As a company proprietor for over a years, I count on software and automation to simplify procedures and deliver outcomes. So when GoHighLevel arised on the scene few years back, it certainly caught my interest GoHighLevel Reputation Center.
The concept was appealing– an all-in-one client management system with marketing, sales, and service devices integrated together. As an entrepreneur always looking to simplify and scale my service, it seemed like a dream become a reality theoretically. Who wouldn’t want a solitary solution that does it all?
However in this comprehensive GoHighLevel review, I’ll take you inside my tragic trip of trying (and failing) to switch to this preferred new software. You’ll learn:
If you’re thinking about whether GoHighLevel is right for your very own service needs, ideally you can gain from my painful errors and blew up expectations.
Looter: I do NOT recommend GoHighLevel. If you require a CRM, start with this listing of best CRMs instead. I utilize Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re trying to find a sales, marketing, and project administration option to GoHighLevel, then below are a few we suggest.
Backstory: Why I Thought About Changing from Keap
To understand what attracted me to GoHighLevel in the first place, you require context regarding my previous arrangement. For over 5 years I had been gladly relying on Keap (previously Infusionsoft) to satisfy all my client management and automation needs.
I found Keap instinctive to make use of and it dealt with every little thing I required– CRM, email marketing, sales funnels, subscription websites, and customer support.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are created to help small companies maintain their customers while including new ones effortlessly. Automate follow-ups with emails and texts, ensuring leads and clients obtain the best messages at the correct time. Usage web site and social networks types to enhance lead follow-up, and manage your development with very easy appointment organizing and lead tracking. Boost sales with automated pricing quote, invoicing, and settlement processing, maximizing your time. With Keap, small companies can conserve 10 hours each week and rise revenue by 39%. Start with a 14-day free trial, no charge card required.
Why we like Keap
Keap provides a thorough consumer connection management (CRM) and marketing automation service customized for small companies and business owners. We appreciate Keap’s focus on streamlining sales processes and supporting client connections through effective automation devices. The platform’s all-in-one approach combines CRM, email marketing, invoicing, and task administration, making it particularly appealing for companies seeking to combine their tech pile.
Generally, it simply functioned accurately with minimal difficulty or maintenance needed. My open and click-through rates were fantastic (like 35% excellent). Automations ran efficiently without issues.
So why on earth was I attracted to uproot my whole operational structure from a system that worked to try something unverified and untested?
In knowledge I can admit I obtained seduced by the alarm call of “shiny object syndrome”. You recognize the feeling: when everyone’s speaking about a brand-new tool that will transform your company … The yard usually looks greener on the other side, and I questioned whether GoHighLevel could decrease rubbing points that I ‘d found out to tolerate throughout the years with Keap.
I stood up to at first, however a couple of even more disappointments led me to assume maybe it was time for an adjustment.
The Investment: Moving My Company to GoHighLevel
Earlier this year I made a decision to start. I registered for HighLevel’s Firm plan at $297/month, spending substantially more than the $97/month starter cost.
This wasn’t a decision I took lightly. I understood changing platforms was mosting likely to require migrating all my Keap information and basically rebuilding my entire technology framework from scratch making use of all of the GoHighLevel integrations readily available.
Below’s a review of simply some of the initiative called for:
- By hand exporting 20,000+ email client documents
- Recreating lots of automations and workflows
- Moving client profiles, notes, and task data to the new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe payment integration
- Setting up landing pages, coupons, and sales funnels all over once more
- Learning an entirely international UX and interface style
All in, I spent around 30-40 tiresome hours of setup work transitioning every little thing over– not to mention handling shed efficiency during the switch.
Yet ultimately, it was a calculated financial investment I was willing to make. I figured some temporary discomfort would certainly pay off with GoHighLevel offering a much better lasting option for my company, Dripify. Oh just how wrong I was …
It just took me concerning a month of hands-on use to understand I had actually made a large mistake. The problems started piling up promptly, until it got to a point I needed to cut my losses and change back to Keap completely.
Let’s walk through the nightmarish troubles I experienced.
Safety And Security Issues & Many Bugs
Given GoHighLevel positioned itself as an all-in-one automation platform, I made sure to carefully recreate every workflow from my old Keap account.
These included series for onboarding brand-new e-mail subscribers, onboarding brand-new customers, automating follow-ups for webinar enrollments, sending out occasion suggestions, handling membership expirations and a lot more.
Every little thing seemed to be functioning penalty … up until all of a sudden it wasn’t. One morning, I awoke to locate 171 completely unnecessary e-mails had been sent out to individuals that need to NOT have actually obtained them. This took place three days in a row, with a different batch of 160 people every day.
I desperately attempted fixing and reconstructing the automation from the ground up. Yet the issue persisted.
When I frantically reached out to their assistance team, they slightly declared “web server concerns” were responsible. But this explanation really did not make any type of feeling, because the errors proceeded happening each early morning like clockwork unassociated to any kind of downtime.
In my mind, this large failing was totally unacceptable and just didn’t benefit my business. I have thousands of get in touches with counting on my automated campaigns running efficiently.
So if GoHighLevel was going to be absolutely undependable, how could I delegate mission-critical workflows and sensitive customer information to their modern technology?
The unintuitive user interface just worsened these problems …
Discouraging UX
Originating from Keap where every little thing was seamless and user-friendly, GoHighLevel’s learning contour felt steep and complex.
Straightforward jobs like editing and enhancing workflows included digging via food selection systems that were all over the place. Trick settings were unexplainably spread in absolutely various areas. Moving in between features really felt disjointed or complicated.
I’ll tell you what I suggest by discussing their funnel builder as an instance. There were 3 separate setups panels to handle general, private, and item configurations. Yet for some crazy reason, the links to accessibility each of these core setups were spread out on contrary sides of the screen. What!?
As a person who values tidy, thoughtful design, this seriously upset me.
It enhanced that GoHighLevel still felt like a work-in-progress as opposed to a refined product ready for prime-time use. Their concerns seemed concentrated on cramming in every feature imaginable, with poor usability as a second thought.
And speaking of features, I quickly understood the low cost tag came with pricey concessions …
Misleading Pricing GoHighLevel Reputation Center
One of GoHighLevel’s greatest marketing factors is the cost effective cost for access to numerous features. However I promptly learned this cheap base expense was deceptive.
They nickle-and-dimed users with erratic fees for core capability. Suddenly my charge card declarations had vague $10 fees from GoHighLevel here and there.
As it turned out, you get charged every single time you send an e-mail with their servers. So for high quantity individuals, this added up to thousands of dollars in unforeseen prices.
Between these per-email charges and paying additional for deliverability attachments like Mailgun, my “budget-friendly” GoHighLevel subscription ended up setting you back dramatically greater than my Keap plan.
The reduced price tag was appealing, but just not reasonable in practice. This bait-and-switch left a bad taste in my mouth.
Email Rates Suffered
The final dealbreaker was seeing my meticulously nurtured email open rates drop virtually over night after changing to GoHighLevel.
Formerly, my audience engagement regularly struck 35-40% open rates in Keap month after month. Once I migrated their documents over to GoHighLevel, efficiency tanked immediately to a pathetic 9% open rate.
Regardless of just how much I maximized my sending out methods or tried every troubleshooting trick, I can hardly nudge open rates back right into the teenagers– still a 50%+ decrease from my previous standards GoHighLevel Reputation Center.
Let me repeat: my exact same audience and emails all of a sudden had terrible involvement. The only thing I might think that would certainly be causing this was whatever was occurring behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For an agency so depending on e-mail marketing, this was a big deal.
In between the debilitating deliverability issues, hidden costs, broken features, and dreadful interface, I had ultimately reached my limit …
Why I Stop GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Simply 45 days after migrating my agency to GoHighLevel, I understood I had actually made a substantial mistake. The disadvantages substantially surpassed any kind of advantages.
No software application is best, yet the sheer volume of problems was beyond appropriate.
At the end of the day, software application comes down to depend on. If I can’t trust it to handle crucial functions capably or think a vendor has my benefits in mind, after that it’s time to leave– also after investing considerable time, cash, and effort moving.
So I made the tough phone call to reverse training course and return back to Keap completely just weeks after going done in on GoHighLevel. Allow’s discover what I picked up from this debacle.
Secret Takeaways: What I Picked up from My GoHighLevel Blunder
My time with HighLevel can be summed up as a costly misadventure. Yet in hindsight, it educated me a few vital lessons:
- Stick to what works. Do not distress what’s functioning unless something is definitively better across the board. Change brings threat.
- Vet asserts completely. Marketing buzz around brand-new software program typically obscures bigger underlying problems. Deep due persistance is important.
- Select simpleness over features. Properly designed tools need to make your work life simpler, not a lot more complicated and untidy.
- Openness constructs trust fund. Nontransparent pricing, unethical reseller terms, and finger-pointing to escape troubles damages trust fund.
- Seek impartial evaluations. Happy support assesses imply less if excessive problems imply inadequate overall functionality.
- Excellence is difficult. No single option can perfectly fulfill every distinct business demand. Locate the least-bad fit.
- Advancement over revolution. Step-by-step renovations commonly exceed dangerous wholesale reinvention of what currently works penalty.
In short, I learned to be much more doubtful of “as well great to be real” marketing cases and much less lured by the attraction of shiny new things. The devices you use daily need to earn trust through transparency and efficiency, not glossy advertising.