As a company owner for over a years, I rely on software application and automation to enhance procedures and provide results. So when GoHighLevel arised on the scene couple of years back, it absolutely caught my interest GoHighLevel Marketers Toolkit.
The concept was enticing– an all-in-one client monitoring platform with marketing, sales, and service devices incorporated together. As an entrepreneur always looking to simplify and scale my service, it seemed like a dream happened theoretically. That wouldn’t want a solitary option that does it all?
But in this in-depth GoHighLevel evaluation, I’ll take you inside my disastrous trip of trying (and falling short) to switch over to this popular brand-new software. You’ll learn:
If you’re considering whether GoHighLevel is right for your own organization needs, with any luck you can pick up from my excruciating blunders and inflated assumptions.
Spoiler: I do NOT recommend GoHighLevel. If you need a CRM, begin with this list of ideal CRMs rather. I utilize Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re seeking a sales, marketing, and task administration option to GoHighLevel, then here are a couple of we suggest.
Backstory: Why I Took Into Consideration Changing from Keap
To understand what attracted me to GoHighLevel in the first place, you need context regarding my previous setup. For over 5 years I had actually been gladly counting on Keap (previously Infusionsoft) to fulfill all my client management and automation requirements.
I found Keap intuitive to make use of and it took care of whatever I needed– CRM, e-mail marketing, sales funnels, membership sites, and client assistance.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are developed to assist small businesses keep their customers while including new ones effortlessly. Automate follow-ups with emails and texts, ensuring leads and customers get the right messages at the right time. Use web site and social media sites kinds to enhance lead follow-up, and manage your growth with easy consultation organizing and lead monitoring. Boost sales with automated estimating, invoicing, and payment handling, maximizing your time. With Keap, small companies can save 10 hours each week and increase revenue by 39%. Beginning with a 14-day free trial, no charge card needed.
Why we like Keap
Keap provides a thorough customer relationship management (CRM) and marketing automation remedy tailored for small businesses and business owners. We value Keap’s focus on enhancing sales processes and nurturing customer relationships via effective automation tools. The system’s all-in-one strategy integrates CRM, e-mail marketing, invoicing, and job administration, making it particularly eye-catching for services aiming to combine their technology stack.
Essentially, it simply worked dependably with marginal difficulty or upkeep required. My open and click-through rates were fantastic (like 35% fantastic). Automations ran smoothly without any concerns.
So why on earth was I tempted to uproot my whole functional foundation from a system that functioned to attempt something unproven and untested?
In hindsight I can confess I obtained attracted by the alarm phone call of “shiny things syndrome”. You recognize the feeling: when everyone’s talking about a new device that will revolutionize your company … The yard usually looks greener on the other side, and I questioned whether GoHighLevel might lower friction factors that I would certainly discovered to endure over the years with Keap.
I resisted at first, but a couple of even more aggravations led me to think maybe it was time for a change.
The Financial investment: Migrating My Firm to GoHighLevel
Previously this year I made a decision to start. I enrolled in HighLevel’s Company plan at $297/month, spending dramatically greater than the $97/month starter cost.
This wasn’t a decision I ignored. I recognized changing systems was going to require moving all my Keap data and essentially restoring my entire technology framework from scratch making use of every one of the GoHighLevel integrations readily available.
Right here’s an overview of simply several of the effort called for:
- Manually exporting 20,000+ e-mail subscriber records
- Recreating lots of automations and workflows
- Relocating client profiles, notes, and task data to the brand-new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe invoicing integration
- Establishing landing pages, promos, and sales funnels around once again
- Learning a totally international UX and user interface design
All in, I invested around 30-40 laborious hours of configuration job transitioning whatever over– and also managing shed productivity throughout the switch.
Yet inevitably, it was a computed investment I was willing to make. I figured some temporary discomfort would certainly repay with GoHighLevel giving a better long-lasting solution for my service, Dripify. Oh exactly how wrong I was …
It only took me concerning a month of hands-on use to understand I had made a huge blunder. The problems started accumulating rapidly, till it got to a point I had to cut my losses and change back to Keap entirely.
Allow’s walk through the nightmarish problems I encountered.
Security Issues & Many Vermin
Given GoHighLevel placed itself as an all-in-one automation system, I took care to diligently recreate every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These consisted of sequences for onboarding new e-mail subscribers, onboarding new clients, automating follow-ups for webinar registrations, sending occasion tips, handling subscription expirations and far more.
Whatever appeared to be working penalty … till instantly it wasn’t. One morning, I awoke to find 171 entirely unimportant emails had actually been sent to users who should NOT have gotten them. This took place 3 days straight, with a different set of 160 individuals every day.
I frantically tried troubleshooting and rebuilding the automation from the ground up. But the trouble continued.
When I desperately reached out to their assistance team, they slightly declared “server problems” were to blame. Yet this explanation didn’t make any kind of feeling, since the errors proceeded taking place each morning like clockwork unassociated to any downtime.
In my mind, this enormous failure was completely undesirable and just didn’t benefit my business. I have thousands of calls counting on my automated campaigns running efficiently.
So if GoHighLevel was going to be completely unreliable, just how could I entrust mission-critical workflows and delicate client information to their modern technology?
The unintuitive interface just compounded these issues …
Irritating UX
Originating from Keap where everything was smooth and instinctive, GoHighLevel’s learning curve really felt high and challenging.
Straightforward tasks like editing and enhancing workflows involved digging via menu systems that were all over the place. Key settings were unexplainably spread in totally different areas. Moving between features felt disjointed or confusing.
I’ll inform you what I imply by talking about their funnel builder as an instance. There were 3 separate setups panels to handle overall, private, and product configurations. Yet for some crazy factor, the web links to accessibility each of these core settings were expanded on opposite sides of the display. What!?
As somebody that values clean, thoughtful layout, this seriously irritated me.
It reinforced that GoHighLevel still seemed like a work-in-progress rather than a polished item all set for prime-time usage. Their concerns appeared focused on packing in every feature under the sun, with poor functionality as an afterthought.
And talking features, I soon recognized the small cost tag featured costly concessions …
Misleading Pricing GoHighLevel Marketers Toolkit
Among GoHighLevel’s most significant marketing points is the cost effective cost for access to many features. Yet I swiftly learned this cheap base cost was deceptive.
They nickle-and-dimed users with occasional fees for core capability. Instantly my credit card declarations had unclear $10 fees from GoHighLevel here and there.
As it ended up, you obtain charged whenever you send out an email through their web servers. So for high volume individuals, this added up to numerous dollars in unforeseen costs.
In between these per-email fees and paying extra for deliverability add-ons like Mailgun, my “cost effective” GoHighLevel registration ended up costing significantly MORE than my Keap plan.
The low sticker price was appealing, yet simply not reasonable in practice. This bait-and-switch left a bad taste in my mouth.
Email Rates Suffered
The final dealbreaker was seeing my carefully supported e-mail open rates plummet almost overnight after switching over to GoHighLevel.
Formerly, my target market involvement continually struck 35-40% open rates in Keap month after month. But once I moved their records over to GoHighLevel, performance tanked promptly to a worthless 9% open rate.
Despite how much I enhanced my sending techniques or tried every fixing technique, I can barely push open prices back right into the teens– still a 50%+ decrease from my previous benchmarks GoHighLevel Marketers Toolkit.
Let me repeat: my exact same target market and e-mails suddenly had awful interaction. The only thing I can believe that would certainly be causing this was whatever was occurring behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For an agency so depending on e-mail marketing, this was a big deal.
In between the crippling deliverability problems, concealed charges, busted features, and horrible user interface, I had finally reached my limit …
Why I Quit GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Just 45 days after migrating my firm to GoHighLevel, I understood I had made a significant error. The disadvantages substantially exceeded any benefits.
No software program is ideal, however the large quantity of problems was beyond appropriate.
At the end of the day, software application comes down to depend on. If I can’t trust it to manage crucial features effectively or think a vendor has my benefits in mind, after that it’s time to walk away– even after spending substantial time, money, and effort moving.
So I made the hard contact us to turn around training course and return back to Keap entirely simply weeks after going done in on GoHighLevel. Allow’s explore what I picked up from this fiasco.
Trick Takeaways: What I Gained from My GoHighLevel Error
My time with HighLevel can be summed up as an expensive misadventure. Yet in knowledge, it educated me a couple of essential lessons:
- Stay with what works. Do not distress what’s working unless something is definitively much better across the board. Adjustment brings danger.
- Veterinarian asserts thoroughly. Marketing buzz around new software program commonly covers larger underlying defects. Deep due diligence is vital.
- Select simpleness over features. Properly designed tools need to make your job life easier, not much more complex and untidy.
- Transparency constructs trust fund. Nontransparent pricing, dubious reseller terms, and finger-pointing to evade troubles damages count on.
- Seek honest reviews. Delighted assistance assesses imply much less if too much issues suggest inadequate total use.
- Excellence is difficult. No solitary service can flawlessly satisfy every one-of-a-kind business need. Locate the least-bad fit.
- Development over transformation. Step-by-step renovations generally outweigh risky wholesale reinvention of what already works fine.
In other words, I found out to be extra skeptical of “too great to be real” marketing claims and much less attracted by the allure of shiny new objects. The tools you utilize daily should make trust fund through openness and performance, not slick advertising.