As a firm owner for over a decade, I rely upon software and automation to improve procedures and deliver results. So when GoHighLevel emerged on the scene few years back, it definitely caught my focus GoHighLevel Rebilling.
The concept was enticing– an all-in-one customer management system with marketing, sales, and solution devices integrated together. As an entrepreneur constantly seeking to streamline and scale my company, it looked like a desire come to life theoretically. That would not desire a single option that does it all?
But in this extensive GoHighLevel review, I’ll take you inside my tragic trip of attempting (and falling short) to switch to this popular brand-new software application. You’ll learn:
If you’re thinking about whether GoHighLevel is right for your very own company demands, hopefully you can pick up from my excruciating mistakes and pumped up expectations.
Spoiler: I do NOT advise GoHighLevel. If you require a CRM, begin with this listing of best CRMs rather. I use Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re searching for a sales, marketing, and project management alternative to GoHighLevel, then below are a few we suggest.
Backstory: Why I Considered Changing from Keap
To comprehend what attracted me to GoHighLevel in the first place, you need context regarding my previous setup. For over 5 years I had actually been gladly depending on Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) to meet all my client monitoring and automation requirements.
I discovered Keap user-friendly to use and it handled everything I needed– CRM, e-mail marketing, sales funnels, membership sites, and customer support.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are developed to help small businesses maintain their clients while adding new ones effortlessly. Automate follow-ups with emails and texts, making certain leads and customers get the right messages at the correct time. Usage site and social networks types to streamline lead follow-up, and handle your growth with easy appointment organizing and lead monitoring. Boost sales with automated pricing quote, invoicing, and settlement processing, liberating your time. With Keap, small companies can conserve 10 hours each week and rise profits by 39%. Beginning with a 14-day free trial, no charge card called for.
Why we like Keap
Keap offers an extensive consumer partnership monitoring (CRM) and marketing automation option tailored for small businesses and business owners. We appreciate Keap’s concentrate on simplifying sales procedures and nurturing client relationships via powerful automation tools. The platform’s all-in-one strategy incorporates CRM, email marketing, invoicing, and task monitoring, making it especially appealing for organizations aiming to settle their tech pile.
Essentially, it just functioned accurately with very little hassle or upkeep required. My open and click-through prices were wonderful (like 35% great). Automations ran efficiently with no concerns.
So why on earth was I lured to uproot my entire functional structure from a system that worked to attempt something unverified and untried?
In knowledge I can admit I obtained seduced by the alarm phone call of “shiny object disorder”. You know the feeling: when every person’s speaking about a brand-new tool that will certainly revolutionize your business … The grass frequently looks greener on the other side, and I questioned whether GoHighLevel could lower friction factors that I ‘d discovered to tolerate throughout the years with Keap.
I stood up to in the beginning, however a few even more irritations led me to believe perhaps it was time for a modification.
The Financial investment: Moving My Firm to GoHighLevel
Earlier this year I determined to start. I enrolled in HighLevel’s Agency plan at $297/month, spending dramatically more than the $97/month starter price.
This had not been a choice I ignored. I recognized changing platforms was going to call for moving all my Keap data and essentially restoring my entire technology framework from the ground up using all of the GoHighLevel integrations readily available.
Right here’s a summary of just a few of the initiative called for:
- Manually exporting 20,000+ e-mail subscriber records
- Recreating dozens of automations and workflows
- Relocating customer profiles, notes, and project information to the brand-new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe invoicing integration
- Setting up landing pages, coupons, and sales funnels all over once again
- Learning a totally foreign UX and user interface layout
Done in, I invested around 30-40 tedious hours of configuration job transitioning everything over– and also managing lost performance during the button.
But eventually, it was a computed financial investment I was willing to make. I figured some short-term pain would repay with GoHighLevel providing a much better lasting solution for my service, Dripify. Oh how wrong I was …
It only took me regarding a month of hands-on usage to recognize I had made a big blunder. The issues started piling up rapidly, till it reached a factor I needed to cut my losses and switch over back to Keap completely.
Allow’s walk through the horrible issues I ran into.
Protection Issues & Many Bugs
Provided GoHighLevel placed itself as an all-in-one automation platform, I took care to carefully recreate every workflow from my old Keap account.
These included series for onboarding brand-new email subscribers, onboarding new customers, automating follow-ups for webinar enrollments, sending out event pointers, taking care of membership expirations and much more.
Every little thing appeared to be operating fine … up until instantly it had not been. One morning, I woke up to find 171 completely unnecessary e-mails had been sent out to individuals who need to NOT have actually received them. This occurred 3 days straight, with a different set of 160 individuals every day.
I hysterically tried repairing and restoring the automation from the ground up. Yet the issue lingered.
When I frantically reached out to their assistance group, they vaguely claimed “server issues” were responsible. But this description really did not make any type of feeling, given that the mistakes proceeded taking place each early morning like clockwork unassociated to any kind of downtime.
In my mind, this enormous failure was entirely unacceptable and simply didn’t work for my business. I have thousands of calls relying on my automated campaigns running smoothly.
So if GoHighLevel was going to be completely unreliable, just how could I entrust mission-critical workflows and sensitive client information to their modern technology?
The unintuitive user interface only compounded these concerns …
Aggravating UX
Coming from Keap where every little thing was seamless and instinctive, GoHighLevel’s learning contour felt high and complex.
Easy jobs like editing and enhancing workflows entailed digging through food selection systems that were all over the place. Secret settings were unexplainably spread in entirely different sections. Moving between functions felt disjointed or complex.
I’ll tell you what I imply by speaking about their funnel builder as an instance. There were 3 separate settings panels to manage general, private, and product configurations. Yet for some insane factor, the web links to gain access to each of these core settings were expanded on contrary sides of the screen. What!?
As someone that values clean, thoughtful design, this seriously upset me.
It reinforced that GoHighLevel still felt like a work-in-progress as opposed to a sleek product ready for prime-time usage. Their top priorities appeared focused on stuffing in every feature under the sun, with poor functionality as a second thought.
And speaking of features, I quickly realized the small cost tag included costly concessions …
Misleading Pricing GoHighLevel Rebilling
Among GoHighLevel’s largest marketing points is the budget-friendly rate for accessibility to so many features. But I rapidly learned this affordable base expense was deceitful.
They nickle-and-dimed individuals with occasional charges for core functionality. All of a sudden my bank card declarations had vague $10 charges from GoHighLevel here and there.
As it ended up, you obtain billed every single time you send an e-mail via their servers. So for high volume customers, this added up to hundreds of bucks in unexpected expenses.
In between these per-email charges and paying added for deliverability attachments like Mailgun, my “cost effective” GoHighLevel registration wound up costing significantly MORE than my Keap plan.
The reduced sticker price was tempting, but just not reasonable in practice. This bait-and-switch left a poor preference in my mouth.
Email Rates Suffered
The final dealbreaker was seeing my meticulously nurtured e-mail open prices plunge virtually overnight after switching over to GoHighLevel.
Previously, my audience engagement continually hit 35-40% open rates in Keap month after month. But once I moved their records over to GoHighLevel, efficiency tanked immediately to a useless 9% open rate.
No matter just how much I optimized my sending out practices or attempted every troubleshooting method, I could barely nudge open rates back into the teens– still a 50%+ decrease from my previous standards GoHighLevel Rebilling.
Let me repeat: my exact same audience and e-mails unexpectedly had dreadful engagement. The only point I might assume that would be causing this was whatever was occurring behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a firm so based on email marketing, this was a big deal.
In between the debilitating deliverability issues, hidden charges, damaged features, and terrible interface, I had actually ultimately reached my limitation …
Why I Give up GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Just 45 days after migrating my firm to GoHighLevel, I understood I had made a big error. The cons significantly outweighed any type of benefits.
No software application is perfect, however the sheer quantity of troubles was beyond appropriate.
At the end of the day, software application comes down to trust fund. If I can not trust it to handle critical features capably or believe a supplier has my best interests in mind, after that it’s time to leave– even after spending considerable time, cash, and initiative migrating.
So I made the hard phone call to turn around program and return back to Keap entirely just weeks after going all in on GoHighLevel. Let’s explore what I gained from this ordeal.
Trick Takeaways: What I Gained from My GoHighLevel Mistake
My time with HighLevel can be summed up as an expensive accident. However in hindsight, it instructed me a few key lessons:
- Adhere to what jobs. Do not distress what’s working unless something is definitively far better across the board. Modification brings threat.
- Veterinarian claims extensively. Marketing buzz around brand-new software application usually obscures larger underlying imperfections. Deep due diligence is necessary.
- Select simpleness over features. Properly designed tools ought to make your work life easier, not extra complex and unpleasant.
- Openness constructs trust. Nontransparent pricing, questionable reseller terms, and finger-pointing to avert issues ruins depend on.
- Seek impartial evaluations. Happy assistance reviews suggest less if excessive problems indicate bad overall use.
- Perfection is impossible. No solitary option can completely satisfy every distinct business requirement. Find the least-bad fit.
- Evolution over change. Step-by-step improvements commonly surpass high-risk wholesale reinvention of what already works penalty.
Simply put, I discovered to be more hesitant of “as well excellent to be real” marketing cases and much less lured by the attraction of shiny brand-new things. The tools you utilize daily must gain depend on through openness and performance, not slick advertising.