As a company owner for over a decade, I rely on software and automation to streamline procedures and deliver results. So when GoHighLevel emerged on the scene few years back, it certainly captured my interest GoHighLevel Headquarters.
The idea was attractive– an all-in-one client administration system with marketing, sales, and solution tools incorporated together. As a business owner always aiming to streamline and scale my organization, it appeared like a desire come true on paper. That wouldn’t want a single remedy that does it all?
However in this extensive GoHighLevel evaluation, I’ll take you inside my devastating trip of trying (and stopping working) to change to this popular brand-new software application. You’ll find out:
If you’re taking into consideration whether GoHighLevel is right for your very own service requirements, with any luck you can gain from my painful errors and inflated assumptions.
Looter: I do NOT suggest GoHighLevel. If you need a CRM, begin with this listing of best CRMs rather. I make use of Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re trying to find a sales, marketing, and project administration alternative to GoHighLevel, then right here are a few we recommend.
Backstory: Why I Considered Switching Over from Keap
To understand what attracted me to GoHighLevel to begin with, you require context about my previous setup. For over 5 years I had been happily counting on Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) to satisfy all my customer management and automation needs.
I found Keap intuitive to make use of and it handled every little thing I needed– CRM, email marketing, sales funnels, subscription sites, and client assistance.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are developed to assist small companies maintain their clients while including brand-new ones easily. Automate follow-ups with emails and texts, making certain leads and customers obtain the appropriate messages at the right time. Usage website and social media forms to enhance lead follow-up, and handle your growth with simple visit scheduling and lead tracking. Boost sales with automated pricing estimate, invoicing, and settlement handling, maximizing your time. With Keap, small companies can conserve 10 hours each week and boost income by 39%. Begin with a 14-day free trial, no charge card required.
Why we like Keap
Keap offers an extensive consumer relationship monitoring (CRM) and marketing automation remedy customized for local business and entrepreneurs. We value Keap’s focus on simplifying sales procedures and supporting consumer relationships through powerful automation tools. The platform’s all-in-one technique integrates CRM, email marketing, invoicing, and task management, making it particularly attractive for companies looking to combine their technology pile.
For the most part, it simply worked dependably with minimal fuss or upkeep called for. My open and click-through rates were wonderful (like 35% wonderful). Automations ran efficiently with no problems.
So why on earth was I lured to uproot my whole operational foundation from a system that worked to try something unproven and untried?
In hindsight I can admit I got attracted by the siren phone call of “glossy object disorder”. You understand the sensation: when everyone’s speaking about a brand-new tool that will revolutionize your service … The yard typically looks greener on the other side, and I asked yourself whether GoHighLevel could decrease friction points that I ‘d learned to tolerate over the years with Keap.
I stood up to initially, yet a few more frustrations led me to believe maybe it was time for a modification.
The Investment: Moving My Agency to GoHighLevel
Previously this year I made a decision to take the plunge. I enrolled in HighLevel’s Company plan at $297/month, investing substantially more than the $97/month starter cost.
This wasn’t a decision I ignored. I understood switching over systems was going to call for moving all my Keap information and basically reconstructing my entire tech framework from scratch using every one of the GoHighLevel integrations offered.
Right here’s a summary of just a few of the initiative needed:
- Manually exporting 20,000+ e-mail client records
- Recreating lots of automations and workflows
- Relocating customer accounts, notes, and task information to the brand-new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe payment integration
- Setting up landing pages, promotions, and sales funnels all over once again
- Learning a completely international UX and interface layout
Done in, I spent around 30-40 tedious hours of arrangement job transitioning whatever over– and also taking care of lost performance during the button.
Yet ultimately, it was a calculated financial investment I agreed to make. I figured some temporary discomfort would settle with GoHighLevel offering a better long-term remedy for my service, Dripify. Oh just how wrong I was …
It just took me about a month of hands-on usage to recognize I had actually made a huge error. The concerns began piling up swiftly, until it got to a factor I needed to cut my losses and change back to Keap totally.
Let’s walk through the horrible issues I came across.
Protection Issues & Several Vermin
Given GoHighLevel positioned itself as an all-in-one automation platform, I took care to diligently recreate every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These included series for onboarding brand-new e-mail clients, onboarding new customers, automating follow-ups for webinar enrollments, sending out occasion pointers, taking care of subscription expirations and far more.
Every little thing seemed to be functioning penalty … up until all of a sudden it had not been. One morning, I awoke to discover 171 entirely unnecessary e-mails had been sent to customers who need to NOT have actually received them. This happened 3 days straight, with a different set of 160 individuals daily.
I frantically tried fixing and restoring the automation from square one. However the trouble continued.
When I desperately reached out to their support group, they vaguely claimed “server issues” were at fault. But this description didn’t make any feeling, given that the mistakes proceeded taking place each early morning like clockwork unconnected to any type of downtime.
In my mind, this massive failing was completely unacceptable and just didn’t work for my business. I have hundreds of contacts depending on my automated campaigns running efficiently.
So if GoHighLevel was going to be completely unreliable, how could I leave mission-critical workflows and sensitive customer information to their technology?
The unintuitive user interface just compounded these concerns …
Irritating UX
Coming from Keap where everything was smooth and intuitive, GoHighLevel’s learning contour felt steep and difficult.
Basic tasks like modifying workflows involved excavating via food selection systems that were all over the place. Key setups were unexplainably scattered in entirely various areas. Moving in between functions felt disjointed or complex.
I’ll tell you what I indicate by talking about their funnel builder as an example. There were 3 different settings panels to manage total, private, and item setups. Yet for some crazy factor, the links to accessibility each of these core setups were expanded on contrary sides of the screen. What!?
As someone who values tidy, thoughtful layout, this seriously upset me.
It strengthened that GoHighLevel still seemed like a work-in-progress as opposed to a refined product all set for prime-time use. Their concerns seemed focused on packing in every feature imaginable, with poor functionality as a second thought.
And talking features, I soon understood the low price tag featured pricey compromises …
Misleading Pricing GoHighLevel Headquarters
Among GoHighLevel’s largest selling factors is the cost effective cost for access to many features. But I promptly learned this economical base expense was deceitful.
They nickle-and-dimed customers with sporadic charges for core functionality. Suddenly my charge card statements had unclear $10 charges from GoHighLevel here and there.
As it turned out, you obtain billed whenever you send an e-mail with their web servers. So for high volume individuals, this amounted to numerous bucks in unanticipated prices.
Between these per-email charges and paying added for deliverability attachments like Mailgun, my “economical” GoHighLevel subscription ended up setting you back substantially greater than my Keap plan.
The low price tag was alluring, however simply not practical in practice. This bait-and-switch left a bad preference in my mouth.
Email Fees Suffered
The final dealbreaker was seeing my thoroughly nurtured e-mail open prices plunge almost overnight after changing to GoHighLevel.
Formerly, my audience involvement regularly hit 35-40% open prices in Keap month after month. But once I moved their records over to GoHighLevel, performance tanked immediately to a pathetic 9% open price.
Regardless of just how much I maximized my sending practices or tried every fixing technique, I might barely nudge open prices back into the teenagers– still a 50%+ decrease from my previous criteria GoHighLevel Headquarters.
Let me repeat: my exact same target market and e-mails unexpectedly had dreadful engagement. The only point I can assume that would be triggering this was whatever was happening behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a firm so depending on email marketing, this was a big deal.
In between the crippling deliverability problems, concealed fees, damaged features, and terrible interface, I had finally reached my limitation …
Why I Give up GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Simply 45 days after migrating my agency to GoHighLevel, I understood I had made a significant mistake. The disadvantages drastically surpassed any type of benefits.
No software application is best, however the sheer quantity of problems was past acceptable.
At the end of the day, software comes down to depend on. If I can’t trust it to deal with vital functions properly or think a supplier has my best interests in mind, after that it’s time to leave– also after investing considerable time, money, and initiative moving.
So I made the hard contact us to turn around program and return back to Keap entirely just weeks after going done in on GoHighLevel. Allow’s explore what I learned from this ordeal.
Secret Takeaways: What I Learned From My GoHighLevel Error
My time with HighLevel can be summarized as a costly misadventure. Yet in knowledge, it educated me a few vital lessons:
- Stick to what works. Do not upset what’s working unless something is definitively better across the board. Change brings risk.
- Veterinarian claims thoroughly. Marketing hype around new software application frequently covers bigger underlying flaws. Deep due persistance is necessary.
- Select simpleness over features. Properly designed devices ought to make your work life easier, not much more complex and untidy.
- Openness builds count on. Opaque pricing, questionable reseller terms, and finger-pointing to escape problems ruins trust fund.
- Seek impartial reviews. Happy assistance reviews imply less if extreme problems suggest bad overall usability.
- Excellence is difficult. No solitary remedy can perfectly meet every unique organization need. Find the least-bad fit.
- Evolution over revolution. Incremental renovations commonly surpass risky wholesale reinvention of what already works fine.
In short, I found out to be extra unconvinced of “also great to be real” marketing cases and much less tempted by the attraction of glossy brand-new things. The tools you use daily ought to gain count on through transparency and performance, not glossy advertising.