As a firm owner for over a decade, I count on software application and automation to simplify operations and provide results. So when GoHighLevel arised on the scene few years back, it definitely caught my attention GoHighLevel Google My Business Integration.
The idea was attractive– an all-in-one customer management system with marketing, sales, and service tools incorporated with each other. As a business owner always aiming to simplify and scale my organization, it appeared like a dream happened theoretically. Who would not want a single remedy that does it all?
But in this comprehensive GoHighLevel review, I’ll take you inside my disastrous trip of attempting (and failing) to switch over to this prominent new software. You’ll learn:
If you’re thinking about whether GoHighLevel is right for your very own service demands, hopefully you can gain from my excruciating blunders and pumped up assumptions.
Looter: I do NOT advise GoHighLevel. If you require a CRM, begin with this list of best CRMs instead. I use Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re looking for a sales, marketing, and project monitoring choice to GoHighLevel, then right here are a few we suggest.
Backstory: Why I Considered Changing from Keap
To comprehend what attracted me to GoHighLevel to begin with, you require context about my previous arrangement. For over 5 years I had actually been gladly depending on Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) to satisfy all my client monitoring and automation requirements.
I discovered Keap instinctive to utilize and it dealt with every little thing I required– CRM, email marketing, sales funnels, subscription sites, and customer assistance.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are made to aid local business maintain their customers while adding brand-new ones effortlessly. Automate follow-ups with e-mails and texts, guaranteeing leads and clients get the ideal messages at the correct time. Usage website and social networks types to improve lead follow-up, and handle your growth with easy consultation organizing and lead monitoring. Boost sales with automated pricing estimate, invoicing, and payment handling, maximizing your time. With Keap, small companies can save 10 hours weekly and boost earnings by 39%. Begin with a 14-day free trial, no credit card needed.
Why we like Keap
Keap offers a comprehensive client relationship monitoring (CRM) and marketing automation solution customized for small businesses and entrepreneurs. We appreciate Keap’s focus on streamlining sales processes and supporting client connections with effective automation tools. The system’s all-in-one strategy combines CRM, email marketing, invoicing, and task administration, making it especially appealing for companies seeking to settle their technology stack.
Generally, it simply functioned accurately with minimal difficulty or upkeep required. My open and click-through rates were terrific (like 35% terrific). Automations ran smoothly with no issues.
So why on earth was I lured to uproot my whole functional foundation from a system that worked to attempt something unverified and untested?
In hindsight I can confess I got seduced by the alarm call of “glossy item syndrome”. You recognize the feeling: when everybody’s discussing a new tool that will revolutionize your business … The grass frequently looks greener beyond, and I questioned whether GoHighLevel might decrease friction factors that I would certainly found out to tolerate for many years with Keap.
I withstood at first, but a few more stress led me to assume maybe it was time for an adjustment.
The Financial investment: Moving My Firm to GoHighLevel
Earlier this year I decided to start. I registered for HighLevel’s Company plan at $297/month, investing substantially more than the $97/month starter expense.
This had not been a choice I took lightly. I knew changing systems was mosting likely to call for moving all my Keap data and basically rebuilding my whole tech framework from scratch utilizing every one of the GoHighLevel integrations available.
Here’s a review of just several of the initiative needed:
- Manually exporting 20,000+ email client records
- Recreating lots of automations and workflows
- Moving client accounts, notes, and job data to the brand-new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe payment integration
- Setting up landing pages, coupons, and sales funnels all over once again
- Learning a completely foreign UX and user interface style
All in, I invested around 30-40 tiresome hours of configuration job transitioning everything over– as well as managing lost efficiency during the switch.
However eventually, it was a calculated financial investment I wanted to make. I figured some temporary discomfort would repay with GoHighLevel providing a much better lasting service for my company, Dripify. Oh how wrong I was …
It just took me concerning a month of hands-on usage to recognize I had made a huge blunder. The concerns began accumulating promptly, until it got to a factor I had to reduce my losses and switch back to Keap completely.
Allow’s go through the horrible issues I encountered.
Safety And Security Issues & Many Vermin
Offered GoHighLevel positioned itself as an all-in-one automation system, I made sure to carefully recreate each and every single 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, handling membership expirations and a lot more.
Every little thing appeared to be working fine … till suddenly it had not been. One early morning, I awoke to find 171 totally unnecessary emails had actually been sent to individuals that should NOT have actually obtained them. This took place three days in a row, with a different set of 160 people daily.
I desperately attempted troubleshooting and rebuilding the automation from the ground up. However the issue lingered.
When I frantically reached out to their support group, they vaguely asserted “web server concerns” were responsible. Yet this description didn’t make any type of sense, since the errors proceeded happening each morning like clockwork unconnected to any kind of downtime.
In my mind, this huge failing was entirely inappropriate and simply didn’t benefit my business. I have countless contacts counting on my automated campaigns running efficiently.
So if GoHighLevel was going to be totally unstable, how could I leave mission-critical workflows and delicate client information to their innovation?
The unintuitive interface only worsened these problems …
Aggravating UX
Originating from Keap where every little thing was smooth and instinctive, GoHighLevel’s learning contour felt high and difficult.
Simple jobs like editing and enhancing workflows involved digging through menu systems that were all over the place. Trick settings were unexplainably scattered in completely various areas. Moving in between features really felt disjointed or confusing.
I’ll inform you what I imply by discussing their funnel builder as an instance. There were 3 different setups panels to handle overall, individual, and item configurations. Yet for some insane factor, the web links to accessibility each of these core settings were expanded on contrary sides of the screen. What!?
As somebody that values clean, thoughtful style, this seriously upset me.
It enhanced that GoHighLevel still seemed like a work-in-progress instead of a refined product prepared for prime-time use. Their concerns seemed focused on packing in every feature imaginable, with bad usability as an afterthought.
And speaking of features, I soon recognized the low cost tag featured expensive concessions …
Deceptive Pricing GoHighLevel Google My Business Integration
Among GoHighLevel’s greatest selling points is the affordable rate for access to numerous features. Yet I swiftly discovered this economical base cost was deceptive.
They nickle-and-dimed customers with erratic charges for core functionality. Instantly my bank card statements had obscure $10 costs from GoHighLevel here and there.
As it ended up, you obtain billed whenever you send an e-mail via their web servers. So for high volume users, this amounted to thousands of dollars in unforeseen costs.
Between these per-email costs and paying additional for deliverability attachments like Mailgun, my “budget-friendly” GoHighLevel subscription wound up costing considerably MORE than my Keap plan.
The reduced sticker price was tempting, yet just not sensible in practice. This bait-and-switch left a bad preference in my mouth.
Email Fees Suffered
The final dealbreaker was seeing my meticulously supported e-mail open rates plummet almost over night after switching over to GoHighLevel.
Formerly, my target market engagement regularly struck 35-40% open rates in Keap month after month. But once I migrated their documents over to GoHighLevel, efficiency tanked instantly to a pathetic 9% open price.
No matter how much I optimized my sending techniques or tried every fixing method, I could hardly nudge open prices back into the teens– still a 50%+ decrease from my previous benchmarks GoHighLevel Google My Business Integration.
Let me repeat: my exact same target market and emails unexpectedly had awful involvement. The only point I could believe that would certainly be causing this was whatever was happening behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a company so depending on e-mail marketing, this was a big deal.
In between the debilitating deliverability issues, concealed charges, busted features, and dreadful interface, I had lastly reached my limit …
Why I Stop GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Just 45 days after migrating my agency to GoHighLevel, I understood I had made a significant mistake. The cons significantly outweighed any advantages.
No software program is ideal, but the sheer volume of issues was beyond acceptable.
At the end of the day, software application boils down to count on. If I can not trust it to deal with vital functions competently or think a vendor has my benefits in mind, after that it’s time to walk away– even after investing considerable time, money, and initiative migrating.
So I made the challenging call to reverse course and return back to Keap completely simply weeks after going done in on GoHighLevel. Let’s discover what I picked up from this fiasco.
Trick Takeaways: What I Picked up from My GoHighLevel Error
My time with HighLevel can be summarized as a costly misadventure. Yet in hindsight, it instructed me a couple of vital lessons:
- Adhere to what works. Don’t upset what’s functioning unless something is definitively much better across the board. Change brings risk.
- Veterinarian claims completely. Marketing buzz around brand-new software application usually covers larger underlying imperfections. Deep due diligence is necessary.
- Pick simpleness over features. Properly designed tools must make your job life easier, not much more difficult and unpleasant.
- Openness builds trust fund. Nontransparent pricing, questionable reseller terms, and finger-pointing to escape issues damages depend on.
- Seek objective evaluations. Pleased support examines imply much less if excessive problems imply inadequate total usability.
- Excellence is difficult. No single solution can flawlessly fulfill every distinct company need. Find the least-bad fit.
- Evolution over change. Step-by-step enhancements generally surpass dangerous wholesale reinvention of what currently works penalty.
Basically, I discovered to be extra unconvinced of “also excellent to be true” marketing cases and much less lured by the attraction of shiny new objects. The tools you utilize daily need to earn count on with transparency and efficiency, not slick advertising.