As an agency proprietor for over a years, I count on software program and automation to enhance operations and supply results. So when GoHighLevel arised on the scene few years back, it absolutely caught my interest GoHighLevel Incoming Calls.
The concept was enticing– an all-in-one customer monitoring system with marketing, sales, and service tools incorporated together. As an entrepreneur always wanting to simplify and scale my business, it appeared like a dream come true on paper. Who wouldn’t desire a solitary remedy that does it all?
However in this thorough GoHighLevel evaluation, I’ll take you inside my devastating trip of attempting (and failing) to change to this prominent brand-new software application. You’ll learn:
If you’re considering whether GoHighLevel is right for your own service needs, ideally you can pick up from my unpleasant mistakes and inflated assumptions.
Looter: I do NOT recommend GoHighLevel. If you need a CRM, start with this listing of best CRMs instead. I utilize Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re trying to find a sales, marketing, and task monitoring choice to GoHighLevel, after that below are a few we recommend.
Backstory: Why I Took Into Consideration Switching from Keap
To recognize what attracted me to GoHighLevel in the first place, you need context regarding my previous arrangement. For over 5 years I had actually been gladly counting on Keap (previously Infusionsoft) to fulfill all my client administration and automation requirements.
I found Keap intuitive to make use of and it dealt with every little thing I required– CRM, email marketing, sales funnels, membership websites, and customer support.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are created to assist local business maintain their customers while adding brand-new ones easily. Automate follow-ups with e-mails and texts, guaranteeing leads and customers get the right messages at the correct time. Use site and social networks types to improve lead follow-up, and manage your development with simple appointment organizing and lead monitoring. Boost sales with automated pricing estimate, invoicing, and payment processing, liberating your time. With Keap, local business can save 10 hours weekly and boost income by 39%. Beginning with a 14-day free trial, no credit card needed.
Why we like Keap
Keap uses an extensive customer partnership monitoring (CRM) and marketing automation service tailored for small businesses and entrepreneurs. We value Keap’s focus on enhancing sales procedures and nurturing consumer connections via effective automation devices. The platform’s all-in-one strategy combines CRM, e-mail marketing, invoicing, and job administration, making it particularly attractive for companies aiming to combine their technology stack.
Generally, it simply worked reliably with marginal difficulty or maintenance called for. My open and click-through prices were excellent (like 35% great). Automations ran efficiently with no concerns.
So why on earth was I attracted to uproot my entire functional structure from a system that functioned to try something unverified and untried?
In hindsight I can admit I got seduced by the siren call of “glossy object syndrome”. You recognize the feeling: when every person’s speaking about a brand-new tool that will revolutionize your business … The lawn often looks greener on the other side, and I wondered whether GoHighLevel might lower friction points that I would certainly discovered to endure for many years with Keap.
I resisted at first, but a few even more frustrations led me to believe possibly it was time for a modification.
The Financial investment: Moving My Firm to GoHighLevel
Previously this year I chose to take the plunge. I registered for HighLevel’s Firm plan at $297/month, spending considerably greater than the $97/month starter expense.
This had not been a decision I ignored. I knew changing systems was going to need migrating all my Keap information and essentially rebuilding my entire tech infrastructure from the ground up utilizing every one of the GoHighLevel integrations offered.
Here’s an introduction of just some of the initiative needed:
- By hand exporting 20,000+ e-mail subscriber records
- Recreating dozens of automations and workflows
- Relocating client profiles, notes, and job information to the brand-new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe payment integration
- Establishing landing pages, promotions, and sales funnels around once again
- Learning a totally foreign UX and interface design
Done in, I invested around 30-40 tedious hours of configuration work transitioning whatever over– as well as dealing with shed efficiency during the switch.
But inevitably, it was a computed investment I was willing to make. I figured some short-term pain would certainly repay with GoHighLevel offering a much better long-lasting option for my organization, Dripify. Oh how wrong I was …
It just took me concerning a month of hands-on use to recognize I had actually made a big mistake. The issues began piling up quickly, up until it reached a point I had to reduce my losses and switch back to Keap completely.
Let’s walk through the horrible problems I came across.
Safety Issues & Several Bugs
Offered GoHighLevel positioned itself as an all-in-one automation system, I made sure to diligently recreate each and every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These consisted of sequences for onboarding new email clients, onboarding brand-new clients, automating follow-ups for webinar enrollments, sending out occasion pointers, managing membership expiries and far more.
Whatever appeared to be operating penalty … until instantly it wasn’t. One morning, I awoke to find 171 totally unnecessary e-mails had been sent out to individuals who ought to NOT have gotten them. This happened three days straight, with a various set of 160 individuals each day.
I desperately tried troubleshooting and rebuilding the automation from scratch. But the problem lingered.
When I seriously connected to their support group, they vaguely asserted “server problems” were to blame. However this description really did not make any feeling, considering that the mistakes proceeded taking place each early morning like clockwork unassociated to any kind of downtime.
In my mind, this substantial failure was completely undesirable and just didn’t benefit my company. I have countless contacts depending on my automated campaigns running smoothly.
So if GoHighLevel was going to be entirely unreliable, just how could I hand over mission-critical workflows and delicate client information to their technology?
The unintuitive interface only worsened these issues …
Aggravating UX
Originating from Keap where whatever was smooth and user-friendly, GoHighLevel’s learning contour really felt steep and complicated.
Easy tasks like editing and enhancing workflows entailed digging through food selection systems that were all over the place. Key settings were unexplainably spread in totally different areas. Moving in between functions felt disjointed or complicated.
I’ll tell you what I imply by talking about their funnel builder as an instance. There were 3 different setups panels to handle general, private, and item configurations. Yet for some crazy factor, the links to accessibility each of these core settings were spread out on opposite sides of the screen. What!?
As somebody who values tidy, thoughtful style, this seriously upset me.
It reinforced that GoHighLevel still felt like a work-in-progress as opposed to a sleek item all set for prime-time usage. Their top priorities appeared focused on stuffing in every feature under the sun, with poor use as an afterthought.
And talking features, I soon understood the small cost tag featured costly compromises …
Misleading Pricing GoHighLevel Incoming Calls
Among GoHighLevel’s greatest marketing factors is the economical price for accessibility to numerous features. Yet I quickly learned this low-cost base cost was misleading.
They nickle-and-dimed individuals with occasional fees for core capability. All of a sudden my credit card declarations had obscure $10 costs from GoHighLevel occasionally.
As it ended up, you obtain billed whenever you send out an email with their servers. So for high volume users, this amounted to thousands of dollars in unexpected costs.
Between these per-email fees and paying additional for deliverability add-ons like Mailgun, my “economical” GoHighLevel registration ended up costing substantially MORE than my Keap plan.
The reduced sticker price was tempting, however simply not reasonable in practice. This bait-and-switch left a bad preference in my mouth.
Email Rates Suffered
The final dealbreaker was seeing my meticulously nurtured email open rates drop practically overnight after switching to GoHighLevel.
Previously, my audience interaction continually struck 35-40% open prices in Keap month after month. Once I moved their documents over to GoHighLevel, performance tanked promptly to a useless 9% open rate.
No matter just how much I maximized my sending out methods or attempted every troubleshooting method, I might hardly nudge open prices back into the teens– still a 50%+ decline from my previous benchmarks GoHighLevel Incoming Calls.
Let me repeat: my exact same target market and emails instantly had dreadful involvement. The only thing I could believe that would be triggering this was whatever was occurring behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a company so depending on e-mail marketing, this was a big deal.
In between the crippling deliverability problems, hidden fees, damaged features, and terrible interface, I had ultimately reached my limit …
Why I Stop GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Simply 45 days after migrating my firm to GoHighLevel, I recognized I had made a big blunder. The disadvantages considerably exceeded any kind of advantages.
No software is excellent, yet the sheer quantity of problems was beyond acceptable.
At the end of the day, software program boils down to count on. If I can not trust it to handle critical functions competently or think a vendor has my benefits in mind, after that it’s time to leave– also after spending considerable time, money, and effort moving.
So I made the difficult call to reverse course and return back to Keap completely just weeks after going done in on GoHighLevel. Let’s explore what I learned from this ordeal.
Key Takeaways: What I Learned From My GoHighLevel Blunder
My time with HighLevel can be summed up as a pricey accident. Yet in knowledge, it taught me a few key lessons:
- Stick to what works. Don’t disturb what’s functioning unless something is definitively better across the board. Change brings danger.
- Veterinarian claims thoroughly. Marketing buzz around new software often obscures bigger underlying problems. Deep due diligence is important.
- Select simplicity over features. Properly designed tools should make your work life much easier, not extra complicated and unpleasant.
- Transparency develops trust fund. Opaque pricing, questionable reseller terms, and finger-pointing to escape troubles ruins trust.
- Look for objective testimonials. Happy support reviews suggest less if extreme concerns suggest inadequate total usability.
- Excellence is difficult. No single service can perfectly meet every distinct business need. Locate the least-bad fit.
- Development over transformation. Incremental renovations commonly surpass risky wholesale reinvention of what already works fine.
In short, I found out to be extra skeptical of “too good to be true” marketing cases and much less lured by the appeal of shiny new objects. The devices you make use of daily need to gain trust fund through openness and efficiency, not glossy advertising.