As a company proprietor for over a years, I rely on software and automation to simplify operations and deliver outcomes. So when GoHighLevel arised on the scene couple of years back, it absolutely caught my interest GoHighLevel Help Docs.
The idea was appealing– an all-in-one customer management system with marketing, sales, and solution devices incorporated with each other. As an entrepreneur always wanting to streamline and scale my service, it looked like a dream come to life on paper. That wouldn’t want a solitary remedy that does it all?
However in this extensive GoHighLevel testimonial, I’ll take you inside my disastrous journey of attempting (and stopping working) to switch to this preferred new software program. You’ll discover:
If you’re taking into consideration whether GoHighLevel is right for your very own organization requirements, hopefully you can pick up from my painful blunders and pumped up expectations.
Spoiler: I do NOT suggest GoHighLevel. If you require a CRM, start with this list of finest CRMs rather. I utilize Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re looking for a sales, marketing, and job administration alternative to GoHighLevel, after that here are a few we recommend.
Backstory: Why I Took Into Consideration Switching Over from Keap
To recognize what attracted me to GoHighLevel to begin with, you need context regarding my previous setup. For over 5 years I had been happily relying on Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) to satisfy all my customer monitoring and automation demands.
I discovered Keap intuitive to use and it dealt with everything I required– CRM, email marketing, sales funnels, subscription websites, and customer assistance.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are developed to assist small companies keep their clients while adding brand-new ones effortlessly. Automate follow-ups with emails and texts, ensuring leads and customers obtain the appropriate messages at the right time. Usage site and social media kinds to enhance lead follow-up, and manage your development with very easy appointment organizing and lead monitoring. Boost sales with automated pricing quote, invoicing, and payment processing, liberating your time. With Keap, small businesses can conserve 10 hours weekly and rise income by 39%. Beginning with a 14-day free trial, no charge card called for.
Why we like Keap
Keap provides an extensive customer partnership management (CRM) and marketing automation remedy tailored for local business and entrepreneurs. We value Keap’s concentrate on simplifying sales processes and nurturing client partnerships through powerful automation devices. The platform’s all-in-one method combines CRM, email marketing, invoicing, and job administration, making it particularly appealing for services seeking to settle their tech stack.
Generally, it simply worked dependably with minimal difficulty or upkeep called for. My open and click-through prices were fantastic (like 35% terrific). Automations ran smoothly with no problems.
So why on earth was I attracted to uproot my entire functional structure from a system that functioned to attempt something unproven and untried?
In hindsight I can admit I got seduced by the siren call of “glossy item disorder”. You know the feeling: when every person’s speaking about a new device that will certainly reinvent your service … The lawn usually looks greener on the other side, and I questioned whether GoHighLevel could reduce friction points that I ‘d learned to endure throughout the years with Keap.
I withstood initially, yet a couple of more irritations led me to think possibly it was time for a change.
The Financial investment: Migrating My Firm to GoHighLevel
Earlier this year I chose to take the plunge. I registered for HighLevel’s Company plan at $297/month, spending considerably greater than the $97/month starter cost.
This wasn’t a decision I took lightly. I understood changing platforms was going to call for migrating all my Keap data and basically reconstructing my entire technology framework from the ground up making use of all of the GoHighLevel integrations offered.
Right here’s an introduction of simply several of the initiative needed:
- Manually exporting 20,000+ email subscriber documents
- Recreating lots of automations and workflows
- Moving client profiles, notes, and job data to the brand-new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe payment integration
- Setting up landing pages, discounts, and sales funnels around once more
- Learning a completely foreign UX and interface design
All in, I spent around 30-40 tiresome hours of arrangement work transitioning every little thing over– as well as dealing with lost productivity throughout the button.
Yet inevitably, it was a computed investment I agreed to make. I figured some short-term pain would settle with GoHighLevel offering a much better long-term option for my service, Dripify. Oh how incorrect I was …
It only took me concerning a month of hands-on use to recognize I had made a large blunder. The issues began piling up swiftly, until it got to a point I had to cut my losses and change back to Keap completely.
Allow’s go through the horrible issues I came across.
Safety Issues & Lots of Bugs
Provided GoHighLevel placed itself as an all-in-one automation platform, I made sure to meticulously 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 occasion tips, taking care of subscription expirations and a lot more.
Every little thing appeared to be functioning fine … up until instantly it wasn’t. One morning, I awoke to discover 171 completely unimportant emails had been sent out to users that should NOT have actually gotten them. This took place three days in a row, with a various batch of 160 people each day.
I anxiously attempted repairing and restoring the automation from the ground up. However the issue lingered.
When I frantically connected to their assistance group, they vaguely claimed “web server concerns” were responsible. However this explanation really did not make any feeling, because the errors continued occurring each morning like clockwork unassociated to any kind of downtime.
In my mind, this enormous failure was entirely undesirable and simply didn’t benefit my service. I have hundreds of contacts depending on my automated campaigns running efficiently.
So if GoHighLevel was going to be entirely undependable, exactly how could I turn over mission-critical workflows and delicate customer information to their innovation?
The unintuitive user interface only intensified these problems …
Aggravating UX
Originating from Keap where every little thing was seamless and instinctive, GoHighLevel’s learning curve felt steep and complex.
Easy tasks like modifying workflows included excavating with food selection systems that were all over the place. Secret settings were unexplainably spread in entirely various areas. Relocating between features really felt disjointed or confusing.
I’ll tell you what I suggest by discussing their funnel builder as an instance. There were 3 different setups panels to take care of overall, individual, and product configurations. Yet for some insane factor, the links to accessibility each of these core settings were expanded on contrary sides of the screen. What!?
As a person that values tidy, thoughtful design, this seriously frustrated me.
It reinforced that GoHighLevel still felt like a work-in-progress rather than a polished product all set for prime-time use. Their priorities seemed concentrated on cramming in every feature under the sun, with poor usability as an afterthought.
And talking features, I soon realized the low price tag included costly concessions …
Deceptive Pricing GoHighLevel Help Docs
Among GoHighLevel’s most significant selling factors is the economical price for accessibility to a lot of features. However I quickly discovered this affordable base price was misleading.
They nickle-and-dimed users with erratic fees for core performance. Unexpectedly my credit card statements had unclear $10 fees from GoHighLevel occasionally.
As it ended up, you get charged whenever you send out an e-mail with their servers. So for high volume customers, this amounted to numerous bucks in unanticipated expenses.
Between these per-email charges and paying additional for deliverability attachments like Mailgun, my “inexpensive” GoHighLevel registration ended up setting you back dramatically greater than my Keap plan.
The low price tag was alluring, yet just not reasonable in practice. This bait-and-switch left a bad preference in my mouth.
Email Fees Suffered
The final dealbreaker was seeing my meticulously nurtured e-mail open prices plummet nearly overnight after switching to GoHighLevel.
Previously, my target market involvement constantly hit 35-40% open rates in Keap month after month. But once I moved their documents over to GoHighLevel, efficiency tanked quickly to a worthless 9% open price.
No matter how much I enhanced my sending out methods or tried every troubleshooting trick, I could barely nudge open rates back right into the teens– still a 50%+ decrease from my previous standards GoHighLevel Help Docs.
Let me repeat: my exact same target market and e-mails instantly had terrible engagement. The only thing I can think that would certainly be causing this was whatever was taking place behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a company so depending on email marketing, this was a big deal.
In between the crippling deliverability problems, concealed fees, broken features, and dreadful user interface, I had lastly reached my restriction …
Why I Quit GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Simply 45 days after moving my firm to GoHighLevel, I understood I had actually made a huge mistake. The cons considerably surpassed any type of benefits.
No software application is excellent, however the sheer volume of issues was beyond acceptable.
At the end of the day, software program comes down to trust fund. If I can’t trust it to deal with essential features properly or believe a supplier has my benefits in mind, after that it’s time to walk away– even after spending significant time, money, and effort migrating.
So I made the tough phone call to turn around training course and return back to Keap entirely simply weeks after going all in on GoHighLevel. Allow’s explore what I learned from this debacle.
Secret Takeaways: What I Learned From My GoHighLevel Blunder
My time with HighLevel can be summarized as an expensive misadventure. But in hindsight, it showed me a few crucial lessons:
- Stay with what works. Don’t upset what’s functioning unless something is definitively far better across the board. Modification brings risk.
- Veterinarian asserts extensively. Marketing hype around new software commonly obscures larger underlying problems. Deep due diligence is essential.
- Select simpleness over features. Properly designed devices should make your work life easier, not extra complex and untidy.
- Transparency constructs trust fund. Nontransparent pricing, questionable reseller terms, and finger-pointing to avert troubles ruins count on.
- Look for impartial evaluations. Pleased support evaluates imply less if excessive issues suggest poor general functionality.
- Perfection is impossible. No single solution can perfectly satisfy every one-of-a-kind service demand. Discover the least-bad fit.
- Evolution over transformation. Step-by-step renovations typically outweigh high-risk wholesale reinvention of what already functions fine.
In other words, I discovered to be more skeptical of “too great to be true” marketing claims and less tempted by the allure of shiny brand-new objects. The tools you use daily need to make trust fund through openness and performance, not slick advertising.