As an agency owner for over a years, I rely upon software application and automation to simplify procedures and provide results. So when GoHighLevel emerged on the scene couple of years back, it absolutely captured my attention GoHighLevel IVR.
The concept was appealing– an all-in-one client management system with marketing, sales, and solution devices incorporated with each other. As an entrepreneur always aiming to streamline and scale my business, it felt like a desire come true on paper. That would not desire a single remedy that does it all?
But in this in-depth GoHighLevel evaluation, I’ll take you inside my disastrous trip of attempting (and falling short) to switch over to this preferred new software application. You’ll discover:
If you’re considering whether GoHighLevel is right for your own service requirements, hopefully you can pick up from my unpleasant mistakes and pumped up assumptions.
Looter: I do NOT recommend GoHighLevel. If you need a CRM, start with this list of finest CRMs instead. I use Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re looking for a sales, marketing, and project monitoring choice to GoHighLevel, then below are a few we suggest.
Backstory: Why I Considered Changing from Keap
To recognize what attracted me to GoHighLevel to begin with, you require context concerning my previous arrangement. For over 5 years I had actually been gladly relying upon Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) to meet all my client monitoring and automation needs.
I located Keap user-friendly to utilize and it managed whatever I required– CRM, email marketing, sales funnels, subscription websites, and customer assistance.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are developed to help small companies maintain their clients while adding brand-new ones effortlessly. Automate follow-ups with emails and texts, guaranteeing leads and customers obtain the best messages at the right time. Usage internet site and social media types to streamline lead follow-up, and manage your development with easy appointment scheduling and lead tracking. Boost sales with automated pricing quote, invoicing, and repayment handling, freeing up your time. With Keap, local business can save 10 hours each week and increase profits by 39%. Beginning with a 14-day free trial, no credit card required.
Why we like Keap
Keap uses a detailed client relationship administration (CRM) and marketing automation solution tailored for local business and entrepreneurs. We value Keap’s focus on enhancing sales processes and supporting consumer partnerships with powerful automation tools. The system’s all-in-one technique integrates CRM, email marketing, invoicing, and job administration, making it especially attractive for companies seeking to combine their technology pile.
Generally, it just functioned accurately with very little fuss or upkeep needed. My open and click-through prices were excellent (like 35% wonderful). Automations ran smoothly without any problems.
So why on earth was I tempted to uproot my entire operational structure from a system that functioned to attempt something unverified and untried?
In knowledge I can confess I got seduced by the siren call of “glossy item disorder”. You understand the sensation: when everybody’s talking about a brand-new device that will certainly change your business … The yard typically looks greener on the other side, and I questioned whether GoHighLevel may decrease rubbing factors that I would certainly learned to tolerate for many years with Keap.
I stood up to initially, but a few even more stress led me to assume possibly it was time for a change.
The Financial investment: Migrating My Company to GoHighLevel
Previously this year I decided to start. I signed up for HighLevel’s Company plan at $297/month, investing considerably greater than the $97/month starter cost.
This had not been a choice I ignored. I understood switching systems was mosting likely to require migrating all my Keap information and essentially reconstructing my whole tech framework from scratch making use of all of the GoHighLevel integrations offered.
Below’s an overview of simply several of the effort called for:
- Manually exporting 20,000+ e-mail client records
- Recreating loads of automations and workflows
- Moving client profiles, notes, and job information to the new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe billing integration
- Setting up landing pages, promos, and sales funnels throughout once more
- Learning an entirely international UX and interface design
Done in, I invested around 30-40 tiresome hours of setup work transitioning whatever over– and also managing shed performance during the switch.
Yet inevitably, it was a computed investment I was willing to make. I figured some short-term pain would settle with GoHighLevel giving a much better long-term service for my organization, Dripify. Oh exactly how incorrect I was …
It just took me about a month of hands-on use to realize I had made a big error. The concerns began piling up swiftly, until it reached a point I needed to reduce my losses and change back to Keap completely.
Allow’s walk through the horrible problems I experienced.
Security Issues & Lots of Bugs
Offered GoHighLevel positioned itself as an all-in-one automation system, I took care to diligently recreate every workflow from my old Keap account.
These included series for onboarding brand-new e-mail clients, onboarding brand-new clients, automating follow-ups for webinar registrations, sending event suggestions, managing subscription expirations and far more.
Whatever appeared to be operating fine … up until instantly it had not been. One early morning, I woke up to find 171 totally unnecessary emails had actually been sent out to customers who need to NOT have actually gotten them. This occurred three days straight, with a various batch of 160 individuals each day.
I hysterically tried repairing and rebuilding the automation from scratch. However the trouble lingered.
When I seriously connected to their support group, they slightly asserted “web server issues” were to blame. But this explanation really did not make any type of sense, since the mistakes continued taking place each early morning like clockwork unrelated to any type of downtime.
In my mind, this massive failure was totally undesirable and simply didn’t work for my business. I have hundreds of contacts relying upon my automated campaigns running efficiently.
So if GoHighLevel was going to be totally unstable, how could I leave mission-critical workflows and sensitive customer data to their innovation?
The unintuitive interface only compounded these concerns …
Discouraging UX
Coming from Keap where whatever was seamless and user-friendly, GoHighLevel’s learning curve felt steep and complex.
Basic jobs like editing and enhancing workflows involved digging with menu systems that were all over the place. Secret setups were unexplainably spread in entirely various areas. Relocating between features really felt disjointed or complicated.
I’ll tell you what I indicate by discussing their funnel builder as an instance. There were 3 different setups panels to take care of general, individual, and product configurations. Yet for some crazy factor, the links to gain access to each of these core settings were spread out on contrary sides of the display. What!?
As somebody that values tidy, thoughtful layout, this seriously frustrated me.
It reinforced that GoHighLevel still felt like a work-in-progress as opposed to a polished product prepared for prime-time usage. Their priorities seemed focused on cramming in every feature under the sun, with poor functionality as a second thought.
And talking features, I soon realized the low cost tag featured expensive concessions …
Misleading Pricing GoHighLevel IVR
Among GoHighLevel’s greatest selling factors is the cost effective cost for accessibility to numerous features. But I rapidly learned this economical base price was deceitful.
They nickle-and-dimed users with erratic charges for core performance. All of a sudden my bank card statements had obscure $10 charges from GoHighLevel occasionally.
As it ended up, you obtain billed whenever you send an e-mail through their web servers. So for high volume individuals, this amounted to thousands of bucks in unanticipated costs.
In between these per-email charges and paying additional for deliverability add-ons like Mailgun, my “budget-friendly” GoHighLevel membership ended up setting you back substantially greater than my Keap plan.
The reduced sticker price was alluring, yet simply not sensible in practice. This bait-and-switch left a negative taste in my mouth.
Email Rates Suffered
The last dealbreaker was seeing my carefully nurtured email open rates plummet virtually overnight after switching to GoHighLevel.
Formerly, my audience involvement continually struck 35-40% open rates in Keap month after month. But once I migrated their records over to GoHighLevel, performance tanked instantaneously to a worthless 9% open rate.
No matter just how much I maximized my sending techniques or tried every troubleshooting trick, I might hardly nudge open prices back into the teenagers– still a 50%+ decrease from my previous standards GoHighLevel IVR.
Let me repeat: my exact same target market and e-mails instantly had horrible involvement. The only thing I might think that would certainly be triggering this was whatever was occurring behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a company so dependent on email marketing, this was a big deal.
Between the crippling deliverability concerns, hidden costs, broken features, and dreadful user interface, I had actually lastly reached my limitation …
Why I Give up GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Simply 45 days after moving my firm to GoHighLevel, I recognized I had made a significant error. The disadvantages significantly outweighed any kind of advantages.
No software program is excellent, but the large quantity of issues was past appropriate.
At the end of the day, software boils down to depend on. If I can not trust it to take care of crucial features properly or believe a supplier has my best interests in mind, then it’s time to leave– even after spending substantial time, cash, and initiative migrating.
So I made the challenging call to reverse program and return back to Keap totally just weeks after going all in on GoHighLevel. Let’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 a pricey accident. But in knowledge, it showed me a few vital lessons:
- Stick to what jobs. Do not disturb what’s working unless something is definitively much better across the board. Adjustment brings risk.
- Veterinarian asserts completely. Marketing buzz around new software program frequently covers larger underlying flaws. Deep due persistance is necessary.
- Pick simpleness over features. Well-designed tools ought to make your job life easier, not much more difficult and untidy.
- Transparency constructs depend on. Opaque pricing, questionable reseller terms, and finger-pointing to escape problems damages trust fund.
- Seek unbiased reviews. Satisfied support evaluates suggest less if extreme concerns imply poor overall usability.
- Excellence is impossible. No single service can perfectly satisfy every special business need. Find the least-bad fit.
- Advancement over revolution. Step-by-step renovations typically surpass high-risk wholesale reinvention of what currently works penalty.
Simply put, I found out to be more doubtful of “also great to be true” marketing insurance claims and less attracted by the appeal of glossy new objects. The devices you utilize daily should make depend on via transparency and efficiency, not slick advertising.