As an agency owner for over a years, I rely on software and automation to improve procedures and provide outcomes. So when GoHighLevel arised on the scene couple of years back, it most definitely captured my interest GoHighLevel Overview.
The idea was enticing– an all-in-one customer monitoring platform with marketing, sales, and service tools integrated with each other. As a business owner always wanting to streamline and scale my business, it appeared like a dream come to life theoretically. Who wouldn’t want a single remedy that does it all?
Yet in this comprehensive GoHighLevel testimonial, I’ll take you inside my disastrous trip of attempting (and stopping working) to change to this prominent brand-new software application. You’ll find out:
If you’re thinking about whether GoHighLevel is right for your own business needs, with any luck you can pick up from my painful blunders and pumped up expectations.
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 seeking a sales, marketing, and project monitoring choice to GoHighLevel, after that below are a few we advise.
Backstory: Why I Thought About Changing from Keap
To comprehend what attracted me to GoHighLevel in the first place, you need context regarding my previous setup. For over 5 years I had been gladly relying on Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) to meet all my client monitoring and automation requirements.
I discovered Keap instinctive to make use of and it took care of everything I needed– CRM, e-mail marketing, sales funnels, membership websites, and client assistance.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are developed to assist local business keep their clients while adding new ones easily. Automate follow-ups with emails and texts, making certain leads and customers get the appropriate messages at the right time. Usage site and social media sites forms to improve lead follow-up, and handle your development with very easy appointment scheduling and lead monitoring. Boost sales with automated estimating, invoicing, and repayment handling, liberating your time. With Keap, small companies can conserve 10 hours weekly and boost revenue by 39%. Begin with a 14-day free trial, no bank card required.
Why we like Keap
Keap offers a detailed consumer connection monitoring (CRM) and marketing automation remedy customized for small businesses and business owners. We appreciate Keap’s focus on streamlining sales procedures and supporting consumer partnerships with powerful automation devices. The system’s all-in-one strategy combines CRM, email marketing, invoicing, and task monitoring, making it specifically appealing for organizations aiming to consolidate their technology stack.
Essentially, it simply worked reliably with marginal difficulty or maintenance required. My open and click-through rates were excellent (like 35% excellent). Automations ran efficiently without any issues.
So why in the world was I tempted to uproot my entire functional structure from a system that worked to try something unverified and untested?
In knowledge I can confess I got seduced by the siren call of “shiny things disorder”. You know the sensation: when everybody’s talking about a new device that will certainly change your company … The turf often looks greener on the other side, and I asked yourself whether GoHighLevel might minimize friction factors that I ‘d learned to tolerate over the years with Keap.
I withstood initially, however a couple of even more irritations led me to assume maybe it was time for a modification.
The Investment: Moving My Firm to GoHighLevel
Earlier this year I determined to take the plunge. I enrolled in HighLevel’s Firm plan at $297/month, investing considerably greater than the $97/month starter cost.
This had not been a decision I ignored. I knew switching platforms was going to require moving all my Keap information and essentially reconstructing my whole tech facilities from the ground up making use of all of the GoHighLevel integrations available.
Right here’s an introduction of just a few of the initiative required:
- By hand exporting 20,000+ e-mail customer documents
- Recreating lots of automations and workflows
- Relocating customer profiles, notes, and project data to the brand-new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe billing integration
- Setting up landing pages, coupons, and sales funnels around again
- Learning an entirely international UX and user interface style
Done in, I spent around 30-40 tiresome hours of arrangement work transitioning every little thing over– and also dealing with shed efficiency during the button.
But inevitably, it was a calculated financial investment I agreed to make. I figured some short-term pain would repay with GoHighLevel providing a better long-lasting remedy for my business, Dripify. Oh how incorrect I was …
It only took me concerning a month of hands-on use to recognize I had made a huge mistake. The problems began piling up swiftly, until it got to a point I needed to cut my losses and change back to Keap completely.
Allow’s go through the horrible problems I came across.
Protection Issues & Several Bugs
Given GoHighLevel positioned itself as an all-in-one automation system, I took care to thoroughly recreate every workflow from my old Keap account.
These included sequences for onboarding brand-new e-mail customers, onboarding new customers, automating follow-ups for webinar registrations, sending out occasion suggestions, taking care of subscription expirations and much more.
Whatever appeared to be functioning fine … until all of a sudden it wasn’t. One early morning, I woke up to find 171 totally unimportant e-mails had been sent to individuals that ought to NOT have received them. This took place three days in a row, with a various batch of 160 people each day.
I desperately tried repairing and restoring the automation from scratch. However the problem persisted.
When I frantically connected to their assistance team, they slightly claimed “server concerns” were to blame. But this explanation really did not make any kind of feeling, because the errors proceeded happening each early morning like clockwork unassociated to any type of downtime.
In my mind, this substantial failure was entirely undesirable and just didn’t work for my business. I have thousands of contacts relying on my automated campaigns running efficiently.
So if GoHighLevel was going to be absolutely unreliable, how could I entrust mission-critical workflows and sensitive client information to their innovation?
The unintuitive user interface just intensified these concerns …
Discouraging UX
Coming from Keap where everything was seamless and user-friendly, GoHighLevel’s learning curve felt high and challenging.
Straightforward jobs like modifying workflows included excavating via menu systems that were all over the place. Trick settings were unexplainably scattered in absolutely different areas. Moving between features felt disjointed or confusing.
I’ll inform you what I indicate by discussing their funnel builder as an example. There were 3 separate setups panels to manage total, private, and item arrangements. Yet for some insane reason, the links to accessibility each of these core setups were spread out on contrary sides of the screen. What!?
As a person that values tidy, thoughtful style, this seriously irritated me.
It enhanced that GoHighLevel still seemed like a work-in-progress as opposed to a refined product all set for prime-time use. Their priorities appeared concentrated on stuffing in every feature imaginable, with poor use as a second thought.
And talking features, I quickly realized the affordable price tag came with expensive concessions …
Deceptive Pricing GoHighLevel Overview
One of GoHighLevel’s most significant marketing points is the budget-friendly price for accessibility to a lot of features. However I swiftly discovered this inexpensive base price was deceptive.
They nickle-and-dimed individuals with sporadic costs for core performance. Unexpectedly my charge card declarations had vague $10 charges from GoHighLevel here and there.
As it ended up, you obtain charged whenever you send an email via their web servers. So for high volume customers, this amounted to hundreds of dollars in unforeseen costs.
In between these per-email costs and paying added for deliverability attachments like Mailgun, my “economical” GoHighLevel subscription wound up costing significantly greater than my Keap plan.
The low price tag was appealing, but just not sensible in practice. This bait-and-switch left a bad preference in my mouth.
Email Rates Suffered
The final dealbreaker was seeing my meticulously nurtured e-mail open rates plunge practically overnight after switching to GoHighLevel.
Formerly, my audience engagement regularly hit 35-40% open rates in Keap month after month. But once I moved their records over to GoHighLevel, efficiency tanked immediately to a useless 9% open price.
Regardless of how much I maximized my sending out practices or tried every troubleshooting technique, I can hardly push open rates back into the teenagers– still a 50%+ decline from my previous criteria GoHighLevel Overview.
Let me repeat: my exact same target market and emails instantly had awful involvement. The only thing I can think that would certainly be creating this was whatever was happening behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a firm so dependent on e-mail marketing, this was a big deal.
In between the debilitating deliverability issues, hidden charges, busted features, and terrible user interface, I had finally reached my limitation …
Why I Stop GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Simply 45 days after migrating my agency to GoHighLevel, I knew I had made a big mistake. The disadvantages significantly surpassed any kind of advantages.
No software program is perfect, however the sheer volume of problems was beyond acceptable.
At the end of the day, software application boils down to count on. If I can’t trust it to deal with vital features properly or believe a supplier has my best interests in mind, then it’s time to walk away– even after investing significant time, cash, and initiative migrating.
So I made the tough phone call to reverse training course and return back to Keap totally simply weeks after going done in on GoHighLevel. Let’s discover what I picked up from this debacle.
Secret Takeaways: What I Learned From My GoHighLevel Mistake
My time with HighLevel can be summed up as a costly accident. Yet in hindsight, it instructed me a couple of crucial lessons:
- Stick to what works. Don’t distress what’s functioning unless something is definitively much better across the board. Adjustment brings risk.
- Vet declares extensively. Marketing hype around new software application usually obscures larger underlying imperfections. Deep due diligence is essential.
- Pick simpleness over features. Properly designed tools need to make your job life simpler, not more challenging and messy.
- Openness builds count on. Opaque pricing, dubious reseller terms, and finger-pointing to escape problems destroys trust fund.
- Seek unbiased reviews. Delighted support examines suggest much less if too much issues imply poor general functionality.
- Excellence is difficult. No single solution can completely satisfy every one-of-a-kind company requirement. Locate the least-bad fit.
- Advancement over transformation. Step-by-step renovations commonly exceed high-risk wholesale reinvention of what currently functions fine.
In short, I discovered to be a lot more doubtful of “also excellent to be true” marketing claims and much less tempted by the appeal of shiny brand-new things. The tools you use daily must gain count on with openness and performance, not slick advertising.