As a company owner for over a years, I rely upon software program and automation to enhance operations and deliver results. So when GoHighLevel emerged on the scene few years back, it certainly caught my attention GoHighLevel QR Code Generator.
The idea was attractive– an all-in-one client management platform with marketing, sales, and solution devices integrated together. As a business owner always wanting to simplify and scale my company, it seemed like a desire come to life on paper. That would not want a solitary service that does it all?
However in this in-depth GoHighLevel testimonial, I’ll take you inside my devastating trip of attempting (and falling short) to change to this prominent brand-new software application. You’ll find out:
If you’re taking into consideration whether GoHighLevel is right for your own service needs, ideally you can gain from my uncomfortable blunders and inflated assumptions.
Spoiler: I do NOT recommend GoHighLevel. If you need a CRM, begin with this checklist of best CRMs rather. I use Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re searching for a sales, marketing, and job monitoring option to GoHighLevel, then right here are a couple of we suggest.
Backstory: Why I Considered Switching Over from Keap
To recognize what attracted me to GoHighLevel to begin with, you need context regarding my previous setup. For over 5 years I had been happily counting on Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) to satisfy all my customer management and automation demands.
I discovered Keap intuitive to make use of and it dealt with everything I needed– CRM, email marketing, sales funnels, membership sites, and customer assistance.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are made to assist small businesses maintain their clients while adding new ones effortlessly. Automate follow-ups with emails and texts, making certain leads and customers get the best messages at the right time. Usage internet site and social media sites types to simplify lead follow-up, and handle your growth with easy consultation organizing and lead monitoring. Boost sales with automated quoting, invoicing, and settlement processing, liberating your time. With Keap, local business can conserve 10 hours per week and boost profits by 39%. Start with a 14-day free trial, no bank card needed.
Why we like Keap
Keap uses a thorough client relationship monitoring (CRM) and marketing automation remedy tailored for small businesses and entrepreneurs. We appreciate Keap’s focus on improving sales procedures and supporting customer partnerships with effective automation devices. The platform’s all-in-one method incorporates CRM, e-mail marketing, invoicing, and job administration, making it especially attractive for businesses aiming to combine their technology pile.
Generally, it just functioned dependably with minimal hassle or upkeep required. My open and click-through prices were fantastic (like 35% fantastic). Automations ran smoothly without issues.
So why on earth was I attracted to uproot my whole operational structure from a system that worked to attempt something unproven and untested?
In knowledge I can confess I got attracted by the alarm telephone call of “shiny item syndrome”. You know the feeling: when every person’s talking about a brand-new tool that will reinvent your organization … The yard usually looks greener beyond, and I wondered whether GoHighLevel might lower rubbing points that I would certainly discovered to endure throughout the years with Keap.
I resisted at first, but a few even more disappointments led me to assume perhaps it was time for a modification.
The Investment: Migrating My Firm to GoHighLevel
Previously this year I chose to start. I signed up for HighLevel’s Agency plan at $297/month, investing substantially more than the $97/month starter expense.
This wasn’t a choice I took lightly. I recognized switching over systems was going to require migrating all my Keap data and essentially reconstructing my entire tech facilities from scratch making use of all of the GoHighLevel integrations readily available.
Below’s an overview of simply several of the initiative needed:
- Manually exporting 20,000+ e-mail subscriber records
- Recreating dozens of automations and workflows
- Relocating client profiles, notes, and project data to the brand-new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe invoicing integration
- Establishing landing pages, coupons, and sales funnels around again
- Learning a totally foreign UX and user interface design
Done in, I invested around 30-40 laborious hours of configuration job transitioning every little thing over– as well as managing lost performance throughout the switch.
Yet ultimately, it was a calculated investment I agreed to make. I figured some temporary pain would pay off with GoHighLevel giving a better long-term service for my business, Dripify. Oh exactly how wrong I was …
It only took me regarding a month of hands-on use to realize I had made a big blunder. The issues began accumulating promptly, till it reached a point I needed to cut my losses and switch back to Keap totally.
Let’s go through the nightmarish issues I ran into.
Safety And Security Issues & Many Vermin
Offered GoHighLevel positioned itself as an all-in-one automation system, I took care to carefully recreate each and every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These consisted of series for onboarding brand-new e-mail customers, onboarding brand-new clients, automating follow-ups for webinar registrations, sending event tips, handling membership expiries and far more.
Every little thing appeared to be working penalty … until all of a sudden it wasn’t. One morning, I woke up to discover 171 totally pointless emails had been sent to customers that need to NOT have actually gotten them. This occurred 3 days in a row, with a different set of 160 people each day.
I anxiously attempted repairing and rebuilding the automation from the ground up. But the problem persisted.
When I frantically connected to their support group, they vaguely claimed “server issues” were to blame. But this explanation really did not make any kind of sense, since the mistakes continued occurring each early morning like clockwork unrelated to any kind of downtime.
In my mind, this huge failing was totally inappropriate and just didn’t help my business. I have countless calls relying upon my automated campaigns running efficiently.
So if GoHighLevel was going to be totally unreliable, just how could I hand over mission-critical workflows and sensitive customer data to their modern technology?
The unintuitive user interface only worsened these concerns …
Discouraging UX
Coming from Keap where every little thing was smooth and intuitive, GoHighLevel’s learning curve really felt high and challenging.
Easy tasks like editing workflows involved excavating with food selection systems that were all over the place. Key setups were unexplainably spread in totally various areas. Relocating between features really felt disjointed or confusing.
I’ll tell you what I mean by speaking about their funnel builder as an instance. There were 3 different setups panels to handle overall, individual, and item configurations. Yet for some crazy factor, the links to gain access to each of these core settings were expanded on contrary sides of the display. What!?
As somebody who values tidy, thoughtful design, this seriously irritated me.
It enhanced that GoHighLevel still felt like a work-in-progress as opposed to a polished product ready for prime-time use. Their top priorities seemed focused on packing in every feature imaginable, with inadequate functionality as an afterthought.
And speaking of features, I soon understood the low cost tag included pricey concessions …
Deceptive Pricing GoHighLevel QR Code Generator
One of GoHighLevel’s most significant marketing factors is the inexpensive price for accessibility to numerous features. Yet I rapidly discovered this low-cost base cost was deceptive.
They nickle-and-dimed users with occasional costs for core capability. Unexpectedly my bank card statements had unclear $10 charges from GoHighLevel here and there.
As it turned out, you get charged every time you send out an email with their servers. So for high volume individuals, this amounted to numerous dollars in unforeseen costs.
Between these per-email costs and paying added for deliverability attachments like Mailgun, my “cost effective” GoHighLevel registration wound up costing significantly MORE than my Keap plan.
The low price tag was alluring, yet simply not reasonable in practice. This bait-and-switch left a poor preference in my mouth.
Email Fees Suffered
The final dealbreaker was seeing my carefully nurtured e-mail open prices plummet virtually overnight after switching to GoHighLevel.
Previously, my audience interaction constantly hit 35-40% open prices in Keap month after month. Once I moved their records over to GoHighLevel, performance tanked instantaneously to a worthless 9% open rate.
No matter how much I optimized my sending techniques or tried every troubleshooting method, I might barely nudge open prices back right into the teens– still a 50%+ decline from my previous benchmarks GoHighLevel QR Code Generator.
Let me repeat: my exact same target market and e-mails all of a sudden had awful engagement. The only point I could think that would be causing this was whatever was taking place behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For an agency so depending on e-mail marketing, this was a big deal.
Between the crippling deliverability concerns, concealed fees, damaged features, and awful interface, I had lastly reached my limitation …
Why I Stop GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Simply 45 days after moving my company to GoHighLevel, I recognized I had actually made a significant blunder. The disadvantages significantly outweighed any type of advantages.
No software is excellent, however the large volume of issues was beyond acceptable.
At the end of the day, software program boils down to depend on. If I can’t trust it to manage essential 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 challenging contact us to reverse training course and return back to Keap completely just weeks after going all in on GoHighLevel. Allow’s explore what I picked up from this debacle.
Secret Takeaways: What I Learned From My GoHighLevel Error
My time with HighLevel can be summed up as a costly misadventure. But in knowledge, it educated me a couple of essential lessons:
- Stay with what works. Don’t upset what’s functioning unless something is definitively much better across the board. Adjustment brings risk.
- Veterinarian asserts extensively. Marketing hype around brand-new software program typically obscures bigger underlying imperfections. Deep due persistance is essential.
- Pick simpleness over features. Properly designed tools need to make your job life much easier, not much more complex and messy.
- Openness develops count on. Nontransparent pricing, shady reseller terms, and finger-pointing to evade troubles destroys trust fund.
- Seek objective reviews. Satisfied assistance evaluates mean less if too much issues imply bad general functionality.
- Excellence is difficult. No solitary remedy can flawlessly satisfy every special company demand. Find the least-bad fit.
- Evolution over transformation. Incremental improvements typically surpass high-risk wholesale reinvention of what already functions fine.
In short, I found out to be more cynical of “also good to be real” marketing insurance claims and much less tempted by the appeal of shiny new things. The devices you use daily should gain trust through openness and performance, not glossy advertising.