As a firm owner for over a years, I rely upon software and automation to simplify operations and supply results. So when GoHighLevel emerged on the scene few years back, it certainly captured my interest GoHighLevel Initializing.
The idea was attractive– an all-in-one customer management system with marketing, sales, and solution devices incorporated with each other. As a business owner always looking to simplify and scale my company, it looked like a dream come true on paper. That would not want a solitary solution that does it all?
Yet in this thorough GoHighLevel review, I’ll take you inside my devastating trip of attempting (and falling short) to switch over to this preferred brand-new software application. You’ll discover:
If you’re thinking about whether GoHighLevel is right for your own organization needs, ideally you can learn from my painful blunders and inflated assumptions.
Spoiler: I do NOT recommend GoHighLevel. If you require a CRM, begin with this checklist of best CRMs instead. I use Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re looking for a sales, marketing, and task administration option to GoHighLevel, after that here are a couple of we advise.
Backstory: Why I Considered Switching from Keap
To comprehend what attracted me to GoHighLevel to begin with, you require context concerning my previous configuration. For over 5 years I had been gladly relying on Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) to meet all my client management and automation requirements.
I found Keap intuitive to make use of and it handled whatever I required– CRM, e-mail marketing, sales funnels, membership websites, and customer support.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are made to assist small companies keep their clients while including new ones effortlessly. Automate follow-ups with emails and messages, making certain leads and customers obtain the best messages at the correct time. Usage internet site and social networks types to simplify lead follow-up, and manage your development with very easy consultation scheduling and lead tracking. Boost sales with automated pricing quote, invoicing, and settlement handling, freeing up your time. With Keap, small companies can save 10 hours per week and boost earnings by 39%. Start with a 14-day free trial, no bank card required.
Why we like Keap
Keap offers a thorough customer connection management (CRM) and marketing automation service customized for small companies and business owners. We value Keap’s focus on simplifying sales processes and nurturing customer partnerships through powerful automation devices. The platform’s all-in-one strategy incorporates CRM, email marketing, invoicing, and job monitoring, making it especially attractive for services wanting to settle their technology pile.
For the most part, it simply worked reliably with marginal hassle or maintenance needed. My open and click-through rates were excellent (like 35% wonderful). Automations ran efficiently without any issues.
So why in the world was I attracted to uproot my entire functional structure from a system that worked to try something unverified and untried?
In hindsight I can admit I obtained seduced by the siren call of “glossy item disorder”. You know the feeling: when every person’s talking about a brand-new device that will change your service … The turf typically looks greener beyond, and I asked yourself whether GoHighLevel might reduce friction points that I would certainly learned to tolerate for many years with Keap.
I stood up to at first, but a couple of even more aggravations led me to think maybe it was time for a modification.
The Financial investment: Migrating My Agency to GoHighLevel
Previously this year I determined to start. I signed up for HighLevel’s Agency plan at $297/month, spending significantly more than the $97/month starter expense.
This wasn’t a choice I took lightly. I understood switching over platforms was going to call for migrating all my Keap data and basically rebuilding my whole technology infrastructure from square one utilizing all of the GoHighLevel integrations readily available.
Right here’s an overview of just some of the initiative required:
- By hand exporting 20,000+ e-mail customer documents
- Recreating loads of automations and workflows
- Moving client profiles, notes, and job data to the brand-new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe invoicing integration
- Setting up landing pages, coupons, and sales funnels all over once more
- Learning a totally foreign UX and interface design
All in, I invested around 30-40 laborious hours of arrangement work transitioning every little thing over– not to mention handling shed performance during the switch.
However inevitably, it was a computed investment I agreed to make. I figured some temporary pain would certainly pay off with GoHighLevel offering a better long-term service for my service, Dripify. Oh just how wrong I was …
It only took me concerning a month of hands-on use to realize I had actually made a large mistake. The concerns began accumulating rapidly, up until it got to a factor I needed to cut my losses and switch over back to Keap completely.
Let’s go through the nightmarish troubles I ran into.
Safety Issues & Several Vermin
Provided GoHighLevel positioned itself as an all-in-one automation system, I made sure to thoroughly recreate each and every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These included series for onboarding new e-mail subscribers, onboarding brand-new customers, automating follow-ups for webinar registrations, sending event reminders, managing subscription expirations and a lot more.
Everything seemed to be working fine … till instantly it wasn’t. One early morning, I woke up to discover 171 entirely unimportant emails had actually been sent out to individuals that need to NOT have actually gotten them. This took place 3 days straight, with a various batch of 160 individuals every day.
I desperately attempted repairing and rebuilding the automation from the ground up. However the issue persisted.
When I seriously reached out to their assistance team, they slightly declared “web server concerns” were at fault. Yet this explanation didn’t make any kind of feeling, since the errors proceeded taking place each early morning like clockwork unassociated to any kind of downtime.
In my mind, this substantial failure was entirely undesirable and just really did not benefit my organization. I have hundreds of contacts counting on my automated campaigns running efficiently.
So if GoHighLevel was going to be completely undependable, how could I entrust mission-critical workflows and delicate client information to their modern technology?
The unintuitive user interface just compounded these concerns …
Frustrating UX
Coming from Keap where everything was seamless and user-friendly, GoHighLevel’s learning curve felt high and challenging.
Basic tasks like modifying workflows involved digging with food selection systems that were all over the place. Trick setups were unexplainably scattered in entirely various sections. Relocating between functions felt disjointed or complex.
I’ll inform you what I indicate by speaking about their funnel builder as an example. There were 3 separate settings panels to take care of overall, individual, and item setups. Yet for some crazy reason, the web links to access each of these core setups were spread out on opposite sides of the display. What!?
As a person that values tidy, thoughtful design, this seriously upset me.
It reinforced that GoHighLevel still felt like a work-in-progress as opposed to a sleek product all set for prime-time use. Their top priorities appeared focused on packing in every feature under the sun, with poor use as a second thought.
And speaking of features, I soon understood the low cost tag came with costly compromises …
Deceptive Pricing GoHighLevel Initializing
One of GoHighLevel’s largest selling points is the cost effective cost for access to a lot of features. However I rapidly discovered this cheap base cost was deceptive.
They nickle-and-dimed customers with occasional costs for core performance. Suddenly my charge card statements had obscure $10 fees from GoHighLevel here and there.
As it ended up, you obtain charged whenever you send out an email through their web servers. So for high quantity customers, this amounted to numerous dollars in unexpected costs.
In between these per-email fees and paying extra for deliverability attachments like Mailgun, my “budget friendly” GoHighLevel subscription ended up setting you back dramatically MORE than my Keap plan.
The low price tag was alluring, but simply not sensible in practice. This bait-and-switch left a negative taste in my mouth.
Email Fees Suffered
The final dealbreaker was seeing my carefully nurtured e-mail open prices plummet almost overnight after switching to GoHighLevel.
Formerly, my audience involvement regularly hit 35-40% open rates in Keap month after month. But once I migrated their records over to GoHighLevel, performance tanked immediately to a worthless 9% open price.
Despite just how much I maximized my sending out methods or tried every repairing trick, I can hardly nudge open rates back into the teenagers– still a 50%+ decline from my previous criteria GoHighLevel Initializing.
Let me repeat: my exact same target market and e-mails unexpectedly had dreadful engagement. The only thing I might believe that would certainly be causing this was whatever was happening behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a company so dependent on email marketing, this was a big deal.
Between the debilitating deliverability issues, hidden costs, damaged features, and dreadful user interface, I had ultimately reached my restriction …
Why I Stop GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Just 45 days after migrating my firm to GoHighLevel, I understood I had actually made a substantial mistake. The cons dramatically exceeded any benefits.
No software is best, however the large quantity of problems was past appropriate.
At the end of the day, software application comes down to depend on. If I can’t trust it to take care of essential features capably or believe a supplier has my benefits in mind, then it’s time to leave– even after spending considerable time, money, and effort migrating.
So I made the challenging call to turn around course and return back to Keap entirely simply weeks after going done in on GoHighLevel. Allow’s explore what I learned from this ordeal.
Trick Takeaways: What I Learned From My GoHighLevel Mistake
My time with HighLevel can be summarized as an expensive accident. However in knowledge, it educated me a few essential lessons:
- Stick to what works. Do not distress what’s functioning unless something is definitively much better across the board. Change brings threat.
- Veterinarian claims extensively. Marketing buzz around brand-new software application commonly obscures larger underlying problems. Deep due diligence is essential.
- Pick simpleness over features. Properly designed devices must make your job life much easier, not much more complex and untidy.
- Openness develops count on. Opaque pricing, dubious reseller terms, and finger-pointing to evade troubles ruins trust.
- Seek honest reviews. Pleased assistance reviews suggest much less if too much concerns imply poor total functionality.
- Excellence is difficult. No single remedy can flawlessly fulfill every unique company requirement. Find the least-bad fit.
- Evolution over change. Incremental enhancements generally surpass risky wholesale reinvention of what already works penalty.
Basically, I discovered to be a lot more cynical of “too excellent to be real” marketing cases and less tempted by the appeal of shiny new items. The devices you make use of daily ought to earn trust fund through openness and efficiency, not slick advertising.