As an agency owner for over a years, I rely upon software application and automation to improve procedures and deliver results. So when GoHighLevel emerged on the scene couple of years back, it definitely caught my interest GoHighLevel Pause Subscription.
The concept was appealing– an all-in-one client monitoring system with marketing, sales, and service devices incorporated together. As a business owner constantly seeking to streamline and scale my organization, it appeared like a dream come true theoretically. Who wouldn’t desire a single option that does it all?
But in this comprehensive GoHighLevel evaluation, I’ll take you inside my tragic journey of trying (and failing) 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 company needs, ideally you can pick up from my uncomfortable mistakes and pumped up assumptions.
Spoiler: I do NOT recommend GoHighLevel. If you need a CRM, start with this list of best CRMs rather. I utilize Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re searching for a sales, marketing, and task monitoring choice to GoHighLevel, then below are a few we suggest.
Backstory: Why I Took Into Consideration Switching from Keap
To comprehend what attracted me to GoHighLevel to begin with, you require context regarding my previous setup. For over 5 years I had actually been gladly depending on Keap (previously Infusionsoft) to satisfy all my client management and automation needs.
I found Keap instinctive to use and it handled whatever I required– CRM, e-mail marketing, sales funnels, subscription sites, and client assistance.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are designed to help local business keep their customers while adding brand-new ones effortlessly. Automate follow-ups with e-mails and texts, ensuring leads and clients receive the appropriate messages at the right time. Use website and social media sites kinds to simplify lead follow-up, and handle your development with easy consultation scheduling and lead monitoring. Boost sales with automated pricing quote, invoicing, and settlement processing, freeing up your time. With Keap, small businesses can conserve 10 hours weekly and rise earnings by 39%. Begin with a 14-day free trial, no charge card called for.
Why we like Keap
Keap offers a comprehensive client connection management (CRM) and marketing automation option customized for small companies and entrepreneurs. We appreciate Keap’s focus on streamlining sales processes and supporting customer relationships via powerful automation tools. The platform’s all-in-one technique integrates CRM, e-mail marketing, invoicing, and task monitoring, making it especially eye-catching for businesses seeking to consolidate their tech pile.
Essentially, it simply functioned reliably with marginal difficulty or maintenance required. My open and click-through prices were terrific (like 35% terrific). Automations ran smoothly without any concerns.
So why on earth was I lured to uproot my entire functional foundation from a system that functioned to attempt something unverified and untested?
In knowledge I can admit I got seduced by the alarm call of “shiny things disorder”. You recognize the feeling: when everybody’s speaking about a brand-new tool that will change your organization … The lawn typically looks greener beyond, and I wondered whether GoHighLevel may reduce friction points that I ‘d found out to tolerate over the years with Keap.
I stood up to initially, but a couple of even more aggravations led me to assume possibly it was time for an adjustment.
The Investment: Moving My Agency to GoHighLevel
Earlier this year I made a decision to start. I signed up for HighLevel’s Agency plan at $297/month, investing substantially greater than the $97/month starter cost.
This wasn’t a decision I ignored. I knew switching systems was going to call for moving all my Keap information and basically rebuilding my entire tech framework from square one using every one of the GoHighLevel integrations readily available.
Below’s an introduction of just several of the initiative called for:
- Manually exporting 20,000+ e-mail subscriber records
- Recreating loads of automations and workflows
- Moving client accounts, notes, and project information to the brand-new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe billing integration
- Establishing landing pages, coupons, and sales funnels throughout again
- Learning a totally international UX and user interface design
All in, I invested around 30-40 tedious hours of setup work transitioning whatever over– in addition to handling lost efficiency during the button.
However inevitably, it was a calculated investment I was willing to make. I figured some temporary discomfort would pay off with GoHighLevel giving a much better lasting option 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 huge error. The issues began piling up promptly, until it reached a point I needed to cut my losses and switch over back to Keap completely.
Let’s walk through the nightmarish issues I came across.
Protection Issues & Numerous Vermin
Provided GoHighLevel placed itself as an all-in-one automation platform, I made sure to meticulously recreate every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These included sequences for onboarding brand-new email customers, onboarding brand-new clients, automating follow-ups for webinar enrollments, sending out event reminders, taking care of membership expiries and far more.
Whatever seemed to be operating fine … till instantly it wasn’t. One morning, I awoke to discover 171 completely unnecessary emails had actually been sent out to users that must NOT have received them. This took place 3 days straight, with a different set of 160 people every day.
I anxiously attempted repairing and reconstructing the automation from scratch. Yet the issue persisted.
When I frantically connected to their support team, they vaguely claimed “server concerns” were at fault. However this description didn’t make any feeling, considering that the mistakes proceeded occurring each early morning like clockwork unconnected to any type of downtime.
In my mind, this massive failing was totally undesirable and just really did not benefit my company. I have countless get in touches with relying upon my automated campaigns running efficiently.
So if GoHighLevel was mosting likely to be completely unreliable, how could I turn over mission-critical workflows and sensitive customer data to their innovation?
The unintuitive interface just worsened these problems …
Frustrating UX
Coming from Keap where everything was smooth and instinctive, GoHighLevel’s learning curve really felt high and complicated.
Basic jobs like editing workflows entailed digging through food selection systems that were all over the place. Trick setups were unexplainably spread in entirely different areas. Relocating in between functions felt disjointed or complicated.
I’ll inform you what I suggest by discussing their funnel builder as an example. There were 3 separate setups panels to manage overall, individual, and product configurations. Yet for some insane factor, the web links to accessibility each of these core setups were spread out on opposite sides of the screen. What!?
As someone who values clean, thoughtful layout, this seriously annoyed me.
It strengthened that GoHighLevel still seemed like a work-in-progress rather than a refined item ready for prime-time usage. Their top priorities seemed concentrated on cramming in every feature imaginable, with poor use as a second thought.
And speaking of features, I quickly recognized the low price tag featured pricey concessions …
Misleading Pricing GoHighLevel Pause Subscription
One of GoHighLevel’s biggest marketing factors is the budget friendly rate for access to a lot of features. Yet I quickly discovered this inexpensive base cost was misleading.
They nickle-and-dimed customers with sporadic costs for core performance. All of a sudden my bank card declarations had unclear $10 charges from GoHighLevel here and there.
As it turned out, you obtain billed each time you send an email through their servers. So for high volume customers, this added up to thousands of bucks in unexpected prices.
Between these per-email charges and paying additional for deliverability attachments like Mailgun, my “cost effective” GoHighLevel subscription ended up costing substantially MORE than my Keap plan.
The reduced sticker price was appealing, but just not reasonable in practice. This bait-and-switch left a negative preference in my mouth.
Email Fees Suffered
The final dealbreaker was seeing my carefully nurtured email open rates drop practically over night after changing to GoHighLevel.
Formerly, my audience involvement continually hit 35-40% open rates in Keap month after month. Once I moved their records over to GoHighLevel, efficiency tanked promptly to a useless 9% open rate.
Despite just how much I optimized my sending practices or attempted every repairing technique, I can barely push open prices back into the teenagers– still a 50%+ decrease from my previous standards GoHighLevel Pause Subscription.
Let me repeat: my exact same audience and e-mails unexpectedly had awful involvement. The only thing I might assume 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.
Between the debilitating deliverability concerns, concealed costs, broken features, and terrible user interface, I had finally reached my limit …
Why I Give up GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Just 45 days after moving my firm to GoHighLevel, I understood I had made a substantial mistake. The disadvantages considerably surpassed any type of benefits.
No software application is best, yet the sheer quantity of troubles was past acceptable.
At the end of the day, software application boils down to trust fund. If I can not trust it to take care of crucial functions properly or think a supplier has my best interests in mind, then it’s time to leave– also after investing substantial time, money, and effort migrating.
So I made the tough contact us to turn around course and return back to Keap entirely just weeks after going all in on GoHighLevel. Allow’s discover what I gained from this ordeal.
Secret Takeaways: What I Learned From My GoHighLevel Blunder
My time with HighLevel can be summed up as a pricey accident. However in knowledge, it taught me a couple of key lessons:
- Adhere to what works. Do not disturb what’s functioning unless something is definitively far better across the board. Change brings threat.
- Vet declares completely. Marketing buzz around brand-new software program typically covers larger underlying problems. Deep due persistance is important.
- Pick simpleness over features. Properly designed devices need to make your job life less complicated, not a lot more challenging and messy.
- Transparency builds trust fund. Opaque pricing, dubious reseller terms, and finger-pointing to evade troubles destroys count on.
- Seek objective evaluations. Delighted support evaluates indicate much less if too much concerns indicate poor total use.
- Perfection is difficult. No single service can completely satisfy every distinct organization need. Locate the least-bad fit.
- Development over change. Step-by-step improvements generally exceed risky wholesale reinvention of what currently functions fine.
Simply put, I found out to be much more doubtful of “as well excellent to be real” marketing insurance claims and much less attracted by the appeal of shiny new things. The tools you use daily should gain count on via transparency and performance, not glossy advertising.