As a company proprietor for over a years, I depend on software application and automation to enhance procedures and supply outcomes. So when GoHighLevel emerged on the scene couple of years back, it absolutely caught my attention GoHighLevel Promotion.
The idea was appealing– an all-in-one client administration system with marketing, sales, and service tools incorporated with each other. As a business owner constantly looking to simplify and scale my organization, it looked like a desire become a reality on paper. That wouldn’t want a single option that does it all?
Yet in this comprehensive GoHighLevel evaluation, I’ll take you inside my dreadful trip of trying (and failing) to switch to this preferred new software application. You’ll learn:
If you’re thinking about whether GoHighLevel is right for your very own business needs, hopefully you can gain from my painful blunders and blew up expectations.
Looter: I do NOT recommend GoHighLevel. If you require a CRM, begin with this listing of ideal CRMs instead. I make use of Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re looking for a sales, marketing, and project management option to GoHighLevel, then right here are a few we suggest.
Backstory: Why I Took Into Consideration Switching Over from Keap
To understand what attracted me to GoHighLevel to begin with, you require context regarding my previous arrangement. For over 5 years I had actually been gladly relying on Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) to fulfill all my customer management and automation demands.
I found Keap instinctive to use and it handled everything I required– CRM, email marketing, sales funnels, membership websites, and customer assistance.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are developed to aid local business keep their clients while including brand-new ones easily. Automate follow-ups with e-mails and messages, ensuring leads and customers get the best messages at the right time. Use site and social media forms to simplify lead follow-up, and manage your development with simple appointment scheduling and lead monitoring. Boost sales with automated quoting, invoicing, and payment processing, maximizing your time. With Keap, local business can conserve 10 hours per week and boost profits by 39%. Begin with a 14-day free trial, no bank card needed.
Why we like Keap
Keap provides a comprehensive consumer relationship administration (CRM) and marketing automation remedy tailored for local business and business owners. We value Keap’s concentrate on simplifying sales procedures and supporting client partnerships via powerful automation tools. The platform’s all-in-one approach combines CRM, e-mail marketing, invoicing, and job administration, making it particularly appealing for services aiming to consolidate their technology stack.
For the most part, it just functioned accurately with marginal difficulty or upkeep needed. My open and click-through rates were fantastic (like 35% terrific). Automations ran smoothly without any problems.
So why in the world was I lured to uproot my whole operational foundation from a system that functioned to attempt something unproven and untried?
In hindsight I can confess I got seduced by the alarm telephone call of “glossy object disorder”. You understand the sensation: when everyone’s discussing a new device that will reinvent your company … The lawn frequently looks greener on the other side, and I questioned whether GoHighLevel may minimize friction factors that I would certainly discovered to tolerate throughout the years with Keap.
I withstood in the beginning, yet a few even more aggravations led me to believe possibly it was time for a modification.
The Investment: Migrating My Agency to GoHighLevel
Previously this year I decided to start. I signed up for HighLevel’s Company plan at $297/month, spending dramatically greater than the $97/month starter expense.
This had not been a decision I ignored. I understood changing platforms was going to require moving all my Keap data and essentially rebuilding my whole tech framework from scratch utilizing all of the GoHighLevel integrations available.
Below’s a review of simply a few of the effort required:
- Manually exporting 20,000+ e-mail customer documents
- Recreating loads of automations and workflows
- Moving customer profiles, notes, and project data to the brand-new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe billing integration
- Establishing landing pages, coupons, and sales funnels all over once more
- Learning a completely international UX and user interface style
All in, I spent around 30-40 tedious hours of arrangement work transitioning every little thing over– not to mention handling lost efficiency throughout the button.
Yet inevitably, it was a computed financial investment I agreed to make. I figured some short-term pain would pay off with GoHighLevel offering a much better lasting service for my service, Dripify. Oh how incorrect I was …
It just took me about a month of hands-on usage to realize I had actually made a large error. The concerns started piling up promptly, till it reached a factor I needed to cut my losses and switch back to Keap totally.
Allow’s walk through the horrible problems I ran into.
Protection Issues & Lots of Vermin
Provided GoHighLevel positioned itself as an all-in-one automation platform, I took care to diligently recreate every workflow from my old Keap account.
These included series for onboarding new email subscribers, onboarding brand-new clients, automating follow-ups for webinar enrollments, sending event reminders, taking care of subscription expiries and far more.
Everything seemed to be working fine … till suddenly it wasn’t. One morning, I woke up to find 171 entirely irrelevant e-mails had actually been sent to users who ought to NOT have actually obtained them. This occurred 3 days in a row, with a different batch of 160 individuals every day.
I hysterically tried repairing and restoring the automation from scratch. However the problem lingered.
When I seriously connected to their assistance group, they slightly asserted “web server concerns” were to blame. However this description really did not make any type of feeling, given that the errors continued happening each early morning like clockwork unrelated to any downtime.
In my mind, this huge failure was completely unacceptable and simply really did not benefit my company. I have thousands of calls relying on my automated campaigns running smoothly.
So if GoHighLevel was going to be completely undependable, how could I leave mission-critical workflows and sensitive client data to their modern technology?
The unintuitive user interface only compounded these issues …
Irritating UX
Coming from Keap where every little thing was smooth and intuitive, GoHighLevel’s learning contour felt steep and complicated.
Simple jobs like editing and enhancing workflows involved excavating via menu systems that were all over the place. Trick settings were unexplainably spread in completely various sections. Moving in between features felt disjointed or complex.
I’ll tell you what I imply by speaking about their funnel builder as an example. There were 3 separate setups panels to take care of overall, specific, and product setups. Yet for some crazy reason, the links to accessibility each of these core settings were spread out on opposite sides of the display. What!?
As a person that values clean, thoughtful layout, this seriously annoyed me.
It enhanced that GoHighLevel still seemed like a work-in-progress instead of a sleek item ready for prime-time usage. Their top priorities appeared focused on packing in every feature under the sun, with inadequate use as a second thought.
And talking features, I soon understood the low price tag came with pricey concessions …
Misleading Pricing GoHighLevel Promotion
Among GoHighLevel’s biggest marketing points is the budget-friendly cost for accessibility to a lot of features. Yet I swiftly learned this cheap base cost was misleading.
They nickle-and-dimed individuals with erratic charges for core functionality. All of a sudden my bank card declarations had unclear $10 fees from GoHighLevel occasionally.
As it turned out, you get charged every time you send an email via their web servers. So for high volume users, this amounted to thousands of bucks in unanticipated expenses.
Between these per-email charges and paying added for deliverability attachments like Mailgun, my “budget-friendly” GoHighLevel registration wound up costing considerably greater than my Keap plan.
The reduced sticker price was appealing, but just not practical in practice. This bait-and-switch left a bad preference in my mouth.
Email Rates Suffered
The last dealbreaker was seeing my thoroughly supported email open rates drop virtually over night after changing to GoHighLevel.
Formerly, my target market engagement regularly struck 35-40% open prices in Keap month after month. Once I moved their documents over to GoHighLevel, efficiency tanked instantly to a pitiful 9% open price.
Despite just how much I optimized my sending practices or tried every troubleshooting trick, I might barely nudge open rates back into the teens– still a 50%+ decline from my previous criteria GoHighLevel Promotion.
Let me repeat: my exact same target market and emails instantly had horrible engagement. The only point I could assume that would be causing this was whatever was occurring behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a firm so based on e-mail marketing, this was a big deal.
In between the debilitating deliverability concerns, concealed fees, damaged features, and dreadful user interface, I had finally reached my restriction …
Why I Quit GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Just 45 days after moving my firm to GoHighLevel, I understood I had actually made a huge error. The disadvantages significantly surpassed any advantages.
No software is excellent, however the sheer quantity of problems was beyond appropriate.
At the end of the day, software boils down to trust. If I can not trust it to take care of crucial functions capably or believe a vendor has my best interests in mind, then it’s time to leave– even after investing significant time, money, and initiative moving.
So I made the hard phone call to turn around program and return back to Keap completely simply weeks after going done in on GoHighLevel. Allow’s discover what I picked up from this ordeal.
Trick Takeaways: What I Picked up from My GoHighLevel Error
My time with HighLevel can be summarized as a costly misadventure. But in hindsight, it educated me a couple of vital lessons:
- Stick to what jobs. Do not disturb what’s functioning unless something is definitively better across the board. Adjustment brings risk.
- Vet asserts completely. Marketing hype around new software program typically covers larger underlying problems. Deep due diligence is crucial.
- Select simplicity over features. Properly designed tools need to make your job life less complicated, not more difficult and unpleasant.
- Openness builds depend on. Nontransparent pricing, questionable reseller terms, and finger-pointing to evade troubles destroys trust fund.
- Seek objective testimonials. Satisfied support reviews indicate much less if extreme concerns imply inadequate overall usability.
- Perfection is impossible. No single option can completely satisfy every one-of-a-kind business demand. Discover the least-bad fit.
- Development over change. Incremental enhancements usually outweigh risky wholesale reinvention of what currently works penalty.
In other words, I learned to be much more cynical of “also good to be true” marketing insurance claims and less tempted by the attraction of shiny brand-new things. The devices you use daily need to earn depend on through transparency and performance, not slick advertising.