As a firm proprietor for over a years, I rely upon software program and automation to enhance procedures and supply results. So when GoHighLevel emerged on the scene couple of years back, it definitely caught my attention GoHighLevel Local SEO.
The concept was appealing– an all-in-one client administration platform with marketing, sales, and service tools incorporated with each other. As a business owner constantly seeking to simplify and scale my business, it seemed like a desire become a reality on paper. Who wouldn’t want a solitary solution that does it all?
However in this comprehensive GoHighLevel review, I’ll take you inside my dreadful trip of attempting (and stopping working) to switch over to this prominent brand-new software. You’ll find out:
If you’re thinking about whether GoHighLevel is right for your very own business demands, with any luck you can gain from my painful blunders and pumped up assumptions.
Looter: I do NOT recommend GoHighLevel. If you require a CRM, start with this list of ideal CRMs rather. I utilize Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re looking for a sales, marketing, and job monitoring choice to GoHighLevel, after that below are a couple of we suggest.
Backstory: Why I Considered Changing from Keap
To comprehend what attracted me to GoHighLevel in the first place, you need context about my previous configuration. For over 5 years I had been gladly relying upon Keap (previously Infusionsoft) to meet all my client administration and automation demands.
I discovered Keap user-friendly to use and it took care of whatever I required– CRM, e-mail marketing, sales funnels, membership sites, and customer support.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are designed to assist local business maintain their clients while including brand-new ones effortlessly. Automate follow-ups with emails and messages, ensuring leads and clients obtain the ideal messages at the correct time. Use site and social networks types to streamline lead follow-up, and manage your development with easy visit scheduling and lead monitoring. Boost sales with automated quoting, invoicing, and repayment processing, freeing up your time. With Keap, local business can conserve 10 hours per week and boost profits by 39%. Start with a 14-day free trial, no bank card needed.
Why we like Keap
Keap uses a thorough consumer partnership monitoring (CRM) and marketing automation service tailored for small companies and entrepreneurs. We appreciate Keap’s focus on simplifying sales processes and nurturing client partnerships with effective automation tools. The platform’s all-in-one technique incorporates CRM, email marketing, invoicing, and job management, making it specifically appealing for businesses aiming to settle their technology pile.
Essentially, it simply worked accurately with very little fuss or upkeep called for. My open and click-through rates were great (like 35% fantastic). Automations ran efficiently with no issues.
So why on earth was I lured to uproot my entire functional foundation from a system that functioned to attempt something unproven and untested?
In hindsight I can admit I obtained attracted by the alarm call of “shiny things syndrome”. You recognize the sensation: when everyone’s speaking about a brand-new tool that will change your organization … The turf typically looks greener beyond, and I asked yourself whether GoHighLevel may decrease rubbing factors that I would certainly discovered to endure over the years with Keap.
I stood up to at first, but a couple of more frustrations led me to think maybe it was time for a modification.
The Investment: Moving My Agency to GoHighLevel
Previously this year I chose to take the plunge. I registered for HighLevel’s Firm plan at $297/month, spending dramatically greater than the $97/month starter expense.
This had not been a choice I ignored. I knew switching systems was mosting likely to require migrating all my Keap information and basically rebuilding my entire tech facilities from the ground up utilizing every one of the GoHighLevel integrations readily available.
Here’s a summary of just some of the effort needed:
- Manually exporting 20,000+ email subscriber records
- Recreating loads of automations and workflows
- Moving customer profiles, notes, and task information to the brand-new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe billing integration
- Setting up landing pages, promotions, and sales funnels all over once more
- Learning a completely foreign UX and user interface design
All in, I invested around 30-40 tiresome hours of setup job transitioning everything over– as well as managing lost productivity during the switch.
Yet ultimately, it was a calculated investment I wanted to make. I figured some short-term discomfort would certainly settle with GoHighLevel providing a much better long-lasting option for my service, Dripify. Oh exactly how incorrect I was …
It just took me concerning a month of hands-on use to realize I had made a huge blunder. The concerns started accumulating promptly, till it reached a factor I needed to cut my losses and switch back to Keap entirely.
Let’s walk through the nightmarish issues I came across.
Safety Issues & Numerous Vermin
Given GoHighLevel placed itself as an all-in-one automation platform, I made sure to meticulously recreate every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These included series for onboarding brand-new e-mail subscribers, onboarding new clients, automating follow-ups for webinar registrations, sending out event pointers, taking care of subscription expiries and a lot more.
Whatever seemed to be functioning penalty … up until all of a sudden it wasn’t. One early morning, I woke up to discover 171 totally pointless e-mails had been sent out to individuals that should NOT have received them. This happened 3 days in a row, with a different set of 160 individuals each day.
I frantically tried fixing and rebuilding the automation from the ground up. Yet the issue lingered.
When I desperately reached out to their support group, they vaguely claimed “server concerns” were to blame. But this explanation didn’t make any sense, since the errors continued taking place each early morning like clockwork unassociated to any kind of downtime.
In my mind, this enormous failure was entirely undesirable and just really did not work for my business. I have hundreds of contacts counting on my automated campaigns running smoothly.
So if GoHighLevel was mosting likely to be entirely unstable, exactly how could I hand over mission-critical workflows and sensitive client information to their modern technology?
The unintuitive user interface just worsened these problems …
Frustrating UX
Coming from Keap where everything was smooth and intuitive, GoHighLevel’s learning curve really felt high and complicated.
Easy tasks like editing and enhancing workflows involved digging through food selection systems that were all over the place. Trick setups were unexplainably spread in absolutely different areas. Moving in between functions felt disjointed or complicated.
I’ll inform you what I mean by speaking about their funnel builder as an example. There were 3 different settings panels to handle total, individual, and item setups. Yet for some crazy reason, the links to gain access to each of these core settings were spread out on opposite sides of the screen. What!?
As somebody that values clean, thoughtful layout, this seriously irritated me.
It strengthened that GoHighLevel still felt like a work-in-progress as opposed to a sleek product prepared for prime-time use. Their top priorities seemed focused on packing in every feature under the sun, with bad functionality as a second thought.
And speaking of features, I soon understood the low price tag came with costly concessions …
Deceptive Pricing GoHighLevel Local SEO
One of GoHighLevel’s greatest selling points is the affordable price for accessibility to numerous features. Yet I promptly learned this cheap base cost was deceitful.
They nickle-and-dimed individuals with occasional costs for core functionality. Suddenly my bank card statements had vague $10 charges from GoHighLevel occasionally.
As it turned out, you obtain charged whenever you send out an e-mail through their servers. So for high quantity users, this amounted to thousands of dollars in unanticipated costs.
In between these per-email costs and paying additional for deliverability add-ons like Mailgun, my “economical” GoHighLevel subscription wound up setting you back significantly greater than my Keap plan.
The reduced price tag was tempting, yet simply not practical in practice. This bait-and-switch left a bad preference in my mouth.
Email Rates Suffered
The final dealbreaker was seeing my carefully nurtured e-mail open rates plummet virtually overnight after switching over to GoHighLevel.
Previously, my target market engagement continually struck 35-40% open rates in Keap month after month. But once I moved their documents over to GoHighLevel, efficiency tanked promptly to a pathetic 9% open price.
No matter just how much I enhanced my sending practices or attempted every repairing technique, I could hardly nudge open rates back into the teens– still a 50%+ decrease from my previous criteria GoHighLevel Local SEO.
Let me repeat: my exact same target market and emails unexpectedly had dreadful interaction. The only point I can think that would be causing this was whatever was occurring behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a firm so based on email marketing, this was a big deal.
Between the debilitating deliverability issues, hidden costs, busted features, and awful interface, I had actually finally reached my limitation …
Why I Quit GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Simply 45 days after migrating my company to GoHighLevel, I knew I had made a significant error. The cons substantially surpassed any advantages.
No software program is best, but the sheer volume of issues was past appropriate.
At the end of the day, software application comes down to trust fund. If I can’t trust it to take care of critical functions properly or think a supplier has my benefits in mind, after that it’s time to leave– also after investing substantial time, cash, and initiative moving.
So I made the difficult call to turn around training course and return back to Keap totally just weeks after going done in on GoHighLevel. Let’s discover what I gained from this debacle.
Secret Takeaways: What I Learned From My GoHighLevel Error
My time with HighLevel can be summarized as an expensive misadventure. However in knowledge, it educated me a few vital lessons:
- Adhere to what jobs. Do not disturb what’s functioning unless something is definitively better across the board. Change brings threat.
- Veterinarian claims extensively. Marketing buzz around brand-new software typically covers bigger underlying problems. Deep due diligence is essential.
- Pick simpleness over features. Well-designed tools need to make your work life less complicated, not a lot more difficult and messy.
- Transparency develops trust. Nontransparent pricing, dubious reseller terms, and finger-pointing to evade troubles destroys depend on.
- Seek impartial testimonials. Delighted support reviews mean less if too much issues imply inadequate overall use.
- Perfection is difficult. No solitary remedy can perfectly meet every special business need. Find the least-bad fit.
- Evolution over transformation. Incremental enhancements typically surpass dangerous wholesale reinvention of what already functions fine.
Basically, I discovered to be more doubtful of “too great to be true” marketing insurance claims and less lured by the attraction of glossy brand-new things. The tools you make use of daily should earn count on via transparency and performance, not glossy advertising.