As an agency proprietor for over a years, I rely on software program and automation to simplify procedures and supply outcomes. So when GoHighLevel emerged on the scene couple of years back, it certainly caught my interest GoHighLevel Playbooks.
The idea was attractive– an all-in-one client administration system with marketing, sales, and solution tools incorporated together. As an entrepreneur always seeking to streamline and scale my company, it looked like a dream happened theoretically. That wouldn’t want a single service that does it all?
However in this in-depth GoHighLevel review, I’ll take you inside my tragic trip of trying (and falling short) to change to this popular brand-new software program. You’ll learn:
If you’re taking into consideration whether GoHighLevel is right for your very own business demands, ideally you can pick up from my unpleasant errors and pumped up assumptions.
Spoiler: I do NOT suggest GoHighLevel. If you require a CRM, start with this list of finest CRMs instead. I use Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re seeking a sales, marketing, and job administration alternative to GoHighLevel, after that here are a few we recommend.
Backstory: Why I Considered Switching from Keap
To understand what attracted me to GoHighLevel in the first place, you require context about my previous arrangement. For over 5 years I had been gladly counting on Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) to meet all my customer administration and automation demands.
I discovered Keap instinctive to utilize and it managed every little thing I required– CRM, e-mail marketing, sales funnels, subscription websites, and customer assistance.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are created to help local business maintain their customers while adding brand-new ones easily. Automate follow-ups with emails and texts, making sure leads and customers get the appropriate messages at the correct time. Usage web site and social media sites types to enhance lead follow-up, and manage your growth with simple appointment organizing and lead monitoring. Boost sales with automated estimating, invoicing, and payment processing, maximizing your time. With Keap, small companies can conserve 10 hours per week and boost income by 39%. Beginning with a 14-day free trial, no bank card needed.
Why we like Keap
Keap uses a comprehensive consumer relationship monitoring (CRM) and marketing automation solution customized for small companies and entrepreneurs. We appreciate Keap’s concentrate on enhancing sales procedures and nurturing consumer partnerships via effective automation tools. The system’s all-in-one method integrates CRM, e-mail marketing, invoicing, and task monitoring, making it especially attractive for businesses wanting to combine their tech stack.
For the most part, it just functioned dependably with very little difficulty or maintenance called for. My open and click-through prices were fantastic (like 35% fantastic). Automations ran smoothly with no problems.
So why on earth was I lured to uproot my whole functional structure from a system that worked to attempt something unproven and untried?
In hindsight I can confess I obtained attracted by the siren telephone call of “shiny things syndrome”. You recognize the sensation: when everybody’s speaking about a new tool that will transform your business … The lawn usually looks greener on the other side, and I asked yourself whether GoHighLevel could lower friction points that I ‘d learned to endure for many years with Keap.
I withstood initially, however a couple of more aggravations led me to assume maybe it was time for a change.
The Financial investment: Migrating My Firm to GoHighLevel
Previously this year I made a decision to start. I registered for HighLevel’s Agency plan at $297/month, investing substantially greater than the $97/month starter expense.
This wasn’t a choice I ignored. I understood changing systems was mosting likely to call for moving all my Keap information and basically rebuilding my whole technology infrastructure from scratch making use of all of the GoHighLevel integrations available.
Below’s an introduction of simply some of the effort required:
- Manually exporting 20,000+ e-mail subscriber documents
- Recreating lots of automations and workflows
- Relocating client accounts, notes, and project information to the brand-new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe billing integration
- Setting up landing pages, promos, and sales funnels all over again
- Learning a completely international UX and interface layout
Done in, I spent around 30-40 laborious hours of arrangement work transitioning every little thing over– and also taking care of lost efficiency during the switch.
Yet eventually, it was a calculated financial investment I wanted to make. I figured some short-term discomfort would certainly settle with GoHighLevel supplying a better lasting solution for my business, Dripify. Oh just how wrong I was …
It only took me concerning a month of hands-on usage to understand I had made a large mistake. The problems started piling up promptly, up until it reached a point I had to reduce my losses and change back to Keap totally.
Allow’s go through the horrible problems I came across.
Protection Issues & Several Bugs
Given GoHighLevel placed itself as an all-in-one automation system, I made sure to meticulously recreate every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These consisted of sequences for onboarding new email subscribers, onboarding brand-new clients, automating follow-ups for webinar enrollments, sending occasion pointers, taking care of subscription expirations and much more.
Everything appeared to be working penalty … up until unexpectedly it wasn’t. One early morning, I woke up to discover 171 totally pointless e-mails had actually been sent out to individuals that ought to NOT have actually gotten them. This happened 3 days in a row, with a various set of 160 individuals every day.
I hysterically attempted repairing and restoring the automation from the ground up. Yet the trouble lingered.
When I desperately reached out to their support team, they slightly declared “server problems” were to blame. However this description didn’t make any type of feeling, since the errors continued taking place each early morning like clockwork unassociated to any downtime.
In my mind, this substantial failing was totally unacceptable and just really did not benefit my service. I have thousands of get in touches with depending on my automated campaigns running efficiently.
So if GoHighLevel was mosting likely to be entirely unstable, exactly how could I delegate mission-critical workflows and delicate customer information to their modern technology?
The unintuitive interface just intensified these concerns …
Irritating UX
Coming from Keap where whatever was seamless and user-friendly, GoHighLevel’s learning curve felt high and challenging.
Simple jobs like editing and enhancing workflows involved digging via food selection systems that were all over the place. Key setups were unexplainably spread in completely various areas. Moving in between features felt disjointed or complex.
I’ll tell you what I suggest by discussing their funnel builder as an example. There were 3 separate settings panels to manage overall, specific, and item configurations. Yet for some crazy factor, the links to access each of these core settings were expanded on opposite sides of the screen. What!?
As someone who values clean, thoughtful style, this seriously annoyed me.
It strengthened that GoHighLevel still seemed like a work-in-progress as opposed to a refined item prepared for prime-time usage. Their concerns appeared concentrated on packing in every feature imaginable, with bad functionality as an afterthought.
And speaking of features, I soon realized the affordable price tag came with expensive compromises …
Deceptive Pricing GoHighLevel Playbooks
Among GoHighLevel’s largest marketing points is the inexpensive rate for access to a lot of features. However I promptly discovered this affordable base expense was deceptive.
They nickle-and-dimed users with occasional fees for core capability. Instantly my charge card declarations had unclear $10 fees from GoHighLevel occasionally.
As it turned out, you get charged whenever you send an e-mail with their web servers. So for high volume customers, this added up to numerous dollars in unanticipated prices.
Between these per-email charges and paying extra for deliverability add-ons like Mailgun, my “affordable” GoHighLevel subscription ended up costing considerably greater than my Keap plan.
The reduced price tag was tempting, yet simply not realistic in practice. This bait-and-switch left a bad taste in my mouth.
Email Rates Suffered
The last dealbreaker was seeing my meticulously supported email open rates drop virtually overnight after switching to GoHighLevel.
Formerly, my audience interaction continually hit 35-40% open rates in Keap month after month. Once I moved their documents over to GoHighLevel, efficiency tanked instantly to a pitiful 9% open rate.
Regardless of how much I enhanced my sending out practices or tried every troubleshooting technique, I could barely nudge open prices back into the teens– still a 50%+ decrease from my previous standards GoHighLevel Playbooks.
Let me repeat: my exact same target market and emails suddenly had awful engagement. The only thing I might think that would be triggering this was whatever was occurring behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a company so based on e-mail marketing, this was a big deal.
Between the debilitating deliverability problems, hidden costs, broken features, and horrible interface, I had lastly reached my restriction …
Why I Give up GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Simply 45 days after moving my firm to GoHighLevel, I knew I had actually made a massive error. The cons considerably surpassed any type of advantages.
No software is excellent, yet the large volume of problems was past appropriate.
At the end of the day, software program boils down to trust. If I can’t trust it to manage essential functions competently or think a supplier has my best interests in mind, then it’s time to leave– even after spending substantial time, money, and effort moving.
So I made the hard call to turn around course and return back to Keap completely simply weeks after going done in on GoHighLevel. Let’s explore what I learned from this fiasco.
Trick Takeaways: What I Gained from My GoHighLevel Mistake
My time with HighLevel can be summed up as an expensive accident. Yet in knowledge, it taught me a couple of vital lessons:
- Adhere to what jobs. Do not distress what’s working unless something is definitively far better across the board. Adjustment brings danger.
- Vet asserts thoroughly. Marketing buzz around new software frequently covers larger underlying imperfections. Deep due persistance is necessary.
- Pick simpleness over features. Well-designed tools should make your job life much easier, not extra complex and messy.
- Transparency develops trust. Opaque pricing, questionable reseller terms, and finger-pointing to escape issues destroys trust fund.
- Seek honest testimonials. Happy support reviews indicate much less if excessive problems indicate poor total use.
- Perfection is difficult. No solitary remedy can flawlessly satisfy every distinct company need. Locate the least-bad fit.
- Development over revolution. Incremental renovations generally surpass dangerous wholesale reinvention of what currently functions fine.
Simply put, I learned to be much more skeptical of “also excellent to be real” marketing claims and much less lured by the appeal of shiny brand-new objects. The devices you utilize daily need to earn depend on via transparency and efficiency, not glossy advertising.