As a firm owner for over a years, I count on software application and automation to streamline procedures and supply outcomes. So when GoHighLevel arised on the scene few years back, it certainly caught my focus GoHighLevel Monthly Town Hall.
The idea was attractive– an all-in-one customer monitoring platform with marketing, sales, and solution tools incorporated together. As a business owner always seeking to streamline and scale my company, it looked like a desire become a reality theoretically. That would not want a solitary option that does it all?
However in this comprehensive GoHighLevel testimonial, I’ll take you inside my tragic journey of attempting (and stopping working) to switch over to this prominent new software program. You’ll discover:
If you’re thinking about whether GoHighLevel is right for your very own business demands, hopefully you can learn from my excruciating blunders and pumped up expectations.
Spoiler: I do NOT suggest GoHighLevel. If you need a CRM, start with this list of best CRMs instead. I make use of Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re looking for a sales, marketing, and task monitoring alternative to GoHighLevel, after that below are a couple of we recommend.
Backstory: Why I Thought About Changing from Keap
To understand what attracted me to GoHighLevel to begin with, you require context regarding my previous setup. For over 5 years I had actually been happily relying on Keap (previously Infusionsoft) to fulfill all my client management and automation demands.
I located Keap user-friendly to utilize and it dealt with every little thing I required– CRM, email marketing, sales funnels, membership websites, and client support.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are created to aid small businesses maintain their clients while including new ones easily. Automate follow-ups with e-mails and messages, making sure leads and customers obtain the ideal messages at the correct time. Usage website and social media sites forms to improve lead follow-up, and manage your development with very easy consultation organizing and lead monitoring. Boost sales with automated quoting, invoicing, and payment handling, freeing up your time. With Keap, small businesses can save 10 hours per week and rise revenue by 39%. Begin with a 14-day free trial, no charge card required.
Why we like Keap
Keap offers a detailed customer partnership administration (CRM) and marketing automation option customized for local business and business owners. We value Keap’s focus on improving sales processes and nurturing consumer connections with effective automation devices. The platform’s all-in-one technique integrates CRM, email marketing, invoicing, and job management, making it particularly eye-catching for services aiming to settle their tech pile.
Essentially, it just worked dependably with very little fuss or upkeep required. My open and click-through prices were fantastic (like 35% fantastic). Automations ran efficiently without problems.
So why on earth was I attracted to uproot my whole functional structure from a system that worked to attempt something unproven and untested?
In hindsight I can confess I got attracted by the siren call of “shiny item disorder”. You recognize the sensation: when every person’s discussing a brand-new tool that will certainly revolutionize your organization … The turf typically looks greener beyond, and I asked yourself whether GoHighLevel could reduce rubbing factors that I would certainly found out to tolerate throughout the years with Keap.
I stood up to initially, but a couple of more aggravations led me to believe maybe it was time for a modification.
The Financial investment: Migrating My Company to GoHighLevel
Earlier this year I made a decision to start. I registered for HighLevel’s Agency plan at $297/month, investing significantly greater than the $97/month starter cost.
This had not been a decision I took lightly. I knew switching over systems was mosting likely to need moving all my Keap data and essentially restoring my whole tech infrastructure from scratch utilizing every one of the GoHighLevel integrations available.
Here’s an introduction of simply a few of the effort called for:
- Manually exporting 20,000+ email subscriber records
- Recreating dozens of automations and workflows
- Moving customer profiles, notes, and project data to the new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe invoicing integration
- Setting up landing pages, coupons, and sales funnels throughout once more
- Learning a completely foreign UX and user interface design
Done in, I invested around 30-40 tiresome hours of arrangement job transitioning whatever over– as well as taking care of shed productivity during the switch.
But eventually, it was a computed investment I wanted to make. I figured some short-term discomfort would certainly pay off with GoHighLevel giving a much better long-term solution for my business, Dripify. Oh how wrong I was …
It only took me regarding a month of hands-on usage to understand I had actually made a big mistake. The issues began accumulating promptly, until it got to a factor I needed to cut my losses and change back to Keap entirely.
Let’s walk through the nightmarish issues I encountered.
Security Issues & Several Vermin
Provided GoHighLevel placed itself as an all-in-one automation platform, I made sure to carefully recreate every workflow from my old Keap account.
These included sequences for onboarding new email subscribers, onboarding brand-new customers, automating follow-ups for webinar registrations, sending out occasion suggestions, handling subscription expiries and much more.
Whatever appeared to be operating penalty … until all of a sudden it had not been. One morning, I awoke to find 171 totally pointless e-mails had been sent to individuals who ought to NOT have actually received them. This occurred three days straight, with a various batch of 160 individuals daily.
I frantically attempted troubleshooting and reconstructing the automation from square one. But the trouble lingered.
When I desperately reached out to their support group, they vaguely claimed “web server concerns” were at fault. Yet this explanation really did not make any kind of feeling, since the mistakes proceeded happening each morning like clockwork unassociated to any downtime.
In my mind, this large failing was totally unacceptable and simply really did not benefit my business. I have hundreds of contacts depending on my automated campaigns running smoothly.
So if GoHighLevel was mosting likely to be absolutely undependable, exactly how could I entrust mission-critical workflows and delicate client data to their modern technology?
The unintuitive user interface just worsened these problems …
Frustrating UX
Coming from Keap where whatever was smooth and intuitive, GoHighLevel’s learning contour really felt high and difficult.
Basic jobs like editing and enhancing workflows included digging through menu systems that were all over the place. Secret settings were unexplainably scattered in absolutely various sections. Relocating in between functions really felt disjointed or confusing.
I’ll inform you what I suggest by talking about their funnel builder as an instance. There were 3 separate settings panels to manage overall, private, and item setups. Yet for some crazy reason, the web links to accessibility each of these core setups were expanded on contrary sides of the display. What!?
As someone that values tidy, thoughtful design, this seriously frustrated me.
It enhanced that GoHighLevel still felt like a work-in-progress as opposed to a sleek item prepared for prime-time usage. Their concerns seemed focused on cramming in every feature under the sun, with bad use as an afterthought.
And talking features, I quickly understood the low cost tag came with costly concessions …
Deceptive Pricing GoHighLevel Monthly Town Hall
One of GoHighLevel’s biggest marketing points is the budget friendly rate for accessibility to numerous features. Yet I promptly learned this inexpensive base price was deceptive.
They nickle-and-dimed individuals with occasional charges for core performance. Unexpectedly my charge card declarations had unclear $10 charges from GoHighLevel occasionally.
As it ended up, you get billed every time you send out an e-mail with their servers. So for high quantity users, this amounted to thousands of bucks in unexpected expenses.
Between these per-email fees and paying extra for deliverability add-ons like Mailgun, my “economical” GoHighLevel registration wound up costing substantially MORE than my Keap plan.
The reduced price tag was appealing, however just not reasonable in practice. This bait-and-switch left a negative taste in my mouth.
Email Fees Suffered
The final dealbreaker was seeing my thoroughly nurtured e-mail open prices plummet practically overnight after switching to GoHighLevel.
Previously, my audience interaction consistently struck 35-40% open prices in Keap month after month. Once I moved their documents over to GoHighLevel, performance tanked quickly to a pathetic 9% open rate.
Despite just how much I optimized my sending out methods or tried every fixing trick, I can hardly push open rates back into the teens– still a 50%+ decline from my previous benchmarks GoHighLevel Monthly Town Hall.
Let me repeat: my exact same target market and emails suddenly had terrible engagement. The only thing I might think that would be triggering this was whatever was happening behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a company so depending on e-mail marketing, this was a big deal.
In between the crippling deliverability issues, hidden costs, broken features, and terrible user interface, I had actually finally reached my limit …
Why I Stop GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Simply 45 days after moving my company to GoHighLevel, I understood I had actually made a big blunder. The cons drastically outweighed any type of benefits.
No software application is perfect, but the sheer quantity of issues was beyond acceptable.
At the end of the day, software comes down to trust. If I can not trust it to manage important functions capably or think a vendor has my best interests in mind, then it’s time to walk away– also after spending considerable time, cash, and effort moving.
So I made the difficult phone call to turn around program and return back to Keap completely just weeks after going all in on GoHighLevel. Let’s discover what I learned from this fiasco.
Secret Takeaways: What I Picked up from My GoHighLevel Error
My time with HighLevel can be summed up as an expensive accident. But in knowledge, it instructed me a few vital lessons:
- Stay with what works. Don’t distress what’s working unless something is definitively better across the board. Adjustment brings danger.
- Vet declares completely. Marketing hype around brand-new software typically obscures bigger underlying imperfections. Deep due persistance is essential.
- Choose simplicity over features. Well-designed tools ought to make your job life much easier, not much more challenging and untidy.
- Openness develops trust. Nontransparent pricing, unethical reseller terms, and finger-pointing to escape problems ruins depend on.
- Seek objective reviews. Delighted assistance examines suggest much less if excessive issues suggest bad general use.
- Excellence is impossible. No single service can completely satisfy every one-of-a-kind business need. Find the least-bad fit.
- Advancement over change. Step-by-step enhancements usually exceed dangerous wholesale reinvention of what already works fine.
In other words, I found out to be more cynical of “too great to be true” marketing insurance claims and much less tempted by the attraction of glossy brand-new things. The devices you use daily must gain count on with openness and efficiency, not slick advertising.