As an agency owner for over a years, I rely upon software application and automation to enhance procedures and supply results. So when GoHighLevel arised on the scene couple of years back, it most definitely caught my attention GoHighLevel Image Slider.
The idea was enticing– an all-in-one client monitoring system with marketing, sales, and solution tools incorporated together. As an entrepreneur constantly aiming to simplify and scale my service, it seemed like a dream come to life theoretically. That would not desire a single option that does it all?
But in this in-depth GoHighLevel review, I’ll take you inside my devastating journey of attempting (and stopping working) to change to this prominent new software application. You’ll find out:
If you’re considering whether GoHighLevel is right for your very own company demands, ideally you can gain from my excruciating mistakes and inflated assumptions.
Looter: I do NOT suggest GoHighLevel. If you require a CRM, begin with this checklist of best CRMs rather. I use Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re looking for a sales, marketing, and project administration choice to GoHighLevel, after that right here are a couple of we recommend.
Backstory: Why I Took Into Consideration Switching Over from Keap
To comprehend what attracted me to GoHighLevel to begin with, you need context regarding my previous arrangement. For over 5 years I had actually been gladly relying on Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) to satisfy all my customer administration and automation requirements.
I discovered Keap intuitive to use and it dealt with whatever I needed– CRM, e-mail marketing, sales funnels, subscription sites, and client assistance.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are made to help local business maintain their customers while including new ones effortlessly. Automate follow-ups with emails and messages, ensuring leads and clients receive the best messages at the correct time. Usage web site and social networks types to enhance lead follow-up, and manage your development with easy appointment organizing and lead monitoring. Boost sales with automated pricing quote, invoicing, and payment handling, maximizing your time. With Keap, local business can conserve 10 hours per week and rise income by 39%. Begin with a 14-day free trial, no charge card called for.
Why we like Keap
Keap offers a thorough customer relationship management (CRM) and marketing automation remedy tailored for small companies and entrepreneurs. We value Keap’s focus on streamlining sales procedures and nurturing consumer connections via effective automation devices. The platform’s all-in-one approach incorporates CRM, email marketing, invoicing, and task monitoring, making it especially appealing for companies wanting to combine their technology pile.
For the most part, it simply worked accurately with marginal difficulty or maintenance called for. My open and click-through prices were fantastic (like 35% fantastic). Automations ran efficiently with no problems.
So why on earth was I lured to uproot my entire functional foundation from a system that functioned to attempt something unverified and untried?
In knowledge I can confess I obtained seduced by the siren call of “glossy things disorder”. You know the sensation: when everyone’s talking about a brand-new tool that will revolutionize your organization … The yard usually looks greener beyond, and I wondered whether GoHighLevel might reduce rubbing factors that I ‘d learned to endure for many years with Keap.
I stood up to in the beginning, yet a couple of more disappointments led me to assume maybe it was time for a change.
The Financial investment: Migrating My Company to GoHighLevel
Earlier this year I made a decision to start. I enrolled in HighLevel’s Firm plan at $297/month, investing substantially greater than the $97/month starter cost.
This wasn’t a choice I ignored. I knew changing platforms was mosting likely to need moving all my Keap data and basically reconstructing my entire technology framework from the ground up utilizing all of the GoHighLevel integrations offered.
Here’s an introduction of just a few of the effort needed:
- By hand exporting 20,000+ email subscriber records
- Recreating dozens of automations and workflows
- Moving customer accounts, notes, and job information to the new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe billing integration
- Setting up landing pages, discounts, and sales funnels throughout again
- Learning an entirely international UX and user interface design
Done in, I spent around 30-40 tiresome hours of arrangement work transitioning whatever over– in addition to managing lost productivity during the switch.
However ultimately, it was a computed investment I was willing to make. I figured some temporary discomfort would pay off with GoHighLevel offering a far better long-lasting option for my company, Dripify. Oh just how incorrect I was …
It only took me regarding a month of hands-on use to understand I had actually made a big error. The concerns began piling up rapidly, up until it got to a point I had to reduce my losses and change back to Keap completely.
Allow’s walk through the nightmarish troubles I came across.
Protection Issues & Many Bugs
Provided GoHighLevel positioned itself as an all-in-one automation system, I took care to carefully recreate every workflow from my old Keap account.
These consisted of sequences for onboarding new e-mail customers, onboarding brand-new clients, automating follow-ups for webinar registrations, sending occasion pointers, taking care of membership expiries and a lot more.
Every little thing seemed to be operating penalty … up until all of a sudden it wasn’t. One early morning, I woke up to find 171 totally pointless e-mails had been sent out to individuals that need to NOT have actually received them. This happened three days straight, with a various set of 160 people daily.
I desperately tried troubleshooting and restoring the automation from the ground up. However the issue continued.
When I seriously reached out to their support team, they vaguely claimed “server issues” were responsible. Yet this explanation didn’t make any feeling, given that the errors proceeded occurring each early morning like clockwork unrelated to any kind of downtime.
In my mind, this huge failure was totally inappropriate and simply really did not help my service. I have thousands of contacts depending on my automated campaigns running efficiently.
So if GoHighLevel was mosting likely to be absolutely undependable, exactly how could I turn over mission-critical workflows and delicate customer data to their modern technology?
The unintuitive interface just worsened these issues …
Frustrating UX
Originating from Keap where every little thing was smooth and instinctive, GoHighLevel’s learning curve felt steep and complex.
Easy jobs like editing and enhancing workflows included digging through food selection systems that were all over the place. Key setups were unexplainably spread in entirely various sections. Moving in between features felt disjointed or confusing.
I’ll inform you what I indicate by discussing their funnel builder as an example. There were 3 different settings panels to take care of overall, individual, and item configurations. Yet for some crazy factor, the web links to accessibility each of these core settings were spread out on opposite sides of the screen. What!?
As a person that values clean, thoughtful style, this seriously irritated me.
It reinforced that GoHighLevel still seemed like a work-in-progress instead of a polished item prepared for prime-time use. Their priorities appeared focused on packing in every feature under the sun, with poor use as an afterthought.
And speaking of features, I soon understood the affordable price tag featured expensive compromises …
Misleading Pricing GoHighLevel Image Slider
Among GoHighLevel’s biggest marketing factors is the budget friendly price for accessibility to so many features. Yet I rapidly learned this inexpensive base expense was deceitful.
They nickle-and-dimed customers with occasional costs for core performance. Instantly my bank card statements had obscure $10 fees from GoHighLevel occasionally.
As it turned out, you obtain charged each time you send an e-mail through their web servers. So for high quantity individuals, this amounted to thousands of bucks in unforeseen prices.
In between these per-email costs and paying added for deliverability add-ons like Mailgun, my “cost effective” GoHighLevel registration wound up setting you back dramatically MORE than my Keap plan.
The reduced sticker price was tempting, but simply not practical in practice. This bait-and-switch left a poor taste in my mouth.
Email Fees Suffered
The final dealbreaker was seeing my very carefully nurtured email open rates plunge nearly overnight after switching to GoHighLevel.
Formerly, my audience interaction consistently struck 35-40% open prices in Keap month after month. Once I migrated their documents over to GoHighLevel, performance tanked promptly to a worthless 9% open rate.
No matter how much I maximized my sending out practices or attempted every fixing trick, I might hardly push open prices back right into the teens– still a 50%+ decline from my previous standards GoHighLevel Image Slider.
Let me repeat: my exact same audience and e-mails instantly had horrible involvement. The only thing I could think that would be creating this was whatever was occurring behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a firm so depending on email marketing, this was a big deal.
In between the debilitating deliverability issues, hidden costs, broken features, and terrible user interface, I had finally reached my limit …
Why I Quit GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Simply 45 days after migrating my company to GoHighLevel, I recognized I had made a substantial mistake. The cons significantly exceeded any advantages.
No software is ideal, but the sheer volume of problems was past appropriate.
At the end of the day, software application comes down to trust. If I can’t trust it to deal with important functions competently or think a supplier has my best interests in mind, then it’s time to leave– also after spending substantial time, money, and initiative moving.
So I made the difficult contact us to reverse training course and return back to Keap totally simply weeks after going done in on GoHighLevel. Let’s discover what I learned from this debacle.
Secret Takeaways: What I Gained from My GoHighLevel Error
My time with HighLevel can be summarized as a costly accident. However in hindsight, it instructed me a couple of essential lessons:
- Adhere to what works. Don’t disturb what’s working unless something is definitively better across the board. Modification brings risk.
- Vet asserts thoroughly. Marketing buzz around new software commonly covers bigger underlying problems. Deep due diligence is vital.
- Pick simplicity over features. Properly designed devices should make your work life less complicated, not a lot more complicated and unpleasant.
- Transparency develops trust. Nontransparent pricing, unethical reseller terms, and finger-pointing to evade problems destroys trust fund.
- Seek impartial evaluations. Delighted assistance examines indicate much less if excessive issues indicate bad total usability.
- Excellence is impossible. No solitary remedy can perfectly fulfill every distinct service demand. Discover the least-bad fit.
- Development over revolution. Step-by-step renovations normally surpass dangerous wholesale reinvention of what already works penalty.
In short, I found out to be much more cynical of “too excellent to be real” marketing insurance claims and less attracted by the allure of glossy brand-new items. The devices you use daily must gain trust via openness and efficiency, not glossy advertising.