As a firm owner for over a decade, I count on software application and automation to simplify procedures and supply results. So when GoHighLevel arised on the scene couple of years back, it definitely caught my focus GoHighLevel Internationalization.
The idea was attractive– an all-in-one client management system with marketing, sales, and service tools integrated together. As an entrepreneur always looking to simplify and scale my business, it appeared like a desire come to life theoretically. That wouldn’t desire a single service that does it all?
However in this extensive GoHighLevel evaluation, I’ll take you inside my disastrous journey of trying (and failing) to switch to this preferred new software application. You’ll discover:
If you’re thinking about whether GoHighLevel is right for your own service needs, with any luck you can learn from my painful errors and pumped up expectations.
Looter: I do NOT advise GoHighLevel. If you require a CRM, start with this listing of finest CRMs rather. I use Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re searching for a sales, marketing, and task administration alternative to GoHighLevel, after that below are a few 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 been gladly depending on Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) to satisfy all my customer administration and automation needs.
I found Keap user-friendly to use and it handled whatever I required– CRM, e-mail marketing, sales funnels, subscription websites, and customer support.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are created to aid small businesses maintain their clients while adding new ones easily. Automate follow-ups with e-mails and texts, ensuring leads and clients obtain the ideal messages at the right time. Usage website and social networks kinds to improve lead follow-up, and handle your development with easy consultation organizing and lead tracking. Boost sales with automated pricing estimate, invoicing, and settlement handling, freeing up your time. With Keap, small companies can conserve 10 hours weekly and rise profits by 39%. Begin with a 14-day free trial, no charge card called for.
Why we like Keap
Keap uses a detailed consumer partnership monitoring (CRM) and marketing automation solution customized for small businesses and entrepreneurs. We value Keap’s focus on simplifying sales procedures and nurturing client partnerships through powerful automation devices. The system’s all-in-one strategy combines CRM, e-mail marketing, invoicing, and task monitoring, making it particularly appealing for companies looking to consolidate their tech stack.
Essentially, it just worked accurately with marginal fuss or upkeep required. My open and click-through prices were excellent (like 35% fantastic). Automations ran efficiently with no 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 confess I got attracted by the siren call of “shiny item disorder”. You understand the feeling: when every person’s speaking about a new tool that will certainly change your company … The grass often looks greener on the other side, and I asked yourself whether GoHighLevel might decrease friction points that I would certainly learned to tolerate throughout the years with Keap.
I withstood initially, however a couple of more aggravations led me to believe perhaps it was time for a change.
The Financial investment: Moving My Agency to GoHighLevel
Earlier this year I made a decision to start. I enrolled in HighLevel’s Firm plan at $297/month, investing substantially more than the $97/month starter cost.
This had not been a decision I ignored. I knew switching over platforms was going to require migrating all my Keap information and essentially reconstructing my whole tech infrastructure from the ground up utilizing every one of the GoHighLevel integrations readily available.
Below’s a review of just several of the effort required:
- Manually exporting 20,000+ email client records
- Recreating lots of automations and workflows
- Relocating customer accounts, notes, and task data to the brand-new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe invoicing integration
- Setting up landing pages, promotions, and sales funnels all over again
- Learning a totally international UX and user interface layout
Done in, I invested around 30-40 laborious hours of configuration job transitioning whatever over– in addition to handling shed performance throughout the button.
But inevitably, it was a calculated investment I wanted to make. I figured some temporary discomfort would certainly repay with GoHighLevel giving a much better lasting service for my service, Dripify. Oh how wrong I was …
It just took me regarding a month of hands-on usage to recognize I had actually made a large mistake. The concerns began piling up quickly, until it got to a factor I had to reduce my losses and change back to Keap completely.
Allow’s go through the nightmarish issues I came across.
Safety Issues & Lots of Bugs
Given 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 brand-new e-mail customers, onboarding new clients, automating follow-ups for webinar registrations, sending out occasion reminders, taking care of membership expirations and a lot more.
Everything seemed to be functioning penalty … up until suddenly it wasn’t. One morning, I woke up to find 171 entirely unimportant emails had been sent out to individuals who ought to NOT have obtained them. This occurred three days straight, with a different set of 160 people each day.
I frantically tried repairing and restoring the automation from scratch. But the issue lingered.
When I desperately connected to their support team, they slightly asserted “web server problems” were at fault. However this description didn’t make any type of sense, given that the mistakes continued taking place each morning like clockwork unconnected to any type of downtime.
In my mind, this massive failing was totally inappropriate and just really did not benefit my business. I have countless contacts depending on my automated campaigns running efficiently.
So if GoHighLevel was mosting likely to be totally unstable, just how could I hand over mission-critical workflows and sensitive client data to their innovation?
The unintuitive user interface only compounded these concerns …
Frustrating UX
Coming from Keap where every little thing was seamless and intuitive, GoHighLevel’s learning curve felt high and complex.
Straightforward jobs like editing and enhancing workflows included excavating with food selection systems that were all over the place. Key setups were unexplainably scattered in totally different sections. Relocating in between functions really felt disjointed or complicated.
I’ll inform you what I mean by discussing their funnel builder as an example. There were 3 separate setups panels to take care of total, specific, and item setups. Yet for some crazy factor, the links to access each of these core settings were expanded on opposite sides of the display. What!?
As a person who values tidy, thoughtful layout, this seriously irritated me.
It strengthened that GoHighLevel still felt like a work-in-progress instead of a refined product ready for prime-time usage. Their concerns seemed focused on cramming in every feature imaginable, with poor usability as a second thought.
And speaking of features, I soon understood the low price tag came with expensive concessions …
Deceptive Pricing GoHighLevel Internationalization
Among GoHighLevel’s most significant marketing points is the economical cost for accessibility to a lot of features. But I promptly learned this low-cost base expense was misleading.
They nickle-and-dimed customers with sporadic costs for core capability. Unexpectedly my bank card statements had unclear $10 costs from GoHighLevel occasionally.
As it ended up, you get charged every time you send an email via their servers. So for high quantity users, this amounted to hundreds of dollars in unforeseen costs.
Between these per-email fees and paying extra for deliverability attachments like Mailgun, my “affordable” GoHighLevel registration ended up costing significantly MORE than my Keap plan.
The reduced price tag was alluring, however just not practical in practice. This bait-and-switch left a bad preference in my mouth.
Email Fees Suffered
The final dealbreaker was seeing my very carefully supported e-mail open prices drop practically over night after changing to GoHighLevel.
Formerly, my audience engagement continually hit 35-40% open rates in Keap month after month. But once I moved their documents over to GoHighLevel, efficiency tanked promptly to a worthless 9% open rate.
Regardless of how much I enhanced my sending techniques or attempted every troubleshooting method, I might barely push open prices back into the teenagers– still a 50%+ decline from my previous standards GoHighLevel Internationalization.
Let me repeat: my exact same target market and emails suddenly had terrible interaction. The only point I could assume that would certainly be triggering this was whatever was taking place behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For an agency so depending on e-mail marketing, this was a big deal.
In between the debilitating deliverability issues, concealed charges, busted features, and horrible user interface, I had lastly reached my restriction …
Why I Give up GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Just 45 days after moving my firm to GoHighLevel, I understood I had actually made a massive blunder. The cons dramatically outweighed any benefits.
No software is ideal, yet the large quantity of troubles was past appropriate.
At the end of the day, software application comes down to count on. If I can’t trust it to deal with essential features properly or think a vendor has my benefits in mind, after that it’s time to leave– even after investing considerable time, money, and effort migrating.
So I made the difficult call to reverse training course and return back to Keap totally just weeks after going done in on GoHighLevel. Allow’s explore what I learned from this fiasco.
Trick Takeaways: What I Learned From My GoHighLevel Blunder
My time with HighLevel can be summed up as an expensive accident. However in hindsight, it educated me a few essential lessons:
- Stick to what works. Don’t disturb what’s working unless something is definitively far better across the board. Adjustment brings risk.
- Vet asserts completely. Marketing buzz around new software often obscures bigger underlying imperfections. Deep due diligence is vital.
- Choose simpleness over features. Properly designed devices need to make your work life simpler, not much more complex and messy.
- Openness develops depend on. Nontransparent pricing, shady reseller terms, and finger-pointing to escape troubles damages trust fund.
- Look for unbiased testimonials. Pleased assistance reviews imply much less if too much concerns indicate poor general usability.
- Excellence is impossible. No solitary option can flawlessly satisfy every unique organization requirement. Find the least-bad fit.
- Development over change. Step-by-step enhancements generally exceed risky wholesale reinvention of what currently works penalty.
In short, I discovered to be much more hesitant of “as well excellent to be true” marketing claims and less attracted by the attraction of shiny new objects. The tools you make use of daily need to make count on through transparency and performance, not slick advertising.