As a company proprietor for over a years, I depend on software and automation to improve procedures and provide outcomes. So when GoHighLevel emerged on the scene few years back, it certainly caught my focus GoHighLevel Outlook Integration.
The concept was enticing– an all-in-one client monitoring platform with marketing, sales, and solution devices integrated together. As an entrepreneur always seeking to simplify and scale my company, it appeared like a desire come to life on paper. That would not desire a solitary remedy that does it all?
However in this comprehensive GoHighLevel evaluation, I’ll take you inside my tragic trip of attempting (and falling short) to change to this preferred new software application. You’ll discover:
If you’re considering whether GoHighLevel is right for your own service demands, hopefully you can pick up from my unpleasant blunders and pumped up assumptions.
Spoiler: I do NOT suggest GoHighLevel. If you need a CRM, start with this checklist of best CRMs instead. I use Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re looking for a sales, marketing, and job monitoring option to GoHighLevel, after that right here are a few we suggest.
Backstory: Why I Considered Switching from Keap
To recognize what attracted me to GoHighLevel in the first place, you require context concerning my previous setup. For over 5 years I had been happily relying upon Keap (previously Infusionsoft) to fulfill all my customer monitoring and automation needs.
I located Keap instinctive to use and it dealt with every little thing I required– CRM, e-mail marketing, sales funnels, membership sites, and customer support.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are developed to help small businesses maintain their clients while including new ones effortlessly. Automate follow-ups with e-mails and messages, making sure leads and customers receive the best messages at the right time. Use site and social networks kinds to improve lead follow-up, and handle your growth with easy consultation organizing and lead tracking. Boost sales with automated pricing quote, invoicing, and payment processing, liberating your time. With Keap, small businesses can conserve 10 hours weekly and boost profits by 39%. Beginning with a 14-day free trial, no charge card needed.
Why we like Keap
Keap provides a detailed consumer relationship monitoring (CRM) and marketing automation solution customized for small companies and business owners. We appreciate Keap’s concentrate on enhancing sales procedures and nurturing customer connections with powerful automation tools. The system’s all-in-one method integrates CRM, e-mail marketing, invoicing, and job administration, making it especially attractive for companies seeking to settle their tech pile.
Generally, it simply worked accurately with minimal fuss or maintenance called for. My open and click-through prices were great (like 35% excellent). Automations ran smoothly with no issues.
So why on earth was I tempted to uproot my whole functional structure from a system that functioned to try something unverified and untried?
In hindsight I can confess I got attracted by the siren phone call of “glossy object disorder”. You recognize the feeling: when everyone’s talking about a new device that will certainly change your organization … The grass typically looks greener on the other side, and I questioned whether GoHighLevel might minimize friction factors that I ‘d discovered to endure over the years with Keap.
I resisted at first, yet a couple of even more stress led me to believe perhaps it was time for a change.
The Financial investment: Moving My Company to GoHighLevel
Previously this year I chose to take the plunge. I registered for HighLevel’s Agency plan at $297/month, spending dramatically greater than the $97/month starter expense.
This had not been a decision I ignored. I recognized switching over platforms was mosting likely to require moving all my Keap information and basically rebuilding my entire tech facilities from square one utilizing every one of the GoHighLevel integrations available.
Below’s a review of simply some of the effort required:
- By hand exporting 20,000+ e-mail subscriber records
- Recreating dozens of automations and workflows
- Relocating client profiles, notes, and project information to the brand-new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe invoicing integration
- Establishing landing pages, coupons, and sales funnels around again
- Learning an entirely international UX and user interface layout
All in, I spent around 30-40 tiresome hours of setup work transitioning every little thing over– and also dealing with shed efficiency throughout the switch.
Yet ultimately, it was a calculated financial investment I was willing to make. I figured some temporary pain would settle with GoHighLevel supplying a better long-term option for my organization, Dripify. Oh just how incorrect I was …
It just took me concerning a month of hands-on use to recognize I had made a big mistake. The concerns began piling up promptly, till it got to a point I had to reduce my losses and switch back to Keap totally.
Let’s go through the horrible issues I experienced.
Security Issues & Several Vermin
Given GoHighLevel positioned itself as an all-in-one automation platform, I took care to meticulously recreate each and every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These consisted of sequences for onboarding new e-mail subscribers, onboarding new customers, automating follow-ups for webinar enrollments, sending occasion pointers, taking care of subscription expiries and a lot more.
Everything seemed to be working penalty … up until unexpectedly it had not been. One morning, I awoke to discover 171 totally irrelevant e-mails had actually been sent out to individuals that must NOT have received them. This happened three days straight, with a various batch of 160 individuals each day.
I desperately tried fixing and reconstructing the automation from the ground up. But the problem continued.
When I seriously connected to their assistance group, they slightly asserted “server concerns” were to blame. Yet this explanation didn’t make any type of feeling, because the mistakes proceeded taking place each early morning like clockwork unrelated to any kind of downtime.
In my mind, this massive failing was entirely unacceptable and simply really did not help my company. I have thousands of contacts depending on my automated campaigns running efficiently.
So if GoHighLevel was going to be entirely unreliable, just how could I leave mission-critical workflows and delicate customer information to their modern technology?
The unintuitive interface only compounded these issues …
Discouraging UX
Originating from Keap where every little thing was smooth and instinctive, GoHighLevel’s learning curve felt steep and difficult.
Basic jobs like editing workflows included excavating via menu systems that were all over the place. Secret setups were unexplainably scattered in completely different sections. Moving between features really felt disjointed or complex.
I’ll tell you what I indicate by discussing their funnel builder as an example. There were 3 different settings panels to take care of total, specific, and product arrangements. Yet for some crazy factor, the web links to access each of these core settings were expanded on contrary 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 sleek product ready for prime-time usage. Their top priorities seemed concentrated on packing in every feature under the sun, with poor use as a second thought.
And talking features, I quickly recognized the affordable price tag included costly concessions …
Deceptive Pricing GoHighLevel Outlook Integration
One of GoHighLevel’s most significant selling points is the affordable cost for accessibility to many features. Yet I rapidly learned this cheap base price was misleading.
They nickle-and-dimed individuals with sporadic charges for core capability. Suddenly my charge card declarations had vague $10 charges from GoHighLevel occasionally.
As it turned out, you obtain charged each time you send out an email via their web servers. So for high quantity individuals, this added up to hundreds of dollars in unanticipated costs.
In between these per-email fees and paying added for deliverability attachments like Mailgun, my “budget friendly” GoHighLevel subscription ended up setting you back substantially MORE than my Keap plan.
The low sticker price was tempting, however just not realistic in practice. This bait-and-switch left a poor taste in my mouth.
Email Fees Suffered
The final dealbreaker was seeing my very carefully nurtured email open prices plummet practically overnight after switching to GoHighLevel.
Previously, my target market interaction continually struck 35-40% open prices in Keap month after month. Once I migrated their documents over to GoHighLevel, efficiency tanked instantaneously to a useless 9% open price.
Despite just how much I maximized my sending out methods or tried every fixing technique, I might barely push open prices back right into the teens– still a 50%+ decline from my previous benchmarks GoHighLevel Outlook Integration.
Let me repeat: my exact same target market and e-mails all of a sudden had awful involvement. The only point I could think that would certainly be causing this was whatever was happening behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For an agency so based on e-mail marketing, this was a big deal.
In between the crippling deliverability concerns, hidden fees, damaged features, and terrible interface, I had ultimately reached my restriction …
Why I Give up GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Just 45 days after moving my company to GoHighLevel, I recognized I had made a substantial error. The disadvantages dramatically outweighed any kind of benefits.
No software is best, however the sheer volume of problems was beyond acceptable.
At the end of the day, software program boils down to depend on. If I can not trust it to take care of essential functions effectively or believe a vendor has my best interests in mind, then it’s time to walk away– also after spending considerable time, money, and effort migrating.
So I made the hard phone call to turn around program and return back to Keap entirely just weeks after going done in on GoHighLevel. Allow’s discover what I picked up from this debacle.
Secret Takeaways: What I Gained from My GoHighLevel Error
My time with HighLevel can be summarized as a costly accident. Yet in knowledge, it showed me a couple of crucial lessons:
- Stick to what jobs. Do not upset what’s working unless something is definitively much better across the board. Change brings threat.
- Vet asserts extensively. Marketing hype around brand-new software often obscures larger underlying problems. Deep due diligence is essential.
- Select simpleness over features. Properly designed tools need to make your work life much easier, not extra complicated and unpleasant.
- Openness develops depend on. Opaque pricing, questionable reseller terms, and finger-pointing to escape troubles damages trust fund.
- Seek honest reviews. Happy support reviews imply less if excessive concerns imply poor total usability.
- Perfection is difficult. No single option can completely fulfill every one-of-a-kind organization demand. Discover the least-bad fit.
- Development over change. Step-by-step renovations typically exceed risky wholesale reinvention of what currently works fine.
In short, I found out to be more doubtful of “too good to be true” marketing cases and less attracted by the appeal of shiny new items. The tools you utilize daily need to gain depend on via openness and performance, not slick advertising.