As a company owner for over a decade, I rely upon software application and automation to streamline procedures and supply results. So when GoHighLevel emerged on the scene couple of years back, it certainly captured my attention GoHighLevel Mobile Payments Options.
The idea was attractive– an all-in-one customer monitoring system with marketing, sales, and solution tools incorporated together. As a business owner constantly wanting to simplify and scale my organization, it appeared like a desire come to life on paper. Who would not desire a solitary remedy that does it all?
However in this extensive GoHighLevel review, I’ll take you inside my devastating journey of trying (and falling short) to change to this prominent new software program. You’ll learn:
If you’re considering whether GoHighLevel is right for your very own company requirements, ideally you can gain from my painful errors and inflated expectations.
Looter: I do NOT suggest GoHighLevel. If you need a CRM, begin with this checklist of ideal CRMs rather. I make use of Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re trying to find a sales, marketing, and job management choice to GoHighLevel, after that below are a couple of we recommend.
Backstory: Why I Took Into Consideration Switching from Keap
To understand what attracted me to GoHighLevel in the first place, you require context about my previous arrangement. For over 5 years I had actually been happily relying upon Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) to fulfill all my client monitoring and automation needs.
I discovered Keap intuitive to use and it managed whatever I required– CRM, e-mail marketing, sales funnels, membership websites, and customer assistance.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are made to assist small businesses keep their clients while adding brand-new ones effortlessly. Automate follow-ups with e-mails and texts, ensuring leads and customers receive the right messages at the right time. Usage web site and social networks types to improve lead follow-up, and handle your growth with very easy consultation organizing and lead monitoring. Boost sales with automated estimating, invoicing, and payment processing, maximizing your time. With Keap, local business can save 10 hours weekly and rise profits by 39%. Beginning with a 14-day free trial, no credit card required.
Why we like Keap
Keap uses an extensive consumer partnership administration (CRM) and marketing automation option customized for small companies and business owners. We appreciate Keap’s concentrate on simplifying sales procedures and nurturing client connections with powerful automation devices. The system’s all-in-one approach incorporates CRM, email marketing, invoicing, and task administration, making it especially eye-catching for organizations looking to consolidate their technology pile.
Essentially, it just functioned reliably with marginal fuss or maintenance called for. My open and click-through rates were terrific (like 35% terrific). Automations ran efficiently with no concerns.
So why in the world was I tempted to uproot my entire functional structure from a system that worked to try something unproven and untried?
In hindsight I can admit I got seduced by the siren phone call of “shiny things syndrome”. You understand the sensation: when every person’s speaking about a brand-new tool that will certainly revolutionize your business … The turf usually looks greener beyond, and I wondered whether GoHighLevel may minimize rubbing points that I ‘d learned to endure over the years with Keap.
I withstood at first, yet a couple of even more aggravations led me to believe possibly it was time for an adjustment.
The Financial investment: Migrating My Company to GoHighLevel
Previously this year I determined to start. I signed up for HighLevel’s Company plan at $297/month, spending considerably more than the $97/month starter expense.
This had not been a decision I ignored. I understood changing platforms was going to call for migrating all my Keap information and basically rebuilding my whole tech facilities from square one utilizing every one of the GoHighLevel integrations offered.
Right here’s an introduction of simply a few of the initiative called for:
- By hand exporting 20,000+ email subscriber documents
- Recreating lots of automations and workflows
- Moving client accounts, notes, and job data to the new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe payment integration
- Setting up landing pages, coupons, and sales funnels all over once more
- Learning an entirely foreign UX and user interface style
Done in, I invested around 30-40 tiresome hours of arrangement work transitioning whatever over– and also dealing with lost performance during the button.
However eventually, it was a computed investment I agreed to make. I figured some short-term discomfort would repay with GoHighLevel supplying a far better long-lasting remedy for my organization, Dripify. Oh how incorrect I was …
It just took me regarding a month of hands-on usage to realize I had actually made a large blunder. The concerns began piling up swiftly, until it reached a factor I had to reduce my losses and change back to Keap completely.
Allow’s go through the horrible troubles I encountered.
Safety And Security Issues & Several Bugs
Given GoHighLevel placed itself as an all-in-one automation system, I made sure to meticulously recreate each and every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These included series for onboarding new email subscribers, onboarding new clients, automating follow-ups for webinar registrations, sending out event reminders, managing subscription expiries and a lot more.
Whatever appeared to be operating fine … until suddenly it wasn’t. One morning, I awoke to locate 171 completely unimportant emails had been sent to users who ought to NOT have received them. This happened three days straight, with a various set of 160 people daily.
I frantically attempted repairing and reconstructing the automation from scratch. However the issue continued.
When I desperately reached out to their assistance group, they slightly declared “web server problems” were responsible. Yet this description didn’t make any type of sense, considering that the errors proceeded occurring each morning like clockwork unrelated to any kind of downtime.
In my mind, this large failure was completely undesirable and simply really did not work for my organization. I have countless calls depending on my automated campaigns running smoothly.
So if GoHighLevel was mosting likely to be totally unstable, exactly how could I delegate mission-critical workflows and sensitive client data to their innovation?
The unintuitive user interface just compounded these problems …
Discouraging UX
Coming from Keap where everything was seamless and instinctive, GoHighLevel’s learning curve really felt high and complicated.
Basic jobs like modifying workflows involved digging with menu systems that were all over the place. Secret settings were unexplainably spread in absolutely various sections. Moving between functions felt disjointed or complicated.
I’ll tell you what I suggest by speaking about their funnel builder as an example. There were 3 separate setups panels to manage overall, private, and item arrangements. Yet for some insane factor, the links to access each of these core settings were spread out on contrary sides of the display. What!?
As someone that values tidy, thoughtful style, this seriously annoyed me.
It enhanced that GoHighLevel still seemed like a work-in-progress rather than a polished product prepared for prime-time use. Their priorities appeared focused on stuffing in every feature under the sun, with poor functionality as a second thought.
And speaking of features, I quickly recognized the low price tag came with costly compromises …
Misleading Pricing GoHighLevel Mobile Payments Options
Among GoHighLevel’s biggest selling points is the economical rate for access to many features. Yet I swiftly learned this affordable base cost was misleading.
They nickle-and-dimed users with occasional fees for core performance. Suddenly my credit card statements had unclear $10 charges from GoHighLevel here and there.
As it ended up, you obtain billed every single time you send out an email via their servers. So for high quantity individuals, this amounted to thousands of dollars in unanticipated costs.
Between these per-email fees and paying additional for deliverability attachments like Mailgun, my “inexpensive” GoHighLevel registration wound up setting you back considerably MORE than my Keap plan.
The reduced sticker price was tempting, yet just not practical in practice. This bait-and-switch left a poor preference in my mouth.
Email Rates Suffered
The last dealbreaker was seeing my meticulously nurtured e-mail open prices drop virtually over night after switching to GoHighLevel.
Formerly, my target market engagement continually struck 35-40% open rates in Keap month after month. Once I moved their records over to GoHighLevel, performance tanked promptly to a worthless 9% open price.
Regardless of how much I enhanced my sending practices or attempted every repairing method, I might hardly nudge open prices back right into the teenagers– still a 50%+ decrease from my previous criteria GoHighLevel Mobile Payments Options.
Let me repeat: my exact same audience and emails suddenly had awful interaction. The only thing I can think that would certainly be causing this was whatever was occurring behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a firm so based on e-mail marketing, this was a big deal.
In between the crippling deliverability issues, concealed costs, busted features, and dreadful user interface, I had finally reached my limitation …
Why I Give up GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Just 45 days after migrating my agency to GoHighLevel, I recognized I had actually made a huge mistake. The cons considerably surpassed any type of benefits.
No software program is excellent, however the sheer quantity of problems was past appropriate.
At the end of the day, software application comes down to trust fund. If I can’t trust it to manage vital functions effectively or believe a vendor has my benefits in mind, after that it’s time to walk away– even after investing significant time, cash, and effort migrating.
So I made the challenging contact us to turn around course and return back to Keap completely just weeks after going done in on GoHighLevel. Allow’s discover what I learned from this debacle.
Key Takeaways: What I Learned From My GoHighLevel Error
My time with HighLevel can be summarized as a costly ill fortune. But in hindsight, it taught me a couple of vital lessons:
- Stay with what works. Do not distress what’s functioning unless something is definitively much better across the board. Change brings threat.
- Vet asserts extensively. Marketing hype around brand-new software application frequently obscures larger underlying defects. Deep due persistance is essential.
- Choose simplicity over features. Properly designed tools should make your work life less complicated, not extra difficult and untidy.
- Transparency constructs depend on. Opaque pricing, questionable reseller terms, and finger-pointing to escape troubles damages count on.
- Seek objective evaluations. Delighted support assesses indicate much less if excessive issues imply bad total functionality.
- Perfection is difficult. No single solution can completely fulfill every special business need. Discover the least-bad fit.
- Evolution over revolution. Step-by-step enhancements generally outweigh high-risk wholesale reinvention of what currently works penalty.
Basically, I discovered to be more cynical of “also excellent to be real” marketing cases and much less lured by the attraction of shiny brand-new items. The devices you utilize daily should earn trust through openness and performance, not glossy advertising.