As a company proprietor for over a years, I count 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 focus GoHighLevel Quick Wins.
The concept was enticing– an all-in-one customer monitoring system with marketing, sales, and solution devices integrated together. As a business owner constantly wanting to streamline and scale my company, it appeared like a dream come true on paper. Who would not want a single option that does it all?
Yet in this thorough GoHighLevel evaluation, I’ll take you inside my devastating journey of trying (and failing) to switch to this preferred brand-new software program. You’ll find out:
If you’re thinking about whether GoHighLevel is right for your own service needs, with any luck you can pick up from my uncomfortable blunders and blew up expectations.
Looter: I do NOT suggest GoHighLevel. If you need a CRM, start with this checklist of best CRMs rather. I use Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re trying to find a sales, marketing, and project administration choice to GoHighLevel, after that here are a few we recommend.
Backstory: Why I Took Into Consideration Changing from Keap
To recognize what attracted me to GoHighLevel to begin with, you need context about my previous configuration. For over 5 years I had been gladly counting on Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) to satisfy all my customer monitoring and automation demands.
I found Keap user-friendly to use and it handled every little thing I required– CRM, e-mail marketing, sales funnels, subscription sites, and client assistance.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are developed to help local business maintain their customers while including brand-new ones effortlessly. Automate follow-ups with emails and messages, making certain leads and customers get the right messages at the right time. Usage site and social networks forms to simplify lead follow-up, and manage your growth with very easy appointment organizing and lead monitoring. Boost sales with automated estimating, invoicing, and payment processing, liberating your time. With Keap, small companies can save 10 hours weekly and rise income by 39%. Begin with a 14-day free trial, no bank card called for.
Why we like Keap
Keap offers an extensive client partnership administration (CRM) and marketing automation remedy tailored for small companies and entrepreneurs. We value Keap’s focus on improving sales processes and nurturing client partnerships via powerful automation tools. The system’s all-in-one method incorporates CRM, email marketing, invoicing, and job management, making it especially appealing for companies wanting to consolidate their tech stack.
Essentially, it just worked dependably with minimal fuss or maintenance called for. My open and click-through prices were wonderful (like 35% excellent). Automations ran efficiently without concerns.
So why in the world was I tempted to uproot my entire functional foundation from a system that worked to attempt something unverified and untried?
In hindsight I can confess I obtained seduced by the alarm telephone call of “glossy object disorder”. You know the feeling: when every person’s talking about a new device that will reinvent your service … The lawn usually looks greener beyond, and I asked yourself whether GoHighLevel might minimize rubbing factors that I ‘d found out to tolerate throughout the years with Keap.
I withstood at first, but a couple of even more aggravations led me to believe perhaps it was time for an adjustment.
The Financial investment: Migrating My Agency to GoHighLevel
Earlier this year I chose to start. I registered for HighLevel’s Company plan at $297/month, spending considerably greater than the $97/month starter price.
This had not been a choice I took lightly. I knew switching over systems was going to require moving all my Keap information and basically rebuilding my entire tech facilities from scratch using all of the GoHighLevel integrations available.
Here’s an introduction of simply some of the initiative needed:
- Manually exporting 20,000+ email client documents
- Recreating dozens of automations and workflows
- Relocating client accounts, notes, and project data to the new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe invoicing integration
- Setting up landing pages, coupons, and sales funnels throughout once more
- Learning an entirely foreign UX and interface layout
Done in, I spent around 30-40 tiresome hours of arrangement job transitioning everything over– not to mention handling lost performance during the switch.
Yet ultimately, it was a computed financial investment I was willing to make. I figured some short-term pain would certainly pay off with GoHighLevel giving a better long-lasting option for my company, Dripify. Oh how incorrect I was …
It just took me concerning a month of hands-on use to realize I had made a huge mistake. The problems began accumulating promptly, up until it reached a point I had to reduce my losses and switch back to Keap completely.
Allow’s walk through the horrible problems I came across.
Security Issues & Numerous Vermin
Given GoHighLevel placed itself as an all-in-one automation platform, I made sure to diligently recreate every workflow from my old Keap account.
These consisted of sequences for onboarding new e-mail customers, onboarding brand-new clients, automating follow-ups for webinar registrations, sending occasion reminders, handling subscription expirations and much more.
Whatever seemed to be functioning fine … till all of a sudden it wasn’t. One early morning, I woke up to discover 171 entirely unnecessary emails had actually been sent out to users that must NOT have actually obtained them. This occurred 3 days in a row, with a various batch of 160 people every day.
I frantically tried repairing and rebuilding the automation from the ground up. Yet the problem lingered.
When I desperately reached out to their support team, they slightly declared “server concerns” were at fault. However this description really did not make any sense, since the mistakes continued taking place each early morning like clockwork unassociated to any type of downtime.
In my mind, this massive failure was totally inappropriate and simply really did not benefit my service. I have hundreds of get in touches with relying upon my automated campaigns running efficiently.
So if GoHighLevel was going to be totally unreliable, exactly how could I leave mission-critical workflows and sensitive customer data to their modern technology?
The unintuitive interface only compounded these issues …
Irritating UX
Originating from Keap where whatever was seamless and instinctive, GoHighLevel’s learning curve felt steep and difficult.
Basic jobs like modifying workflows involved excavating via food selection systems that were all over the place. Secret settings were unexplainably scattered in totally different areas. Moving in between functions really felt disjointed or complex.
I’ll inform you what I suggest by talking about their funnel builder as an example. There were 3 separate settings panels to take care of overall, private, and item configurations. Yet for some insane factor, the web links to access each of these core settings were expanded on contrary sides of the screen. What!?
As somebody who values tidy, thoughtful style, this seriously irritated me.
It enhanced that GoHighLevel still seemed like a work-in-progress rather than a refined item ready for prime-time usage. Their priorities appeared concentrated on stuffing in every feature under the sun, with inadequate use as an afterthought.
And talking features, I quickly understood the affordable price tag featured pricey concessions …
Misleading Pricing GoHighLevel Quick Wins
Among GoHighLevel’s biggest marketing points is the affordable cost for access to a lot of features. But I swiftly discovered this inexpensive base cost was misleading.
They nickle-and-dimed users with occasional costs for core capability. Unexpectedly my credit card statements had vague $10 costs from GoHighLevel occasionally.
As it turned out, you get charged every time you send an e-mail through their servers. So for high quantity users, this added up to numerous bucks in unexpected expenses.
Between these per-email fees and paying extra for deliverability add-ons like Mailgun, my “economical” GoHighLevel subscription wound up costing dramatically 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 Rates Suffered
The last dealbreaker was seeing my meticulously supported e-mail open prices drop virtually over night after switching over to GoHighLevel.
Formerly, my audience engagement constantly struck 35-40% open rates in Keap month after month. Once I migrated their records over to GoHighLevel, efficiency tanked instantaneously to a worthless 9% open price.
No matter how much I optimized my sending methods or attempted every fixing technique, I can hardly nudge open prices back into the teens– still a 50%+ decline from my previous benchmarks GoHighLevel Quick Wins.
Let me repeat: my exact same target market and emails unexpectedly had awful involvement. The only thing I might assume that would be causing this was whatever was taking place behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For an agency so dependent on email marketing, this was a big deal.
In between the debilitating deliverability problems, concealed costs, busted features, and terrible user interface, I had lastly reached my limitation …
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 mistake. The cons drastically exceeded any kind of advantages.
No software program is ideal, yet the sheer volume of problems was beyond appropriate.
At the end of the day, software boils down to depend on. If I can not trust it to manage vital functions effectively or believe a supplier has my best interests in mind, after that it’s time to walk away– even after spending considerable time, money, and effort moving.
So I made the hard phone call to reverse program and return back to Keap totally just weeks after going done in on GoHighLevel. Allow’s explore what I learned from this debacle.
Trick Takeaways: What I Gained from My GoHighLevel Error
My time with HighLevel can be summarized as an expensive misadventure. But in hindsight, it taught me a few key lessons:
- Adhere to what works. Do not distress what’s functioning unless something is definitively better across the board. Modification brings risk.
- Veterinarian asserts extensively. Marketing hype around new software commonly covers bigger underlying imperfections. Deep due diligence is crucial.
- Pick simpleness over features. Well-designed devices must make your work life much easier, not extra challenging and unpleasant.
- Openness constructs depend on. Nontransparent pricing, dubious reseller terms, and finger-pointing to avert issues destroys trust.
- Look for honest testimonials. Satisfied support reviews indicate much less if extreme problems indicate bad overall use.
- Perfection is impossible. No single option can perfectly meet every distinct company need. Find the least-bad fit.
- Development over transformation. Step-by-step renovations commonly surpass dangerous wholesale reinvention of what currently works fine.
Simply put, I found out to be more doubtful of “also great to be true” marketing cases and less tempted by the appeal of shiny new items. The devices you use daily ought to gain trust via openness and efficiency, not glossy advertising.