As a company owner for over a years, I rely upon software application and automation to enhance procedures and supply results. So when GoHighLevel emerged on the scene few years back, it most definitely captured my interest GoHighLevel Jessica Clark.
The idea was attractive– an all-in-one customer management system with marketing, sales, and solution devices incorporated together. As an entrepreneur always looking to streamline and scale my service, it looked like a dream become a reality on paper. Who wouldn’t desire a solitary solution that does it all?
But in this extensive GoHighLevel evaluation, I’ll take you inside my dreadful journey of trying (and falling short) to change to this popular new software. You’ll discover:
If you’re thinking about whether GoHighLevel is right for your own organization requirements, ideally you can gain from my excruciating mistakes and blew up assumptions.
Spoiler: I do NOT suggest GoHighLevel. If you require a CRM, start with this list of ideal CRMs instead. I use Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re seeking a sales, marketing, and project management choice to GoHighLevel, then here are a few we suggest.
Backstory: Why I Considered Switching from Keap
To recognize what attracted me to GoHighLevel in the first place, you require context concerning my previous setup. For over 5 years I had actually been happily depending on Keap (previously Infusionsoft) to satisfy all my client monitoring and automation requirements.
I found Keap instinctive to make use of and it dealt with every little thing I needed– CRM, e-mail marketing, sales funnels, subscription sites, and client support.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are made to assist small businesses maintain their clients while adding new ones easily. Automate follow-ups with e-mails and texts, making sure leads and customers receive the appropriate messages at the right time. Usage website and social media types to simplify lead follow-up, and manage your development with simple appointment scheduling and lead monitoring. Boost sales with automated pricing estimate, invoicing, and repayment processing, freeing up your time. With Keap, local business can conserve 10 hours per week and increase profits by 39%. Start with a 14-day free trial, no charge card required.
Why we like Keap
Keap uses a detailed client connection management (CRM) and marketing automation option tailored for small companies and entrepreneurs. We appreciate Keap’s focus on improving sales processes and nurturing consumer partnerships via effective automation tools. The system’s all-in-one strategy integrates CRM, email marketing, invoicing, and task management, making it especially eye-catching for companies wanting to settle their tech stack.
Essentially, it just worked accurately with very little fuss or upkeep called for. My open and click-through prices were excellent (like 35% fantastic). Automations ran smoothly with no problems.
So why on earth was I lured to uproot my whole functional structure from a system that functioned to attempt something unverified and untried?
In knowledge I can admit I got seduced by the alarm telephone call of “glossy item syndrome”. You understand the feeling: when everyone’s talking about a new device that will revolutionize your company … The yard commonly looks greener on the other side, and I questioned whether GoHighLevel might minimize friction points that I would certainly discovered to endure over the years with Keap.
I withstood at first, yet a couple of more frustrations led me to believe possibly it was time for a modification.
The Investment: Migrating My Agency to GoHighLevel
Earlier this year I decided to take the plunge. I registered for HighLevel’s Agency plan at $297/month, investing considerably more than the $97/month starter cost.
This wasn’t a decision I took lightly. I understood changing platforms was mosting likely to need migrating all my Keap information and basically reconstructing my entire tech infrastructure from square one utilizing all of the GoHighLevel integrations readily available.
Here’s an overview of just a few of the effort required:
- Manually exporting 20,000+ e-mail customer documents
- Recreating dozens of automations and workflows
- Relocating customer accounts, notes, and task information to the brand-new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe payment integration
- Establishing landing pages, coupons, and sales funnels all over once again
- Learning an entirely international UX and user interface style
All in, I invested around 30-40 tedious hours of setup work transitioning everything over– in addition to managing lost performance throughout the switch.
However inevitably, it was a calculated investment I wanted to make. I figured some temporary pain would pay off with GoHighLevel providing a far better lasting remedy for my service, Dripify. Oh just how wrong I was …
It just took me regarding a month of hands-on usage to understand I had actually made a huge blunder. The problems started accumulating rapidly, until it reached a point I had to cut my losses and change back to Keap completely.
Allow’s walk through the nightmarish issues I ran into.
Security Issues & Several Vermin
Offered 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 consisted of series for onboarding new email clients, onboarding new clients, automating follow-ups for webinar registrations, sending out occasion suggestions, handling membership expirations and far more.
Every little thing seemed to be operating fine … up until unexpectedly it had not been. One morning, I woke up to find 171 completely unnecessary e-mails had actually been sent to users who must NOT have actually obtained them. This took place three days straight, with a different batch of 160 individuals daily.
I anxiously attempted repairing and reconstructing the automation from scratch. However the trouble lingered.
When I seriously connected to their assistance team, they slightly declared “server problems” were responsible. But this explanation didn’t make any feeling, because the errors continued happening each morning like clockwork unconnected to any kind of downtime.
In my mind, this large failing was entirely unacceptable and simply didn’t work for my business. I have thousands of calls relying on my automated campaigns running efficiently.
So if GoHighLevel was going to be entirely unstable, how could I turn over mission-critical workflows and sensitive client data to their innovation?
The unintuitive user interface only intensified these concerns …
Frustrating UX
Originating from Keap where every little thing was seamless and intuitive, GoHighLevel’s learning contour really felt high and difficult.
Straightforward jobs like editing and enhancing workflows involved digging through food selection systems that were all over the place. Secret settings were unexplainably scattered in entirely various sections. Moving between functions felt disjointed or complex.
I’ll tell you what I mean by talking about their funnel builder as an example. There were 3 separate settings panels to take care of total, private, and item setups. Yet for some insane factor, the links to gain access to each of these core setups were expanded on opposite sides of the display. What!?
As someone that values clean, thoughtful design, this seriously annoyed me.
It reinforced that GoHighLevel still felt like a work-in-progress rather than a sleek item all set for prime-time usage. Their concerns appeared focused on cramming in every feature imaginable, with bad use as a second thought.
And talking features, I soon realized the low cost tag included costly concessions …
Misleading Pricing GoHighLevel Jessica Clark
One of GoHighLevel’s greatest selling points is the budget-friendly price for access to numerous features. Yet I quickly discovered this cheap base price was deceptive.
They nickle-and-dimed users with sporadic charges for core functionality. Suddenly my bank card declarations had unclear $10 charges from GoHighLevel here and there.
As it ended up, you get charged every time you send an e-mail with their servers. So for high quantity individuals, this added up to hundreds of dollars in unforeseen costs.
Between these per-email fees and paying added for deliverability add-ons like Mailgun, my “economical” GoHighLevel registration wound up costing substantially greater than my Keap plan.
The low sticker price was tempting, but just not reasonable in practice. This bait-and-switch left a negative taste in my mouth.
Email Rates Suffered
The final dealbreaker was seeing my very carefully supported e-mail open rates plummet nearly overnight after changing to GoHighLevel.
Previously, my target market engagement consistently struck 35-40% open rates in Keap month after month. But once I moved their documents over to GoHighLevel, efficiency tanked instantly to a useless 9% open rate.
Despite just how much I maximized my sending out techniques or attempted every troubleshooting technique, I could hardly push open rates back into the teenagers– still a 50%+ decrease from my previous criteria GoHighLevel Jessica Clark.
Let me repeat: my exact same target market and emails all of a sudden had dreadful interaction. The only thing I might believe that would certainly be causing this was whatever was occurring behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a company so based on e-mail marketing, this was a big deal.
Between the crippling deliverability issues, concealed costs, broken features, and awful interface, I had lastly reached my restriction …
Why I Stop GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Just 45 days after moving my company to GoHighLevel, I understood I had actually made a significant mistake. The disadvantages dramatically outweighed any advantages.
No software application is perfect, however the large quantity of issues was past appropriate.
At the end of the day, software program boils down to trust fund. If I can’t trust it to handle essential functions capably or believe a vendor has my benefits in mind, then it’s time to leave– also after spending significant time, money, and effort migrating.
So I made the challenging call to turn around program and return back to Keap totally simply weeks after going done in on GoHighLevel. Let’s explore what I gained from this debacle.
Secret Takeaways: What I Gained from My GoHighLevel Mistake
My time with HighLevel can be summed up as an expensive accident. However in hindsight, it educated me a few key lessons:
- Stay with what works. Do not distress what’s working unless something is definitively far better across the board. Change brings threat.
- Vet declares extensively. Marketing buzz around brand-new software program frequently covers larger underlying flaws. Deep due diligence is crucial.
- Pick simplicity over features. Properly designed devices should make your job life much easier, not much more challenging and messy.
- Transparency constructs trust. Opaque pricing, unethical reseller terms, and finger-pointing to evade troubles destroys trust.
- Look for impartial evaluations. Satisfied assistance examines imply much less if extreme problems suggest inadequate overall usability.
- Perfection is difficult. No single option can perfectly satisfy every distinct organization need. Discover the least-bad fit.
- Evolution over transformation. Step-by-step renovations typically exceed high-risk wholesale reinvention of what already works penalty.
In short, I learned to be extra hesitant of “as well great to be real” marketing cases and less tempted by the attraction of shiny new objects. The devices you use daily should earn count on with transparency and performance, not slick advertising.