As a company proprietor for over a decade, I rely upon software program and automation to enhance operations and provide outcomes. So when GoHighLevel emerged on the scene few years back, it certainly caught my interest GoHighLevel Mobile UI.
The concept was enticing– an all-in-one customer monitoring system with marketing, sales, and service devices incorporated together. As an entrepreneur constantly looking to simplify and scale my service, it felt like a dream happened theoretically. Who would not desire a single solution that does it all?
But in this comprehensive GoHighLevel review, I’ll take you inside my dreadful trip of attempting (and failing) to change to this popular new software application. You’ll discover:
If you’re thinking about whether GoHighLevel is right for your very own company requirements, hopefully you can pick up from my unpleasant blunders and inflated assumptions.
Looter: I do NOT recommend GoHighLevel. If you need a CRM, begin with this list of finest CRMs rather. I use Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re searching for a sales, marketing, and project administration alternative to GoHighLevel, then below are a few we advise.
Backstory: Why I Thought About Changing from Keap
To recognize what attracted me to GoHighLevel to begin with, you need context concerning my previous arrangement. For over 5 years I had actually been gladly counting on Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) to fulfill all my client administration and automation demands.
I found Keap intuitive to make use of and it handled everything I needed– CRM, e-mail marketing, sales funnels, membership sites, and client support.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are developed to assist small businesses keep their clients while adding new ones easily. Automate follow-ups with e-mails and texts, making sure leads and clients obtain the ideal messages at the correct time. Use website and social media forms to streamline lead follow-up, and handle your development with easy appointment organizing and lead monitoring. Boost sales with automated pricing quote, invoicing, and settlement handling, maximizing your time. With Keap, small businesses can save 10 hours weekly and increase income by 39%. Begin with a 14-day free trial, no bank card needed.
Why we like Keap
Keap offers an extensive client partnership management (CRM) and marketing automation option tailored for local business and entrepreneurs. We appreciate Keap’s concentrate on improving sales processes and nurturing client partnerships through effective automation devices. The platform’s all-in-one technique incorporates CRM, e-mail marketing, invoicing, and job administration, making it particularly appealing for businesses aiming to combine their technology pile.
Essentially, it just worked dependably with minimal hassle or upkeep required. My open and click-through rates were wonderful (like 35% terrific). Automations ran efficiently without any problems.
So why in the world was I lured to uproot my entire functional structure from a system that worked to try something unproven and untried?
In knowledge I can confess I got attracted by the siren telephone call of “glossy item disorder”. You know the feeling: when everyone’s discussing a brand-new device that will certainly reinvent your company … The turf often looks greener on the other side, and I wondered whether GoHighLevel may lower friction points that I would certainly discovered to endure over the years with Keap.
I stood up to initially, yet a few even more disappointments led me to think possibly it was time for a modification.
The Investment: Moving My Agency to GoHighLevel
Previously this year I made a decision to start. I enrolled in HighLevel’s Agency plan at $297/month, investing dramatically greater than the $97/month starter cost.
This had not been a choice I took lightly. I knew switching systems was going to require moving all my Keap data and essentially restoring my whole tech facilities from the ground up using all of the GoHighLevel integrations readily available.
Below’s a review of simply some of the effort called for:
- Manually exporting 20,000+ e-mail subscriber documents
- Recreating lots of automations and workflows
- Moving client profiles, notes, and project information to the new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe invoicing integration
- Establishing landing pages, discounts, and sales funnels throughout once again
- Learning a completely foreign UX and interface design
All in, I spent around 30-40 laborious hours of setup work transitioning whatever over– not to mention dealing with shed productivity throughout the switch.
However ultimately, it was a computed financial investment I agreed to make. I figured some short-term pain would settle with GoHighLevel providing a much better long-lasting option for my business, Dripify. Oh just how incorrect I was …
It just took me concerning a month of hands-on usage to realize I had made a big mistake. The concerns began piling up swiftly, up until it got to a factor I had to cut my losses and switch over back to Keap entirely.
Allow’s walk through the horrible issues I experienced.
Protection Issues & Many Vermin
Offered GoHighLevel placed itself as an all-in-one automation system, I took care to diligently recreate each and every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These consisted of series for onboarding brand-new email clients, onboarding brand-new clients, automating follow-ups for webinar enrollments, sending event pointers, taking care of membership expiries and a lot more.
Everything appeared to be operating fine … up until all of a sudden it had not been. One morning, I woke up to find 171 totally pointless emails had actually been sent to customers who should NOT have actually gotten them. This happened 3 days in a row, with a different batch of 160 people daily.
I frantically tried repairing and restoring the automation from scratch. Yet the trouble lingered.
When I frantically connected to their assistance group, they vaguely declared “web server concerns” were responsible. Yet this explanation really did not make any type of sense, given that the errors continued happening each morning like clockwork unassociated to any type of downtime.
In my mind, this huge failure was totally inappropriate and simply didn’t help my organization. I have countless get in touches with relying on my automated campaigns running efficiently.
So if GoHighLevel was going to be totally undependable, just how could I leave mission-critical workflows and sensitive customer information to their modern technology?
The unintuitive user interface just intensified these concerns …
Frustrating UX
Originating from Keap where whatever was seamless and instinctive, GoHighLevel’s learning contour really felt steep and complicated.
Easy jobs like editing workflows included excavating via menu systems that were all over the place. Secret setups were unexplainably scattered in entirely different areas. Moving in between functions felt disjointed or complicated.
I’ll inform you what I suggest by talking about their funnel builder as an instance. There were 3 separate setups panels to manage overall, private, and product setups. Yet for some insane factor, the web links to gain access to each of these core setups were spread out on contrary sides of the display. What!?
As somebody who values clean, thoughtful layout, this seriously frustrated me.
It reinforced that GoHighLevel still felt like a work-in-progress as opposed to a polished item ready for prime-time usage. Their top priorities seemed concentrated on stuffing in every feature under the sun, with bad usability as a second thought.
And speaking of features, I soon recognized the low price tag featured expensive compromises …
Deceptive Pricing GoHighLevel Mobile UI
One of GoHighLevel’s biggest marketing points is the budget-friendly cost for access to many features. Yet I swiftly discovered this inexpensive base price was misleading.
They nickle-and-dimed customers with sporadic fees for core functionality. Unexpectedly my charge card statements had obscure $10 fees from GoHighLevel here and there.
As it ended up, you obtain charged each time you send an email via their web servers. So for high quantity individuals, this amounted to numerous bucks in unexpected prices.
Between these per-email charges and paying additional for deliverability add-ons like Mailgun, my “budget-friendly” GoHighLevel membership wound up costing considerably MORE than my Keap plan.
The low sticker price was alluring, but simply not sensible in practice. This bait-and-switch left a bad taste in my mouth.
Email Rates Suffered
The final dealbreaker was seeing my thoroughly supported e-mail open prices drop practically over night after switching to GoHighLevel.
Formerly, my target market involvement regularly struck 35-40% open rates in Keap month after month. Once I moved their records over to GoHighLevel, performance tanked instantly to a worthless 9% open price.
Regardless of how much I enhanced my sending techniques or tried every repairing method, I can hardly push open prices back into the teenagers– still a 50%+ decline from my previous criteria GoHighLevel Mobile UI.
Let me repeat: my exact same audience and e-mails all of a sudden had dreadful engagement. The only thing I can think that would be causing this was whatever was occurring behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a company so based on e-mail marketing, this was a big deal.
Between the crippling deliverability issues, concealed charges, busted features, and awful user interface, I had lastly reached my restriction …
Why I Quit GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Just 45 days after moving my firm to GoHighLevel, I recognized I had made a significant error. The cons drastically exceeded any kind of advantages.
No software application is ideal, yet the sheer volume of troubles was past appropriate.
At the end of the day, software application comes down to depend on. If I can not trust it to manage crucial functions effectively or believe a supplier has my benefits in mind, then it’s time to walk away– also after spending substantial time, money, and effort moving.
So I made the challenging phone call to turn around training course and return back to Keap entirely just weeks after going done in on GoHighLevel. Let’s explore what I gained from this fiasco.
Key Takeaways: What I Gained from My GoHighLevel Blunder
My time with HighLevel can be summed up as a pricey accident. But in hindsight, it taught me a couple of key lessons:
- Stay with what works. Don’t distress what’s working unless something is definitively better across the board. Modification brings threat.
- Veterinarian declares extensively. Marketing hype around brand-new software application usually covers larger underlying problems. Deep due diligence is vital.
- Pick simplicity over features. Well-designed tools should make your job life less complicated, not much more complicated and messy.
- Openness develops trust. Opaque pricing, shady reseller terms, and finger-pointing to escape issues destroys trust fund.
- Look for unbiased testimonials. Delighted support reviews mean less if too much concerns suggest poor general usability.
- Excellence is difficult. No solitary service can flawlessly satisfy every one-of-a-kind business requirement. Locate the least-bad fit.
- Development over transformation. Step-by-step improvements typically surpass high-risk wholesale reinvention of what currently functions fine.
Basically, I found out to be extra skeptical of “as well excellent to be true” marketing cases and much less tempted by the attraction of shiny new things. The devices you make use of daily must gain trust through openness and performance, not glossy advertising.