As a company proprietor for over a decade, I depend on software application and automation to improve operations and provide results. So when GoHighLevel emerged on the scene couple of years back, it most definitely captured my focus GoHighLevel Integrations.
The idea was attractive– an all-in-one customer monitoring system with marketing, sales, and service tools integrated with each other. As an entrepreneur constantly wanting to streamline and scale my business, it appeared like a dream come to life on paper. Who would not want a solitary service that does it all?
However in this thorough GoHighLevel testimonial, I’ll take you inside my dreadful trip of attempting (and stopping working) to switch over to this preferred new software program. You’ll learn:
If you’re considering whether GoHighLevel is right for your own business needs, ideally you can learn from my uncomfortable blunders and inflated assumptions.
Spoiler: I do NOT suggest GoHighLevel. If you need a CRM, begin with this list of best CRMs instead. I use Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re searching for a sales, marketing, and task monitoring choice to GoHighLevel, after that here are a couple of we advise.
Backstory: Why I Thought About Changing from Keap
To recognize what attracted me to GoHighLevel in the first place, you need context regarding my previous setup. For over 5 years I had actually been happily relying on Keap (previously Infusionsoft) to meet all my customer 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, subscription websites, and client assistance.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are developed to help small companies maintain their customers while adding brand-new ones effortlessly. Automate follow-ups with e-mails and texts, making sure leads and customers obtain the ideal messages at the correct time. Use website and social media types to improve lead follow-up, and handle your growth with very easy visit scheduling and lead monitoring. Boost sales with automated estimating, invoicing, and settlement processing, liberating your time. With Keap, small companies can save 10 hours per week and boost revenue by 39%. Start with a 14-day free trial, no charge card required.
Why we like Keap
Keap supplies an extensive consumer relationship administration (CRM) and marketing automation remedy tailored for small companies and business owners. We appreciate Keap’s focus on streamlining sales processes and nurturing client connections with effective automation tools. The platform’s all-in-one approach incorporates CRM, e-mail marketing, invoicing, and job monitoring, making it especially attractive for organizations wanting to combine their technology stack.
Generally, it simply functioned reliably with marginal difficulty or maintenance required. My open and click-through rates were fantastic (like 35% excellent). Automations ran smoothly without concerns.
So why in the world was I attracted to uproot my entire functional foundation from a system that functioned to attempt something unverified and untested?
In hindsight I can confess I obtained seduced by the alarm call of “shiny object disorder”. You know the feeling: when everyone’s discussing a brand-new device that will certainly reinvent your company … The turf commonly looks greener beyond, and I asked yourself whether GoHighLevel might lower friction points that I would certainly learned to tolerate over the years with Keap.
I withstood at first, however a few more irritations led me to assume maybe it was time for an adjustment.
The Financial investment: Moving My Company to GoHighLevel
Previously this year I determined to start. I registered for HighLevel’s Agency plan at $297/month, spending significantly more than the $97/month starter expense.
This wasn’t a decision I took lightly. I knew switching over systems was mosting likely to need migrating all my Keap information and essentially restoring my whole technology infrastructure from the ground up making use of all of the GoHighLevel integrations available.
Right here’s a review of simply some of the initiative required:
- Manually exporting 20,000+ email subscriber records
- Recreating loads of automations and workflows
- Relocating customer profiles, notes, and job information to the brand-new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe invoicing integration
- Establishing landing pages, discounts, and sales funnels throughout once more
- Learning an entirely foreign UX and user interface style
All in, I invested around 30-40 tedious hours of configuration work transitioning every little thing 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 temporary discomfort would settle with GoHighLevel supplying a better lasting service for my service, Dripify. Oh just how wrong I was …
It only took me concerning a month of hands-on usage to recognize I had actually made a big blunder. The concerns started accumulating swiftly, till it got to a point I had to cut my losses and switch back to Keap totally.
Let’s go through the nightmarish problems I ran into.
Safety And Security Issues & Lots of Vermin
Provided GoHighLevel placed itself as an all-in-one automation system, I made sure to diligently recreate every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These consisted of series for onboarding brand-new email clients, onboarding brand-new clients, automating follow-ups for webinar enrollments, sending out occasion pointers, handling membership expirations and a lot more.
Whatever seemed to be operating fine … until unexpectedly it wasn’t. One early morning, I woke up to find 171 totally pointless e-mails had been sent out to users that must NOT have actually received them. This took place three days straight, with a various set of 160 people daily.
I anxiously attempted repairing and rebuilding the automation from scratch. But the issue continued.
When I seriously reached out to their support team, they slightly declared “server issues” were at fault. However this explanation didn’t make any type of feeling, considering that the errors proceeded taking place each early morning like clockwork unassociated to any kind of downtime.
In my mind, this large failing was completely unacceptable and simply didn’t benefit my business. I have countless contacts depending on my automated campaigns running efficiently.
So if GoHighLevel was going to be totally unreliable, exactly how could I entrust mission-critical workflows and delicate client data to their technology?
The unintuitive interface only intensified these concerns …
Frustrating UX
Originating from Keap where everything was smooth and user-friendly, GoHighLevel’s learning curve felt steep and difficult.
Basic jobs like modifying workflows entailed excavating with menu systems that were all over the place. Trick setups were unexplainably scattered in entirely different sections. Relocating between functions really felt disjointed or confusing.
I’ll inform you what I indicate by speaking about their funnel builder as an instance. There were 3 different setups panels to take care of total, private, and product configurations. Yet for some crazy reason, the links to gain access to each of these core setups were expanded on opposite sides of the screen. What!?
As someone who values tidy, thoughtful style, this seriously frustrated me.
It strengthened that GoHighLevel still seemed like a work-in-progress as opposed to a sleek item prepared for prime-time use. Their concerns seemed concentrated on packing in every feature under the sun, with inadequate usability as an afterthought.
And speaking of features, I soon recognized the low cost tag came with pricey compromises …
Misleading Pricing GoHighLevel Integrations
One of GoHighLevel’s biggest marketing points is the cost effective price for accessibility to so many features. Yet I promptly discovered this economical base price was deceptive.
They nickle-and-dimed individuals with erratic charges for core capability. All of a sudden my bank card statements had unclear $10 costs from GoHighLevel here and there.
As it turned out, you get billed whenever you send out an e-mail through their web servers. So for high quantity individuals, this amounted to numerous dollars in unforeseen costs.
Between these per-email fees and paying extra for deliverability attachments like Mailgun, my “budget-friendly” GoHighLevel registration ended up setting you back dramatically MORE than my Keap plan.
The low sticker price was tempting, yet just not sensible in practice. This bait-and-switch left a negative taste in my mouth.
Email Rates Suffered
The final dealbreaker was seeing my very carefully nurtured e-mail open rates plummet practically overnight after changing to GoHighLevel.
Formerly, my audience interaction constantly struck 35-40% open prices in Keap month after month. Once I moved their documents over to GoHighLevel, efficiency tanked instantaneously to a worthless 9% open rate.
Regardless of just how much I maximized my sending practices or tried every fixing trick, I could hardly push open rates back right into the teens– still a 50%+ decline from my previous standards GoHighLevel Integrations.
Let me repeat: my exact same audience and e-mails instantly had awful engagement. The only thing I can think that would certainly be triggering this was whatever was taking place behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For an agency so based on e-mail marketing, this was a big deal.
Between the crippling deliverability issues, concealed charges, broken features, and terrible interface, I had actually finally reached my limit …
Why I Stop GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Simply 45 days after moving my company to GoHighLevel, I knew I had made a huge mistake. The disadvantages substantially exceeded any kind of advantages.
No software is best, however the large quantity of problems was beyond acceptable.
At the end of the day, software comes down to trust. If I can’t trust it to deal with crucial functions competently or believe a supplier has my benefits in mind, then it’s time to walk away– also after investing significant time, money, and effort moving.
So I made the hard contact us to turn around program and return back to Keap totally just weeks after going all in on GoHighLevel. Let’s discover what I picked up from this fiasco.
Key Takeaways: What I Learned From My GoHighLevel Error
My time with HighLevel can be summed up as a pricey ill fortune. Yet in hindsight, it showed me a few essential lessons:
- Stick to what works. Do not distress what’s working unless something is definitively better across the board. Adjustment brings danger.
- Veterinarian claims thoroughly. Marketing hype around brand-new software typically covers larger underlying defects. Deep due diligence is vital.
- Choose simplicity over features. Well-designed tools should make your job life simpler, not more complicated and messy.
- Transparency constructs count on. Nontransparent pricing, unethical reseller terms, and finger-pointing to avert troubles destroys trust.
- Seek impartial testimonials. Satisfied support assesses suggest less if extreme concerns indicate bad overall use.
- Excellence is difficult. No solitary solution can perfectly satisfy every special business need. Discover the least-bad fit.
- Advancement over change. Incremental renovations typically surpass risky wholesale reinvention of what already works fine.
Simply put, I found out to be a lot more hesitant of “also good to be true” marketing claims and much less tempted by the appeal of glossy brand-new objects. The devices you utilize daily need to make count on via transparency and efficiency, not glossy advertising.