As a company proprietor for over a years, I count on software program and automation to streamline procedures and provide results. So when GoHighLevel emerged on the scene couple of years back, it definitely captured my interest GoHighLevel IDX Integration.
The idea was enticing– an all-in-one client monitoring platform with marketing, sales, and solution devices integrated with each other. As an entrepreneur constantly aiming to simplify and scale my organization, it seemed like a dream come true on paper. Who wouldn’t want a solitary service that does it all?
Yet in this comprehensive GoHighLevel review, I’ll take you inside my dreadful journey of attempting (and failing) to switch to this prominent brand-new software. You’ll find out:
If you’re thinking about whether GoHighLevel is right for your very own business demands, with any luck you can pick up from my excruciating errors and pumped up assumptions.
Spoiler: I do NOT recommend GoHighLevel. If you require a CRM, begin with this listing of ideal CRMs rather. I make use of Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re looking for a sales, marketing, and project monitoring option to GoHighLevel, then here are a few we recommend.
Backstory: Why I Took Into Consideration Switching from Keap
To recognize what attracted me to GoHighLevel to begin with, you require context concerning my previous configuration. For over 5 years I had been happily depending on Keap (previously Infusionsoft) to fulfill all my customer management and automation requirements.
I found Keap user-friendly to make use of and it handled everything I required– CRM, e-mail marketing, sales funnels, membership sites, and client assistance.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are developed to aid small businesses maintain their clients while adding new ones effortlessly. Automate follow-ups with e-mails and messages, making certain leads and clients get the best messages at the right time. Usage site and social networks forms to improve lead follow-up, and manage your growth with easy consultation organizing and lead tracking. Boost sales with automated estimating, invoicing, and payment handling, freeing up your time. With Keap, local business can conserve 10 hours per week and rise profits by 39%. Beginning with a 14-day free trial, no credit card required.
Why we like Keap
Keap provides a detailed client partnership monitoring (CRM) and marketing automation solution tailored for small businesses and business owners. We value Keap’s concentrate on simplifying sales processes and nurturing client connections via effective automation tools. The system’s all-in-one approach combines CRM, email marketing, invoicing, and job administration, making it particularly attractive for businesses looking to combine their technology pile.
For the most part, it just functioned accurately with very little fuss or maintenance required. My open and click-through prices were excellent (like 35% great). Automations ran efficiently without any problems.
So why on earth was I tempted to uproot my whole operational structure from a system that functioned to try something unverified and untried?
In knowledge I can admit I got attracted by the siren call of “shiny object syndrome”. You recognize the sensation: when every person’s discussing a brand-new device that will reinvent your service … The grass typically looks greener beyond, and I wondered whether GoHighLevel may reduce friction factors that I would certainly discovered to tolerate throughout the years with Keap.
I resisted in the beginning, however a couple of even more stress led me to assume maybe it was time for a change.
The Investment: Moving My Firm to GoHighLevel
Previously this year I made a decision to take the plunge. I enrolled in HighLevel’s Agency plan at $297/month, investing significantly greater than the $97/month starter cost.
This wasn’t a decision I took lightly. I knew switching over systems was mosting likely to need moving all my Keap information and basically reconstructing my entire technology facilities from scratch using all of the GoHighLevel integrations readily available.
Here’s a summary of just some of the effort needed:
- Manually exporting 20,000+ email customer records
- Recreating loads of automations and workflows
- Relocating customer profiles, notes, and task data to the brand-new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe invoicing integration
- Setting up landing pages, coupons, and sales funnels throughout once more
- Learning a totally international UX and interface layout
Done in, I invested around 30-40 laborious hours of arrangement work transitioning everything over– and also handling lost productivity during the button.
But inevitably, it was a calculated financial investment I wanted to make. I figured some short-term discomfort would certainly repay with GoHighLevel offering a better long-term service for my service, Dripify. Oh how wrong I was …
It only took me concerning a month of hands-on usage to realize I had made a big mistake. The concerns began accumulating quickly, up until it reached a factor I needed to cut my losses and switch over back to Keap completely.
Let’s go through the horrible problems I ran into.
Security Issues & Several Vermin
Offered GoHighLevel placed itself as an all-in-one automation platform, I took care to meticulously recreate each and every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These consisted of sequences for onboarding brand-new email clients, onboarding brand-new clients, automating follow-ups for webinar enrollments, sending out event pointers, managing subscription expirations and much more.
Whatever seemed to be operating fine … till suddenly it had not been. One morning, I woke up to locate 171 totally unimportant emails had been sent out to users who must NOT have actually gotten them. This happened three days in a row, with a various set of 160 individuals every day.
I frantically tried fixing and reconstructing the automation from square one. But the trouble persisted.
When I desperately connected to their support team, they slightly declared “web server problems” were at fault. But this explanation didn’t make any kind of sense, considering that the errors proceeded happening each early morning like clockwork unassociated to any downtime.
In my mind, this substantial failure was completely inappropriate and simply really did not help my organization. I have thousands of get in touches with relying on my automated campaigns running efficiently.
So if GoHighLevel was going to be totally unreliable, exactly how could I entrust mission-critical workflows and sensitive customer information to their modern technology?
The unintuitive user interface just worsened these issues …
Irritating UX
Coming from Keap where every little thing was seamless and intuitive, GoHighLevel’s learning contour felt high and complex.
Easy jobs like editing workflows involved excavating through food selection systems that were all over the place. Key setups were unexplainably scattered in totally different areas. Relocating between features felt disjointed or complex.
I’ll tell you what I indicate by speaking about their funnel builder as an example. There were 3 separate settings panels to take care of total, individual, and product arrangements. Yet for some insane factor, the web links to access each of these core setups were spread out on contrary sides of the display. What!?
As a person that values tidy, thoughtful layout, this seriously annoyed me.
It enhanced that GoHighLevel still seemed like a work-in-progress instead of a sleek product ready for prime-time use. Their priorities seemed focused on stuffing in every feature imaginable, with bad functionality as a second thought.
And talking features, I quickly recognized the affordable price tag featured pricey concessions …
Misleading Pricing GoHighLevel IDX Integration
Among GoHighLevel’s most significant selling factors is the economical rate for access to numerous features. Yet I swiftly learned this low-cost base price was misleading.
They nickle-and-dimed customers with occasional fees for core capability. Unexpectedly my bank card statements had unclear $10 costs from GoHighLevel here and there.
As it turned out, you obtain billed every single time you send an email via their web servers. So for high quantity individuals, this added up to numerous dollars in unforeseen expenses.
Between these per-email charges and paying added for deliverability add-ons like Mailgun, my “budget-friendly” GoHighLevel registration ended up setting you back considerably MORE than my Keap plan.
The reduced sticker price was tempting, however just not realistic in practice. This bait-and-switch left a negative taste in my mouth.
Email Rates Suffered
The final dealbreaker was seeing my meticulously nurtured email open prices drop practically over night after switching to GoHighLevel.
Formerly, my audience involvement continually struck 35-40% open rates in Keap month after month. Once I migrated their records over to GoHighLevel, efficiency tanked instantly to a worthless 9% open rate.
Regardless of just how much I enhanced my sending out practices or attempted every troubleshooting trick, I might barely nudge open prices back into the teenagers– still a 50%+ decrease from my previous standards GoHighLevel IDX Integration.
Let me repeat: my exact same target market and e-mails all of a sudden had horrible engagement. The only thing I might think that would be creating this was whatever was taking place behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a company so depending on e-mail marketing, this was a big deal.
In between the debilitating deliverability problems, concealed costs, damaged features, and dreadful interface, I had lastly reached my restriction …
Why I Stop GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Simply 45 days after migrating my firm to GoHighLevel, I knew I had made a massive error. The disadvantages significantly outweighed any advantages.
No software program is excellent, however the sheer quantity of issues was past appropriate.
At the end of the day, software program boils down to count on. If I can not trust it to manage vital features effectively or think a supplier has my best interests in mind, after that it’s time to walk away– even after spending significant time, money, and effort moving.
So I made the challenging call to reverse program and return back to Keap completely simply weeks after going all in on GoHighLevel. Let’s discover what I gained from this ordeal.
Key Takeaways: What I Picked up from My GoHighLevel Error
My time with HighLevel can be summarized as a costly ill fortune. But in knowledge, it educated me a few vital lessons:
- Stay with what jobs. Don’t disturb what’s working unless something is definitively far better across the board. Modification brings threat.
- Veterinarian declares extensively. Marketing hype around brand-new software usually obscures larger underlying problems. Deep due diligence is crucial.
- Choose simpleness over features. Well-designed tools must make your job life much easier, not much more complex and untidy.
- Transparency builds count on. Nontransparent pricing, unethical reseller terms, and finger-pointing to avert troubles destroys trust.
- Seek honest evaluations. Delighted assistance reviews indicate less if excessive concerns suggest inadequate general usability.
- Perfection is impossible. No solitary service can perfectly fulfill every distinct business demand. Find the least-bad fit.
- Advancement over change. Incremental enhancements generally exceed dangerous wholesale reinvention of what currently functions penalty.
Simply put, I found out to be a lot more hesitant of “too good to be real” marketing claims and less tempted by the attraction of glossy brand-new objects. The devices you utilize daily need to gain trust fund with openness and efficiency, not slick advertising.