As an agency proprietor for over a decade, I rely on software application and automation to improve operations and supply outcomes. So when GoHighLevel arised on the scene few years back, it certainly caught my interest GoHighLevel Kitchen Remodel Snapshot.
The idea was attractive– an all-in-one customer management system with marketing, sales, and solution tools integrated together. As an entrepreneur constantly aiming to simplify and scale my organization, it seemed like a desire happened on paper. That wouldn’t want a solitary service that does it all?
But in this comprehensive GoHighLevel evaluation, I’ll take you inside my devastating trip of attempting (and failing) to change to this preferred new software. You’ll find out:
If you’re considering whether GoHighLevel is right for your very own organization needs, ideally you can pick up from my agonizing errors and inflated expectations.
Looter: I do NOT recommend GoHighLevel. If you require a CRM, begin with this listing of ideal CRMs instead. I make use of Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re searching for a sales, marketing, and job monitoring choice to GoHighLevel, then right here are a couple of we suggest.
Backstory: Why I Took Into Consideration Switching from Keap
To recognize what attracted me to GoHighLevel to begin with, you require context about my previous configuration. For over 5 years I had actually been gladly depending on Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) to fulfill all my client monitoring and automation requirements.
I located Keap instinctive to use and it dealt with every little thing I required– CRM, e-mail marketing, sales funnels, membership websites, and customer assistance.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are made to help small businesses keep their customers while including new ones easily. Automate follow-ups with e-mails and texts, making certain leads and customers get the right messages at the correct time. Use website and social media sites forms to simplify lead follow-up, and manage your growth with simple consultation organizing and lead tracking. Boost sales with automated pricing quote, invoicing, and repayment processing, maximizing your time. With Keap, local business can conserve 10 hours per week and increase earnings by 39%. Begin with a 14-day free trial, no bank card required.
Why we like Keap
Keap offers a comprehensive consumer partnership monitoring (CRM) and marketing automation solution customized for small businesses and entrepreneurs. We value Keap’s concentrate on improving sales processes and supporting customer partnerships via powerful automation devices. The platform’s all-in-one approach incorporates CRM, e-mail marketing, invoicing, and task management, making it especially appealing for businesses looking to consolidate their tech pile.
For the most part, it just functioned reliably with marginal difficulty or maintenance required. My open and click-through prices were terrific (like 35% wonderful). Automations ran efficiently without concerns.
So why in the world was I lured to uproot my entire functional foundation from a system that worked to attempt something unproven and untried?
In hindsight I can confess I obtained seduced by the alarm telephone call of “shiny things disorder”. You understand the feeling: when every person’s speaking about a brand-new device that will reinvent your business … The grass often looks greener beyond, and I questioned whether GoHighLevel could decrease rubbing factors that I would certainly found out to tolerate throughout the years with Keap.
I withstood in the beginning, but a couple of even more frustrations led me to think possibly it was time for an adjustment.
The Financial investment: Migrating My Firm to GoHighLevel
Previously this year I determined to start. I registered for HighLevel’s Firm plan at $297/month, spending significantly more than the $97/month starter expense.
This wasn’t a choice I ignored. I knew changing systems was mosting likely to require migrating all my Keap information and basically restoring my whole tech framework from square one using all of the GoHighLevel integrations readily available.
Below’s a summary of just several of the effort required:
- Manually exporting 20,000+ email subscriber documents
- Recreating loads of automations and workflows
- Relocating customer profiles, notes, and project data to the brand-new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe billing integration
- Setting up landing pages, discounts, and sales funnels all over again
- Learning a completely foreign UX and user interface style
Done in, I spent around 30-40 tiresome hours of configuration work transitioning everything over– not to mention handling shed efficiency throughout the switch.
But eventually, it was a computed investment I wanted to make. I figured some short-term discomfort would repay with GoHighLevel giving a better long-lasting service for my service, Dripify. Oh just how incorrect I was …
It only took me regarding a month of hands-on usage to understand I had actually made a big blunder. The problems started accumulating quickly, up until it got to a factor I needed to cut my losses and switch over back to Keap entirely.
Allow’s walk through the horrible problems I experienced.
Safety And Security Issues & Numerous Bugs
Given GoHighLevel positioned itself as an all-in-one automation platform, I made sure to carefully recreate each and every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These included sequences for onboarding brand-new e-mail subscribers, onboarding brand-new customers, automating follow-ups for webinar enrollments, sending occasion tips, handling subscription expirations and much more.
Whatever appeared to be working penalty … until all of a sudden it had not been. One morning, I awoke to locate 171 totally pointless emails had been sent to individuals that must NOT have gotten them. This occurred three days in a row, with a various set of 160 individuals each day.
I anxiously tried fixing and rebuilding the automation from the ground up. But the trouble persisted.
When I desperately reached out to their support group, they slightly declared “web server issues” were to blame. But this explanation really did not make any sense, given that the mistakes proceeded occurring each early morning like clockwork unconnected to any type of downtime.
In my mind, this large failing was entirely inappropriate and just didn’t benefit my company. I have countless calls counting on my automated campaigns running efficiently.
So if GoHighLevel was going to be entirely unstable, just how could I entrust mission-critical workflows and delicate client information to their technology?
The unintuitive interface only compounded these concerns …
Irritating UX
Coming from Keap where every little thing was seamless and intuitive, GoHighLevel’s learning contour really felt steep and difficult.
Basic jobs like editing and enhancing workflows included excavating via food selection systems that were all over the place. Key setups were unexplainably spread in absolutely different areas. Relocating between functions felt disjointed or complicated.
I’ll inform you what I suggest by talking about their funnel builder as an example. There were 3 separate setups panels to take care of general, individual, and item configurations. Yet for some crazy reason, the web links to access each of these core settings were expanded on contrary sides of the screen. What!?
As somebody who values tidy, thoughtful design, this seriously upset me.
It strengthened that GoHighLevel still felt like a work-in-progress instead of a sleek item all set for prime-time use. Their top priorities seemed concentrated on packing in every feature imaginable, with inadequate usability as a second thought.
And speaking of features, I quickly understood the low cost tag included costly compromises …
Misleading Pricing GoHighLevel Kitchen Remodel Snapshot
One of GoHighLevel’s biggest selling factors is the budget-friendly price for accessibility to so many features. Yet I promptly discovered this cheap base expense was misleading.
They nickle-and-dimed users with erratic fees for core capability. Instantly my credit card declarations had unclear $10 costs from GoHighLevel here and there.
As it ended up, you obtain billed whenever you send out an email with their web servers. So for high volume users, this added up to hundreds of dollars in unexpected costs.
In between these per-email fees and paying extra for deliverability add-ons like Mailgun, my “budget-friendly” GoHighLevel subscription wound up costing significantly greater than my Keap plan.
The low price tag was alluring, yet simply not realistic in practice. This bait-and-switch left a bad taste in my mouth.
Email Rates Suffered
The final dealbreaker was seeing my very carefully supported e-mail open rates plummet practically overnight after switching to GoHighLevel.
Previously, my audience engagement constantly struck 35-40% open rates in Keap month after month. Once I migrated their records over to GoHighLevel, performance tanked instantaneously to a pitiful 9% open rate.
No matter how much I maximized my sending out practices or tried every repairing trick, I can barely push open rates back into the teens– still a 50%+ decline from my previous standards GoHighLevel Kitchen Remodel Snapshot.
Let me repeat: my exact same target market and e-mails suddenly had awful interaction. The only thing I could assume that would be causing this was whatever was happening behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a company so depending on email marketing, this was a big deal.
In between the debilitating deliverability problems, hidden charges, broken features, and dreadful user interface, I had actually lastly reached my limit …
Why I Quit GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Simply 45 days after migrating my agency to GoHighLevel, I knew I had made a significant error. The cons drastically exceeded any type of benefits.
No software is best, yet the large volume of problems was beyond acceptable.
At the end of the day, software application comes down to depend on. If I can not trust it to manage vital features competently or think a supplier has my best interests in mind, after that it’s time to leave– even after investing considerable time, money, and effort migrating.
So I made the tough contact us to turn around training course and return back to Keap completely just weeks after going done in on GoHighLevel. Allow’s explore what I gained from this debacle.
Key Takeaways: What I Picked up from My GoHighLevel Mistake
My time with HighLevel can be summarized as an expensive ill fortune. However in knowledge, it showed me a couple of essential lessons:
- Adhere to what works. Do not disturb what’s functioning unless something is definitively better across the board. Modification brings risk.
- Veterinarian asserts thoroughly. Marketing hype around new software usually covers larger underlying imperfections. Deep due persistance is vital.
- Pick simplicity over features. Properly designed tools ought to make your job life easier, not much more challenging and untidy.
- Transparency builds count on. Opaque pricing, questionable reseller terms, and finger-pointing to evade issues ruins trust fund.
- Seek impartial evaluations. Delighted support assesses mean much less if extreme concerns indicate poor general functionality.
- Excellence is impossible. No solitary service can flawlessly satisfy every unique organization demand. Locate the least-bad fit.
- Advancement over transformation. Incremental improvements generally outweigh dangerous wholesale reinvention of what already functions penalty.
In short, I found out to be a lot more doubtful of “as well good to be real” marketing insurance claims and much less attracted by the allure of shiny brand-new items. The devices you use daily must make depend on via openness and performance, not glossy advertising.