As a company proprietor for over a decade, I count on software application and automation to enhance procedures and provide results. So when GoHighLevel emerged on the scene couple of years back, it absolutely captured my attention GoHighLevel Missed Call Text Back.
The concept was enticing– an all-in-one client management platform with marketing, sales, and solution tools integrated with each other. As a business owner always seeking to streamline and scale my company, it felt like a desire come to life on paper. That would not desire a single remedy that does it all?
Yet in this comprehensive GoHighLevel evaluation, I’ll take you inside my dreadful journey of trying (and stopping working) to change to this popular brand-new software program. You’ll discover:
If you’re considering whether GoHighLevel is right for your own organization requirements, ideally you can gain from my uncomfortable blunders and inflated assumptions.
Spoiler: I do NOT suggest GoHighLevel. If you require a CRM, start with this list of ideal CRMs rather. I make use of Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re trying to find a sales, marketing, and task management alternative to GoHighLevel, then here are a couple of we suggest.
Backstory: Why I Thought About Switching Over from Keap
To understand what attracted me to GoHighLevel in the first place, you require context regarding my previous configuration. For over 5 years I had actually been happily relying upon Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) to satisfy all my client management and automation demands.
I discovered Keap user-friendly to make use of and it handled every little thing I required– CRM, e-mail marketing, sales funnels, membership sites, and client assistance.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are made to aid small businesses keep their clients while adding brand-new ones effortlessly. Automate follow-ups with e-mails and messages, guaranteeing leads and clients obtain the appropriate messages at the right time. Usage internet site and social media forms to enhance lead follow-up, and handle your growth with easy consultation organizing and lead monitoring. Boost sales with automated pricing quote, invoicing, and payment handling, liberating your time. With Keap, local business can save 10 hours weekly and increase income by 39%. Beginning with a 14-day free trial, no charge card required.
Why we like Keap
Keap uses a thorough customer relationship management (CRM) and marketing automation service tailored for small businesses and business owners. We value Keap’s concentrate on improving sales procedures and supporting consumer partnerships with powerful automation devices. The system’s all-in-one technique combines CRM, email marketing, invoicing, and job monitoring, making it especially attractive for companies looking to combine their tech pile.
Generally, it just worked dependably with marginal fuss or upkeep required. My open and click-through prices were terrific (like 35% fantastic). Automations ran smoothly without any problems.
So why in the world was I tempted to uproot my whole functional foundation from a system that functioned to attempt something unverified and untested?
In knowledge I can admit I obtained seduced by the alarm call of “shiny item syndrome”. You understand the sensation: when every person’s discussing a new tool that will change your business … The grass often looks greener on the other side, and I wondered whether GoHighLevel could minimize rubbing factors that I ‘d discovered to tolerate throughout the years with Keap.
I resisted at first, but a few even more stress led me to believe perhaps it was time for a change.
The Investment: Moving My Firm to GoHighLevel
Earlier this year I chose to take the plunge. I registered for HighLevel’s Agency plan at $297/month, investing substantially greater than the $97/month starter price.
This had not been a choice I took lightly. I knew switching platforms was mosting likely to require migrating all my Keap information and essentially restoring my entire technology facilities from scratch making use of all of the GoHighLevel integrations offered.
Below’s a review of simply several of the effort needed:
- Manually exporting 20,000+ email customer documents
- Recreating lots of automations and workflows
- Relocating client accounts, notes, and job information to the new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe payment integration
- Setting up landing pages, discounts, and sales funnels throughout once again
- Learning an entirely foreign UX and interface style
Done in, I invested around 30-40 tedious hours of arrangement job transitioning every little thing over– as well as dealing with shed performance throughout the button.
However ultimately, it was a calculated investment I wanted to make. I figured some temporary discomfort would settle with GoHighLevel giving a much better long-term option for my service, Dripify. Oh how incorrect I was …
It only took me regarding a month of hands-on usage to realize I had made a huge mistake. The problems started accumulating swiftly, until it got to a point I had to cut my losses and change back to Keap completely.
Allow’s go through the horrible problems I ran into.
Protection Issues & Numerous Bugs
Given GoHighLevel placed itself as an all-in-one automation system, I took care to meticulously recreate every workflow from my old Keap account.
These consisted of series for onboarding brand-new email clients, onboarding brand-new customers, automating follow-ups for webinar enrollments, sending event pointers, managing subscription expiries and much more.
Whatever seemed to be working penalty … till unexpectedly it wasn’t. One morning, I woke up to discover 171 totally pointless e-mails had actually been sent to customers who ought to NOT have actually obtained them. This occurred 3 days straight, with a various batch of 160 people every day.
I desperately attempted troubleshooting and reconstructing the automation from the ground up. But the problem lingered.
When I frantically reached out to their support group, they vaguely asserted “web server problems” were to blame. However this description didn’t make any type of feeling, considering that the mistakes continued taking place each morning like clockwork unassociated to any downtime.
In my mind, this huge failure was totally unacceptable and just really did not work for my business. I have hundreds of contacts relying upon my automated campaigns running efficiently.
So if GoHighLevel was going to be absolutely unreliable, how could I turn over mission-critical workflows and sensitive customer information to their technology?
The unintuitive interface only compounded these concerns …
Irritating UX
Originating from Keap where everything was smooth and instinctive, GoHighLevel’s learning curve really felt high and difficult.
Basic tasks like editing workflows entailed digging with menu systems that were all over the place. Trick setups were unexplainably scattered in completely different sections. 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 settings panels to take care of total, specific, and item setups. Yet for some insane reason, the web links to gain access to each of these core settings were spread out on contrary sides of the display. What!?
As someone who values tidy, thoughtful style, this seriously irritated me.
It strengthened that GoHighLevel still felt like a work-in-progress instead of a polished product ready for prime-time usage. Their concerns seemed concentrated on stuffing in every feature under the sun, with inadequate functionality as a second thought.
And speaking of features, I soon understood the low cost tag came with costly concessions …
Deceptive Pricing GoHighLevel Missed Call Text Back
Among GoHighLevel’s most significant marketing points is the inexpensive rate for accessibility to numerous features. But I rapidly discovered this low-cost base expense was deceitful.
They nickle-and-dimed customers with erratic fees for core performance. Instantly my credit card declarations had unclear $10 charges from GoHighLevel occasionally.
As it ended up, you get billed whenever you send out an e-mail with their web servers. So for high quantity individuals, this added up to hundreds of dollars in unanticipated costs.
Between these per-email costs and paying extra for deliverability attachments like Mailgun, my “economical” GoHighLevel subscription wound up costing dramatically MORE than my Keap plan.
The low sticker price was appealing, yet just not realistic in practice. This bait-and-switch left a poor preference in my mouth.
Email Rates Suffered
The final dealbreaker was seeing my carefully nurtured email open rates drop practically over night after switching over to GoHighLevel.
Previously, my audience interaction continually hit 35-40% open prices in Keap month after month. Once I migrated their documents over to GoHighLevel, performance tanked promptly to a pitiful 9% open rate.
No matter just how much I maximized my sending out methods or attempted every repairing trick, I could hardly push open rates back right into the teens– still a 50%+ decline from my previous benchmarks GoHighLevel Missed Call Text Back.
Let me repeat: my exact same target market and e-mails instantly had awful engagement. The only point I can believe that would certainly be creating this was whatever was taking place behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For an agency so based on e-mail marketing, this was a big deal.
Between the debilitating deliverability issues, concealed fees, broken features, and dreadful user interface, I had lastly reached my limitation …
Why I Quit GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Just 45 days after migrating my company to GoHighLevel, I understood I had actually made a huge blunder. The cons dramatically surpassed any advantages.
No software program is ideal, but the large quantity of issues was beyond appropriate.
At the end of the day, software boils down to depend on. If I can’t trust it to manage crucial features effectively or think a supplier has my best interests in mind, then it’s time to leave– also after investing significant time, cash, and effort migrating.
So I made the difficult phone call to turn around course and return back to Keap totally simply weeks after going done in on GoHighLevel. Let’s discover what I picked up from this ordeal.
Trick Takeaways: What I Gained from My GoHighLevel Error
My time with HighLevel can be summed up as a pricey ill fortune. But in hindsight, it instructed me a couple of essential lessons:
- Stay with what jobs. Don’t disturb what’s functioning unless something is definitively much better across the board. Change brings danger.
- Vet declares completely. Marketing buzz around brand-new software program typically covers larger underlying defects. Deep due diligence is necessary.
- Pick simplicity over features. Properly designed tools must make your work life much easier, not a lot more complicated and untidy.
- Openness develops trust fund. Opaque pricing, unethical reseller terms, and finger-pointing to avert issues damages trust fund.
- Look for objective evaluations. Happy support examines indicate less if too much concerns indicate poor overall usability.
- Excellence is difficult. No solitary option can perfectly satisfy every one-of-a-kind business need. Discover the least-bad fit.
- Evolution over change. Step-by-step enhancements commonly outweigh high-risk wholesale reinvention of what already functions fine.
In other words, I discovered to be much more doubtful of “too great to be real” marketing insurance claims and less attracted by the allure of glossy new objects. The tools you make use of daily must gain trust with openness and efficiency, not glossy advertising.