As a firm proprietor for over a decade, I depend on software application and automation to streamline procedures and supply results. So when GoHighLevel emerged on the scene few years back, it definitely captured my interest GoHighLevel Outbound Calls.
The idea was appealing– an all-in-one client monitoring platform with marketing, sales, and solution tools incorporated with each other. As a business owner constantly aiming to simplify and scale my service, it seemed like a desire come true on paper. Who wouldn’t desire a solitary solution that does it all?
However in this comprehensive GoHighLevel evaluation, I’ll take you inside my tragic journey of trying (and falling short) to switch over to this preferred brand-new software. You’ll find out:
If you’re taking into consideration whether GoHighLevel is right for your very own organization needs, with any luck you can gain from my painful errors and blew up assumptions.
Looter: I do NOT advise GoHighLevel. If you need a CRM, begin with this list of ideal CRMs instead. I make use of Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re searching for a sales, marketing, and job management option to GoHighLevel, after that below are a couple of we suggest.
Backstory: Why I Took Into Consideration Changing from Keap
To comprehend what attracted me to GoHighLevel to begin with, you need context regarding my previous arrangement. For over 5 years I had been happily depending on Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) to fulfill all my client administration and automation requirements.
I located Keap intuitive to use and it took care of everything I needed– CRM, e-mail marketing, sales funnels, membership sites, and customer assistance.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are created to help local business keep their clients while including brand-new ones effortlessly. Automate follow-ups with emails and texts, making sure leads and customers receive the right messages at the correct time. Use internet site and social media sites types to streamline lead follow-up, and handle your development with very easy consultation scheduling and lead monitoring. Boost sales with automated quoting, invoicing, and repayment processing, maximizing your time. With Keap, local business can conserve 10 hours weekly and rise profits by 39%. Start with a 14-day free trial, no credit card needed.
Why we like Keap
Keap supplies a thorough customer connection administration (CRM) and marketing automation remedy customized for small businesses and entrepreneurs. We value Keap’s focus on simplifying sales processes and supporting client partnerships through powerful automation tools. The system’s all-in-one technique combines CRM, e-mail marketing, invoicing, and task administration, making it especially appealing for services looking to settle their technology stack.
For the most part, it just functioned reliably with very little fuss or maintenance needed. My open and click-through prices were fantastic (like 35% wonderful). Automations ran efficiently with no issues.
So why on earth was I tempted to uproot my whole operational foundation from a system that worked to try something unproven and untried?
In knowledge I can confess I obtained seduced by the siren telephone call of “shiny object syndrome”. You understand the sensation: when every person’s discussing a new device that will certainly change your service … The yard commonly looks greener on the other side, and I questioned whether GoHighLevel may lower rubbing points that I would certainly learned to tolerate over the years with Keap.
I resisted at first, but a couple of even more frustrations led me to think perhaps it was time for a modification.
The Financial investment: Migrating My Agency to GoHighLevel
Previously this year I made a decision to start. I signed up for HighLevel’s Agency plan at $297/month, spending dramatically more than the $97/month starter cost.
This had not been a decision I ignored. I knew switching platforms was mosting likely to require migrating all my Keap information and basically restoring my whole technology infrastructure from square one making use of all of the GoHighLevel integrations offered.
Right here’s an overview of simply a few of the initiative needed:
- By hand exporting 20,000+ email subscriber records
- Recreating loads of automations and workflows
- Moving client profiles, notes, and job data to the new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe payment integration
- Establishing landing pages, promotions, and sales funnels around once again
- Learning a completely foreign UX and user interface layout
All in, I spent around 30-40 laborious hours of arrangement job transitioning every little thing over– in addition to managing shed efficiency throughout the switch.
Yet ultimately, it was a calculated investment I agreed to make. I figured some short-term pain would certainly pay off with GoHighLevel offering a far better long-term remedy for my organization, Dripify. Oh just how incorrect I was …
It just took me regarding a month of hands-on usage to realize I had made a big mistake. The problems began accumulating swiftly, until it got to a point I had to cut my losses and switch over back to Keap completely.
Allow’s go through the nightmarish issues I came across.
Security Issues & Several Bugs
Provided GoHighLevel positioned itself as an all-in-one automation system, I took care to carefully recreate every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These included series for onboarding new e-mail clients, onboarding new customers, automating follow-ups for webinar enrollments, sending out event suggestions, taking care of membership expiries and far more.
Whatever appeared to be working fine … until unexpectedly it wasn’t. One morning, I awoke to discover 171 totally pointless e-mails had been sent out to individuals that should NOT have gotten them. This occurred three days in a row, with a various batch of 160 people every day.
I frantically attempted fixing and restoring the automation from scratch. Yet the problem persisted.
When I desperately reached out to their support group, they slightly declared “web server problems” were responsible. Yet this explanation didn’t make any feeling, since the mistakes proceeded happening each morning like clockwork unassociated to any type of downtime.
In my mind, this huge failing was totally inappropriate and just really did not work for my service. I have thousands of contacts relying upon my automated campaigns running smoothly.
So if GoHighLevel was mosting likely to be entirely unreliable, how could I entrust mission-critical workflows and sensitive customer information to their innovation?
The unintuitive interface just intensified these issues …
Frustrating UX
Coming from Keap where whatever was seamless and user-friendly, GoHighLevel’s learning contour felt steep and complicated.
Simple tasks like modifying workflows entailed digging through menu systems that were all over the place. Trick settings were unexplainably spread in totally various areas. Moving in between features felt disjointed or complex.
I’ll tell you what I indicate by speaking about their funnel builder as an instance. There were 3 separate settings panels to take care of overall, specific, and item configurations. Yet for some insane factor, the web links to gain access to each of these core setups were expanded on contrary sides of the display. What!?
As someone that values clean, thoughtful style, this seriously annoyed me.
It reinforced that GoHighLevel still seemed like a work-in-progress instead of a refined product all set for prime-time usage. Their priorities appeared concentrated on packing in every feature under the sun, with poor functionality as a second thought.
And speaking of features, I quickly recognized the low cost tag came with costly concessions …
Misleading Pricing GoHighLevel Outbound Calls
Among GoHighLevel’s biggest marketing factors is the inexpensive rate for access to so many features. But I swiftly learned this economical base expense was deceptive.
They nickle-and-dimed customers with occasional costs for core performance. All of a sudden my credit card statements had obscure $10 costs from GoHighLevel occasionally.
As it ended up, you get charged each time you send out an e-mail via their servers. So for high quantity customers, this added up to numerous bucks in unforeseen costs.
In between these per-email fees and paying extra for deliverability attachments like Mailgun, my “economical” GoHighLevel subscription ended up setting you back considerably greater than my Keap plan.
The low sticker price was appealing, but simply not reasonable in practice. This bait-and-switch left a negative preference in my mouth.
Email Fees Suffered
The last dealbreaker was seeing my very carefully supported email open prices drop virtually overnight after changing to GoHighLevel.
Previously, my audience interaction regularly hit 35-40% open prices in Keap month after month. But once I migrated their records over to GoHighLevel, performance tanked instantly to a pathetic 9% open price.
Regardless of how much I optimized my sending out techniques or tried every fixing technique, I can hardly push open prices back right into the teens– still a 50%+ decline from my previous criteria GoHighLevel Outbound Calls.
Let me repeat: my exact same audience and emails unexpectedly had dreadful interaction. The only point I might believe that would be creating this was whatever was occurring behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For an agency so dependent on e-mail marketing, this was a big deal.
In between the debilitating deliverability problems, concealed charges, busted features, and awful interface, I had finally reached my limitation …
Why I Stop GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Just 45 days after migrating my company to GoHighLevel, I knew I had made a substantial blunder. The cons dramatically surpassed any type of advantages.
No software is ideal, however the sheer quantity of troubles was past appropriate.
At the end of the day, software application boils down to trust. If I can’t trust it to take care of crucial functions properly or think a vendor has my best interests in mind, then it’s time to leave– also after investing considerable time, cash, and initiative migrating.
So I made the hard call to turn around course and return back to Keap totally just weeks after going done in on GoHighLevel. Allow’s explore what I learned from this fiasco.
Trick Takeaways: What I Picked up from My GoHighLevel Error
My time with HighLevel can be summarized as a pricey misadventure. Yet in hindsight, it taught me a couple of essential lessons:
- Adhere to what jobs. Do not distress what’s functioning unless something is definitively better across the board. Adjustment brings danger.
- Vet asserts extensively. Marketing buzz around new software program commonly obscures larger underlying imperfections. Deep due diligence is necessary.
- Pick simplicity over features. Properly designed devices should make your work life easier, not extra difficult and unpleasant.
- Transparency develops trust fund. Opaque pricing, unethical reseller terms, and finger-pointing to escape issues ruins trust.
- Seek objective evaluations. Delighted assistance examines imply much less if excessive problems suggest poor general usability.
- Excellence is difficult. No single solution can flawlessly fulfill every special service requirement. Locate the least-bad fit.
- Development over change. Incremental improvements generally outweigh risky wholesale reinvention of what already functions fine.
Simply put, I found out to be a lot more skeptical of “also great to be real” marketing insurance claims and much less lured by the attraction of glossy brand-new things. The devices you utilize daily need to make trust via transparency and efficiency, not slick advertising.