As a company proprietor for over a decade, I rely upon software and automation to streamline procedures and deliver outcomes. So when GoHighLevel arised on the scene couple of years back, it most definitely caught my focus GoHighLevel Relationship Number.
The idea was enticing– an all-in-one client management system with marketing, sales, and service devices integrated together. As a business owner always aiming to simplify and scale my business, it looked like a desire come true on paper. That wouldn’t want a solitary service that does it all?
But in this in-depth GoHighLevel review, I’ll take you inside my disastrous journey of trying (and stopping working) to switch over to this prominent brand-new software program. You’ll find out:
If you’re considering whether GoHighLevel is right for your very own company demands, hopefully you can gain from my agonizing errors and blew up assumptions.
Spoiler: I do NOT suggest GoHighLevel. If you require a CRM, begin with this listing of finest CRMs rather. I make use of Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re looking for a sales, marketing, and job management choice to GoHighLevel, after that right here are a few we recommend.
Backstory: Why I Took Into Consideration Switching from Keap
To recognize what attracted me to GoHighLevel in the first place, you require context concerning my previous setup. For over 5 years I had actually been happily depending on Keap (previously Infusionsoft) to fulfill all my client management and automation needs.
I found Keap intuitive to utilize and it handled every little thing I needed– CRM, e-mail marketing, sales funnels, membership websites, and client support.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are designed to help local business keep their clients while adding new ones effortlessly. Automate follow-ups with emails and texts, ensuring leads and clients obtain the ideal messages at the right time. Usage web site and social media sites forms to streamline lead follow-up, and handle your development with easy visit organizing and lead monitoring. Boost sales with automated estimating, invoicing, and repayment handling, maximizing your time. With Keap, small companies can conserve 10 hours each week and rise earnings by 39%. Start with a 14-day free trial, no charge card needed.
Why we like Keap
Keap uses a thorough client connection management (CRM) and marketing automation service tailored for small companies and entrepreneurs. We appreciate Keap’s focus on simplifying sales processes and supporting client partnerships through powerful automation tools. The platform’s all-in-one technique incorporates CRM, e-mail marketing, invoicing, and task management, making it particularly eye-catching for companies wanting to combine their technology stack.
Generally, it just worked dependably with minimal difficulty or maintenance needed. My open and click-through rates were fantastic (like 35% fantastic). Automations ran efficiently with no concerns.
So why on earth was I lured to uproot my entire operational structure from a system that worked to attempt something unverified and untried?
In knowledge I can admit I obtained seduced by the siren telephone call of “shiny item syndrome”. You understand the sensation: when everybody’s speaking about a brand-new device that will change your business … The turf typically looks greener beyond, and I asked yourself whether GoHighLevel could minimize rubbing points that I ‘d learned to tolerate over the years with Keap.
I withstood in the beginning, however a couple of even more irritations led me to assume possibly it was time for an adjustment.
The Financial investment: Moving My Company to GoHighLevel
Previously this year I decided to start. I registered for HighLevel’s Company plan at $297/month, investing substantially greater than the $97/month starter cost.
This wasn’t a decision I ignored. I knew switching platforms was mosting likely to require moving all my Keap data and basically reconstructing my whole tech facilities from square one making use of all of the GoHighLevel integrations readily available.
Here’s a review of just several of the effort required:
- Manually exporting 20,000+ email client records
- Recreating lots of automations and workflows
- Relocating customer accounts, notes, and project data to the brand-new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe billing integration
- Setting up landing pages, promos, and sales funnels throughout again
- Learning an entirely foreign UX and user interface style
All in, I invested around 30-40 tiresome hours of configuration job transitioning every little thing over– as well as managing lost productivity throughout the button.
However inevitably, it was a calculated investment I wanted to make. I figured some temporary discomfort would certainly repay with GoHighLevel giving a far better long-term option for my business, Dripify. Oh how wrong I was …
It only took me about a month of hands-on use to understand I had made a huge error. The concerns started accumulating quickly, up until it reached a factor I needed to reduce my losses and switch over back to Keap entirely.
Let’s go through the nightmarish problems I encountered.
Safety Issues & Numerous Vermin
Given GoHighLevel placed itself as an all-in-one automation system, I took care to carefully recreate every workflow from my old Keap account.
These consisted of series for onboarding brand-new e-mail clients, onboarding brand-new clients, automating follow-ups for webinar enrollments, sending out event pointers, handling subscription expirations and much more.
Whatever appeared to be functioning penalty … up until instantly it had not been. One morning, I awoke to locate 171 totally unimportant emails had actually been sent out to customers that ought to NOT have actually received them. This happened 3 days in a row, with a different batch of 160 individuals daily.
I hysterically attempted repairing and reconstructing the automation from square one. However the problem lingered.
When I desperately reached out to their assistance team, they vaguely claimed “web server concerns” were responsible. However this description really did not make any sense, considering that the errors continued happening each early morning like clockwork unassociated to any kind of downtime.
In my mind, this large failure was totally unacceptable and simply didn’t help my business. I have thousands of calls depending on my automated campaigns running smoothly.
So if GoHighLevel was mosting likely to be totally undependable, how could I entrust mission-critical workflows and sensitive client data to their technology?
The unintuitive interface just intensified these issues …
Irritating UX
Coming from Keap where everything was smooth and user-friendly, GoHighLevel’s learning curve really felt high and challenging.
Easy tasks like editing workflows involved excavating with menu systems that were all over the place. Secret settings were unexplainably spread in entirely different areas. Relocating in between features felt disjointed or complex.
I’ll tell you what I imply by talking about their funnel builder as an instance. There were 3 different setups panels to manage general, private, and item setups. Yet for some insane reason, the links to gain access to each of these core settings were expanded on opposite sides of the screen. What!?
As someone who values tidy, thoughtful design, this seriously annoyed me.
It reinforced that GoHighLevel still felt like a work-in-progress rather than a sleek product ready for prime-time use. Their priorities appeared focused on packing in every feature imaginable, with bad use as an afterthought.
And speaking of features, I soon realized the low cost tag came with costly concessions …
Deceptive Pricing GoHighLevel Relationship Number
One of GoHighLevel’s greatest selling factors is the economical cost for access to numerous features. But I rapidly learned this inexpensive base price was deceptive.
They nickle-and-dimed customers with sporadic fees for core functionality. Suddenly my charge card declarations had vague $10 fees from GoHighLevel occasionally.
As it ended up, you get charged every single time you send out an e-mail through their servers. So for high volume customers, this added up to numerous bucks in unanticipated prices.
In between these per-email costs and paying additional for deliverability add-ons like Mailgun, my “economical” GoHighLevel membership ended up setting you back substantially greater than my Keap plan.
The low sticker price was alluring, however just not realistic in practice. This bait-and-switch left a negative taste in my mouth.
Email Fees Suffered
The last dealbreaker was seeing my thoroughly supported e-mail open rates plunge virtually overnight after changing to GoHighLevel.
Formerly, my audience engagement consistently struck 35-40% open rates in Keap month after month. Once I moved their documents over to GoHighLevel, performance tanked instantaneously to a pathetic 9% open rate.
Regardless of just how much I optimized my sending practices or tried every troubleshooting trick, I might barely push open prices back into the teenagers– still a 50%+ decline from my previous benchmarks GoHighLevel Relationship Number.
Let me repeat: my exact same target market and emails all of a sudden had horrible engagement. The only point I could assume that would certainly be causing this was whatever was happening behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For an agency so based on e-mail marketing, this was a big deal.
In between the crippling deliverability issues, concealed fees, damaged features, and dreadful interface, I had actually lastly reached my restriction …
Why I Quit GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Simply 45 days after moving my firm to GoHighLevel, I understood I had made a big blunder. The cons dramatically exceeded any advantages.
No software application is ideal, however the large quantity of troubles was past appropriate.
At the end of the day, software program boils down to trust. If I can not trust it to take care of crucial functions effectively or believe a vendor has my benefits in mind, then it’s time to walk away– also after investing considerable time, money, and effort migrating.
So I made the challenging contact us to reverse training course and return back to Keap entirely just weeks after going done in on GoHighLevel. Allow’s discover what I gained from this debacle.
Secret Takeaways: What I Gained from My GoHighLevel Error
My time with HighLevel can be summarized as a costly misadventure. Yet in hindsight, it taught me a few key lessons:
- Stay with what works. Do not distress what’s working unless something is definitively better across the board. Modification brings threat.
- Veterinarian asserts thoroughly. Marketing buzz around new software application typically covers bigger underlying flaws. Deep due persistance is vital.
- Pick simplicity over features. Well-designed devices need to make your work life easier, not extra complex and unpleasant.
- Openness builds depend on. Nontransparent pricing, dubious reseller terms, and finger-pointing to evade issues destroys trust fund.
- Look for objective reviews. Happy assistance reviews indicate much less if too much concerns suggest bad total use.
- Perfection is difficult. No solitary remedy can completely meet every special company requirement. Discover the least-bad fit.
- Advancement over transformation. Step-by-step improvements typically exceed risky wholesale reinvention of what currently functions penalty.
Simply put, I learned to be more hesitant of “too good to be real” marketing insurance claims and less lured by the appeal of shiny brand-new objects. The tools you use daily must gain trust through openness and performance, not slick advertising.