As a firm owner for over a years, I depend on software application and automation to streamline procedures and provide outcomes. So when GoHighLevel emerged on the scene few years back, it certainly caught my focus GoHighLevel Order Bump.
The concept was attractive– an all-in-one client management platform with marketing, sales, and service tools integrated with each other. As an entrepreneur always looking to simplify and scale my business, it felt like a desire happened theoretically. Who wouldn’t desire a solitary remedy that does it all?
However in this comprehensive GoHighLevel testimonial, I’ll take you inside my devastating journey of trying (and failing) to switch to this prominent new software program. You’ll discover:
If you’re thinking about whether GoHighLevel is right for your own company requirements, with any luck you can learn from my agonizing blunders and pumped up assumptions.
Looter: I do NOT suggest GoHighLevel. If you need a CRM, start with this list of ideal CRMs instead. I use Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re looking for a sales, marketing, and project monitoring option to GoHighLevel, then here are a few we recommend.
Backstory: Why I Thought About Changing from Keap
To comprehend what attracted me to GoHighLevel to begin with, you need context about my previous setup. For over 5 years I had been gladly relying on Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) to meet all my client administration and automation needs.
I located Keap user-friendly to utilize and it took care of whatever I needed– CRM, email marketing, sales funnels, membership websites, and customer assistance.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are developed to help local business keep their customers while including new ones effortlessly. Automate follow-ups with e-mails and messages, guaranteeing leads and customers receive the best messages at the correct time. Usage web site and social networks kinds to improve lead follow-up, and handle your development with easy consultation organizing and lead tracking. Boost sales with automated quoting, invoicing, and settlement processing, maximizing your time. With Keap, local business can save 10 hours per week and rise revenue by 39%. Beginning with a 14-day free trial, no bank card called for.
Why we like Keap
Keap supplies a detailed consumer partnership administration (CRM) and marketing automation solution customized for local business and entrepreneurs. We appreciate Keap’s focus on enhancing sales processes and nurturing client partnerships with effective automation tools. The system’s all-in-one technique integrates CRM, email marketing, invoicing, and task administration, making it specifically attractive for services wanting to consolidate their technology pile.
Generally, it simply worked accurately with minimal fuss or maintenance needed. My open and click-through rates were great (like 35% excellent). Automations ran efficiently with no problems.
So why on earth was I lured to uproot my entire operational foundation from a system that functioned to try something unverified and untried?
In hindsight I can confess I got seduced by the alarm telephone call of “shiny object syndrome”. You know the feeling: when everybody’s talking about a new tool that will change your service … The yard typically looks greener on the other side, and I wondered whether GoHighLevel might reduce friction factors that I would certainly learned to tolerate over the years with Keap.
I stood up to in the beginning, however a few even more frustrations led me to believe maybe it was time for an adjustment.
The Financial investment: Migrating My Agency to GoHighLevel
Previously this year I decided to take the plunge. I enrolled in HighLevel’s Company plan at $297/month, spending substantially greater than the $97/month starter expense.
This had not been a decision I took lightly. I understood changing platforms was going to need moving all my Keap information and essentially rebuilding my whole tech infrastructure from square one utilizing all of the GoHighLevel integrations available.
Below’s a summary of just several of the effort needed:
- Manually exporting 20,000+ email customer documents
- Recreating loads of automations and workflows
- Moving client profiles, notes, and task data to the brand-new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe billing integration
- Setting up landing pages, promos, and sales funnels throughout again
- Learning an entirely international UX and interface layout
Done in, I spent around 30-40 tiresome hours of arrangement work transitioning whatever over– as well as managing lost productivity during the switch.
Yet ultimately, it was a computed investment I wanted to make. I figured some temporary pain would pay off with GoHighLevel supplying a much better long-term remedy for my business, Dripify. Oh just how incorrect I was …
It only took me concerning a month of hands-on use to understand I had made a huge blunder. The problems began accumulating quickly, until it got to a point I needed to cut my losses and change back to Keap completely.
Allow’s walk through the horrible problems I ran into.
Safety Issues & Several Vermin
Provided GoHighLevel positioned itself as an all-in-one automation system, I made sure to thoroughly recreate every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These included series for onboarding brand-new e-mail clients, onboarding new customers, automating follow-ups for webinar enrollments, sending out occasion pointers, handling membership expirations and much more.
Whatever seemed to be working fine … until suddenly it wasn’t. One morning, I woke up to find 171 completely pointless e-mails had actually been sent out to users who should NOT have actually gotten them. This occurred three days in a row, with a different set of 160 people daily.
I desperately attempted fixing and rebuilding the automation from the ground up. Yet the problem persisted.
When I frantically connected to their assistance team, they vaguely declared “web server concerns” were responsible. But this explanation didn’t make any kind of sense, given that the mistakes continued taking place each early morning like clockwork unassociated to any kind of downtime.
In my mind, this large failure was completely undesirable and simply didn’t help my company. I have thousands of calls counting on my automated campaigns running smoothly.
So if GoHighLevel was going to be entirely unstable, how could I turn over mission-critical workflows and sensitive client information to their technology?
The unintuitive interface just intensified these issues …
Discouraging UX
Originating from Keap where everything was smooth and instinctive, GoHighLevel’s learning contour felt high and complicated.
Basic jobs like modifying workflows included excavating through menu systems that were all over the place. Key setups were unexplainably spread in totally different areas. Relocating between functions really felt disjointed or complicated.
I’ll inform you what I suggest by discussing their funnel builder as an example. There were 3 separate settings panels to manage overall, private, and item configurations. Yet for some crazy reason, the links to accessibility each of these core settings were spread out on opposite sides of the screen. What!?
As somebody that values clean, thoughtful design, this seriously frustrated me.
It strengthened that GoHighLevel still seemed like a work-in-progress instead of a polished item prepared for prime-time use. Their top priorities seemed concentrated on cramming in every feature under the sun, with poor usability as a second thought.
And talking features, I quickly realized the affordable price tag featured expensive concessions …
Deceptive Pricing GoHighLevel Order Bump
Among GoHighLevel’s largest selling points is the inexpensive cost for accessibility to so many features. However I swiftly discovered this inexpensive base price was deceptive.
They nickle-and-dimed individuals with occasional fees for core capability. Instantly my charge card statements had vague $10 fees from GoHighLevel occasionally.
As it turned out, you obtain billed each time you send out an email through their web servers. So for high quantity individuals, this added up to numerous dollars in unexpected expenses.
Between these per-email costs and paying extra for deliverability attachments like Mailgun, my “cost effective” GoHighLevel registration wound up costing substantially MORE than my Keap plan.
The low sticker price was appealing, however just not practical in practice. This bait-and-switch left a bad taste in my mouth.
Email Rates Suffered
The final dealbreaker was seeing my thoroughly nurtured email open rates plummet virtually overnight after switching over to GoHighLevel.
Previously, my target market interaction regularly struck 35-40% open prices in Keap month after month. Once I moved their documents over to GoHighLevel, performance tanked instantly to a pitiful 9% open price.
No matter just how much I optimized my sending out techniques or attempted every fixing trick, I could hardly push open prices back into the teenagers– still a 50%+ decrease from my previous standards GoHighLevel Order Bump.
Let me repeat: my exact same target market and e-mails unexpectedly had horrible involvement. The only thing I could think that would certainly be triggering this was whatever was happening behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For an agency so dependent on email marketing, this was a big deal.
In between the debilitating deliverability concerns, concealed costs, busted features, and horrible interface, I had ultimately reached my limitation …
Why I Quit GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Just 45 days after migrating my firm to GoHighLevel, I recognized I had actually made a substantial mistake. The cons dramatically exceeded any advantages.
No software is perfect, however the sheer volume of troubles was beyond appropriate.
At the end of the day, software boils down to trust. If I can’t trust it to take care of crucial features properly or think a vendor has my best interests in mind, then it’s time to leave– even after investing significant time, money, and effort moving.
So I made the challenging call to reverse course and return back to Keap completely just weeks after going done in on GoHighLevel. Let’s discover what I learned from this debacle.
Secret Takeaways: What I Learned From My GoHighLevel Mistake
My time with HighLevel can be summed up as a pricey misadventure. Yet in knowledge, it taught me a couple of vital lessons:
- Stay with what works. Do not distress what’s functioning unless something is definitively better across the board. Adjustment brings threat.
- Veterinarian claims extensively. Marketing hype around brand-new software program often obscures bigger underlying problems. Deep due persistance is essential.
- Select simplicity over features. Properly designed tools ought to make your job life easier, not extra difficult and messy.
- Openness constructs depend on. Opaque pricing, shady reseller terms, and finger-pointing to evade problems damages count on.
- Seek objective testimonials. Happy assistance evaluates mean less if too much concerns indicate inadequate total usability.
- Excellence is impossible. No single remedy can completely meet every special service demand. Discover the least-bad fit.
- Development over revolution. Step-by-step enhancements commonly exceed risky wholesale reinvention of what currently works fine.
Basically, I discovered to be more unconvinced of “also great to be true” marketing claims and much less attracted by the attraction of glossy brand-new objects. The tools you make use of daily must make count on with openness and efficiency, not glossy advertising.