profiles, notes, and project data to the new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe billing integration
- Setting up landing pages, promotions, and sales funnels throughout once again
- Learning a totally foreign UX and user interface layout
All in, I spent around 30-40 tiresome hours of setup work transitioning every little thing over– as well as managing lost productivity throughout the switch.
Yet inevitably, it was a calculated financial investment I was willing to make. I figured some temporary discomfort would certainly settle with GoHighLevel providing a much better lasting option for my service, Dripify. Oh just how wrong I was …
It only took me regarding a month of hands-on usage to recognize I had actually made a large blunder. The problems started piling up promptly, until it reached a factor I had to reduce my losses and change back to Keap totally.
Allow’s go through the horrible issues I experienced.
Safety Issues & Many Bugs
Offered GoHighLevel placed itself as an all-in-one automation platform, I made sure to carefully recreate every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These consisted of sequences for onboarding brand-new email subscribers, onboarding new clients, automating follow-ups for webinar enrollments, sending out event pointers, handling subscription expiries and far more.
Whatever seemed to be working penalty … till unexpectedly it wasn’t. One morning, I awoke to find 171 totally pointless emails had actually been sent to customers who must NOT have obtained them. This happened three days straight, with a various batch of 160 individuals daily.
I hysterically attempted fixing and reconstructing the automation from square one. Yet the trouble continued.
When I frantically connected to their assistance group, they slightly asserted “web server concerns” were to blame. However this explanation didn’t make any type of sense, since the errors continued taking place each morning like clockwork unassociated to any downtime.
In my mind, this massive failing was entirely inappropriate and simply really did not help my company. I have countless calls counting on my automated campaigns running smoothly.
So if GoHighLevel was going to be entirely unstable, just how could I hand over mission-critical workflows and delicate client information to their innovation?
The unintuitive user interface just worsened these concerns …
Discouraging UX
Originating from Keap where whatever was seamless and instinctive, GoHighLevel’s learning contour felt high and complex.
Straightforward tasks like editing workflows included digging with menu systems that were all over the place. Trick settings were unexplainably spread in totally various areas. Relocating in between functions really felt disjointed or complicated.
I’ll inform you what I suggest by discussing their funnel builder as an example. There were 3 separate setups panels to take care of total, specific, and product configurations. Yet for some insane reason, the web links to accessibility each of these core setups were spread out on contrary sides of the screen. What!?
As a person who values clean, thoughtful design, this seriously irritated me.
It reinforced that GoHighLevel still seemed like a work-in-progress rather than a refined product all set for prime-time use. Their concerns seemed focused on packing in every feature under the sun, with bad use as a second thought.
And speaking of features, I quickly recognized the affordable price tag came with expensive concessions …
Misleading Pricing GoHighLevel Google Drive Integration
One of GoHighLevel’s most significant marketing factors is the budget friendly price for access to so many features. However I rapidly learned this low-cost base cost was deceitful.
They nickle-and-dimed customers with occasional fees for core capability. Unexpectedly my bank card declarations had vague $10 fees from GoHighLevel here and there.
As it turned out, you obtain billed whenever you send an e-mail through their web servers. So for high quantity customers, this amounted to numerous bucks in unexpected prices.
Between these per-email costs and paying added for deliverability add-ons like Mailgun, my “budget-friendly” GoHighLevel subscription wound up setting you back dramatically MORE than my Keap plan.
The reduced sticker price was alluring, yet just not practical in practice. This bait-and-switch left a poor preference in my mouth.
Email Fees Suffered
The last dealbreaker was seeing my meticulously supported email open rates plunge almost over night after switching over to GoHighLevel.
Previously, my audience interaction regularly struck 35-40% open prices in Keap month after month. Once I moved their documents over to GoHighLevel, efficiency tanked instantly to a useless 9% open rate.
Despite how much I optimized my sending out methods or tried every repairing technique, I could hardly push open rates back into the teenagers– still a 50%+ decline from my previous criteria GoHighLevel Google Drive Integration.
Let me repeat: my exact same target market and e-mails suddenly had terrible engagement. The only point I might assume that would certainly be triggering this was whatever was taking place behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a company so based on e-mail marketing, this was a big deal.
In between the debilitating deliverability problems, hidden fees, busted features, and terrible user interface, I had actually ultimately reached my restriction …
Why I Stop GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Just 45 days after moving my company to GoHighLevel, I knew I had actually made a huge error. The cons substantially surpassed any kind of benefits.
No software application is excellent, yet the large volume of issues was beyond appropriate.
At the end of the day, software program comes down to count on. If I can’t trust it to deal with crucial features capably or believe a supplier has my best interests in mind, after that it’s time to walk away– even after investing significant time, cash, and initiative migrating.
So I made the difficult call to turn around program and return back to Keap completely just weeks after going all in on GoHighLevel. Allow’s discover what I picked up from this ordeal.
Key Takeaways: What I Learned From My GoHighLevel Blunder
My time with HighLevel can be summarized as a pricey accident. Yet in knowledge, it instructed me a few crucial lessons:
- Stay with what jobs. Do not upset what’s working unless something is definitively far better across the board. Change brings risk.
- Veterinarian claims thoroughly. Marketing buzz around brand-new software application frequently covers larger underlying problems. Deep due persistance is vital.
- Choose simplicity over features. Well-designed tools must make your job life easier, not more complicated and untidy.
- Transparency builds depend on. Nontransparent pricing, dubious reseller terms, and finger-pointing to evade problems destroys count on.
- Look for impartial evaluations. Happy assistance reviews mean much less if excessive concerns indicate bad overall functionality.
- Perfection is impossible. No single option can completely meet every unique service requirement. Find the least-bad fit.
- Evolution over transformation. Step-by-step improvements generally surpass risky wholesale reinvention of what currently functions fine.
Basically, I discovered to be a lot more hesitant of “also great to be true” marketing insurance claims and less lured by the attraction of glossy brand-new items. The devices you use daily ought to gain trust fund via transparency and performance, not slick advertising.