As a firm owner for over a years, I rely on software and automation to streamline operations and supply results. So when GoHighLevel emerged on the scene couple of years back, it certainly captured my focus GoHighLevel RingCentral.
The concept was appealing– an all-in-one client management platform with marketing, sales, and service devices incorporated together. As a business owner always wanting to streamline and scale my business, it felt like a dream happened on paper. Who wouldn’t want a solitary remedy that does it all?
Yet in this in-depth GoHighLevel testimonial, I’ll take you inside my disastrous journey of trying (and stopping working) to switch to this prominent brand-new software application. You’ll discover:
If you’re considering whether GoHighLevel is right for your own company requirements, with any luck you can pick up from my painful blunders and blew up assumptions.
Looter: I do NOT recommend GoHighLevel. If you need a CRM, start with this listing of ideal CRMs instead. I utilize Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re looking for a sales, marketing, and task monitoring choice to GoHighLevel, after that below are a few we advise.
Backstory: Why I Took Into Consideration Changing from Keap
To comprehend what attracted me to GoHighLevel to begin with, you need context regarding my previous setup. For over 5 years I had been happily depending on Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) to meet all my customer monitoring and automation needs.
I found Keap user-friendly to make use of and it managed every little thing I needed– CRM, email marketing, sales funnels, membership sites, and client support.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are developed to help local business keep their customers while including brand-new ones easily. Automate follow-ups with e-mails and messages, making sure leads and clients receive the ideal messages at the correct time. Use internet site and social media types to enhance lead follow-up, and manage your development with very easy visit organizing and lead monitoring. Boost sales with automated estimating, invoicing, and repayment processing, maximizing your time. With Keap, small companies can conserve 10 hours weekly and increase revenue by 39%. Start with a 14-day free trial, no credit card required.
Why we like Keap
Keap supplies an extensive client partnership administration (CRM) and marketing automation service customized for local business and entrepreneurs. We appreciate Keap’s focus on simplifying sales procedures and nurturing client connections via effective automation tools. The system’s all-in-one strategy integrates CRM, email marketing, invoicing, and task monitoring, making it particularly eye-catching for companies aiming to settle their tech pile.
For the most part, it just worked dependably with very little fuss or upkeep called for. My open and click-through rates were great (like 35% fantastic). Automations ran efficiently without any issues.
So why in the world was I attracted to uproot my whole operational foundation from a system that worked to try something unproven and untried?
In knowledge I can admit I obtained attracted by the siren telephone call of “glossy item syndrome”. You understand the sensation: when every person’s discussing a new device that will certainly revolutionize your company … The lawn typically looks greener on the other side, and I questioned whether GoHighLevel might lower friction factors that I would certainly discovered to tolerate for many years with Keap.
I stood up to initially, but a few more irritations led me to assume possibly it was time for an adjustment.
The Investment: Moving My Agency to GoHighLevel
Previously this year I made a decision to take the plunge. I enrolled in HighLevel’s Agency plan at $297/month, spending considerably more than the $97/month starter cost.
This had not been a choice I ignored. I recognized switching over platforms was mosting likely to need migrating all my Keap information and basically restoring my whole tech facilities from scratch using every one of the GoHighLevel integrations offered.
Below’s an overview of simply some of the effort called for:
- By hand exporting 20,000+ e-mail client documents
- Recreating lots of automations and workflows
- Moving client accounts, notes, and project information to the brand-new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe invoicing integration
- Establishing landing pages, coupons, and sales funnels all over once again
- Learning a completely foreign UX and user interface design
Done in, I invested around 30-40 tedious hours of setup work transitioning everything over– as well as managing shed efficiency throughout the switch.
However ultimately, it was a computed financial investment I agreed to make. I figured some temporary pain would pay off with GoHighLevel supplying a much better long-lasting remedy for my organization, Dripify. Oh how incorrect I was …
It just took me about a month of hands-on use to understand I had actually made a large error. The concerns started accumulating promptly, until it reached a factor I had to cut my losses and change back to Keap totally.
Allow’s go through the horrible problems I experienced.
Safety Issues & Lots of Bugs
Provided GoHighLevel positioned itself as an all-in-one automation system, I took care to diligently recreate every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These consisted of sequences for onboarding new e-mail subscribers, onboarding brand-new customers, automating follow-ups for webinar registrations, sending occasion reminders, handling subscription expirations and much more.
Every little thing appeared to be working penalty … up until all of a sudden it wasn’t. One early morning, I awoke to discover 171 completely unimportant emails had been sent out to users who need to NOT have gotten them. This happened 3 days straight, with a different batch of 160 individuals daily.
I frantically tried troubleshooting and restoring the automation from the ground up. However the issue lingered.
When I seriously connected to their assistance team, they slightly claimed “web server issues” were responsible. Yet this description really did not make any type of sense, considering that the mistakes proceeded occurring each morning like clockwork unassociated to any downtime.
In my mind, this massive failing was totally inappropriate and simply didn’t benefit my company. I have countless calls depending on my automated campaigns running efficiently.
So if GoHighLevel was going to be absolutely unstable, how could I entrust mission-critical workflows and delicate customer data to their modern technology?
The unintuitive user interface only worsened these issues …
Frustrating UX
Coming from Keap where whatever was smooth and instinctive, GoHighLevel’s learning curve really felt steep and difficult.
Easy tasks like modifying workflows entailed excavating through food selection systems that were all over the place. Secret settings were unexplainably spread in entirely different areas. Relocating in between features really felt disjointed or complicated.
I’ll tell you what I indicate by discussing their funnel builder as an example. There were 3 different settings panels to manage total, specific, and item configurations. Yet for some insane reason, the links to gain access to each of these core setups were spread out on opposite sides of the screen. What!?
As somebody who values clean, thoughtful design, this seriously irritated me.
It strengthened that GoHighLevel still seemed like a work-in-progress instead of a polished item all set for prime-time use. Their top priorities seemed concentrated on stuffing in every feature imaginable, with inadequate usability as a second thought.
And speaking of features, I soon understood the affordable price tag came with pricey concessions …
Deceptive Pricing GoHighLevel RingCentral
One of GoHighLevel’s most significant selling factors is the budget friendly price for access to numerous features. Yet I quickly discovered this affordable base expense was misleading.
They nickle-and-dimed users with sporadic fees for core functionality. Unexpectedly my bank card declarations had obscure $10 costs from GoHighLevel here and there.
As it turned out, you obtain charged whenever you send an e-mail via their servers. So for high quantity users, this amounted to thousands of bucks in unforeseen expenses.
Between these per-email charges and paying extra for deliverability attachments like Mailgun, my “cost effective” GoHighLevel subscription wound up setting you back dramatically greater than my Keap plan.
The low price tag was appealing, yet simply not reasonable in practice. This bait-and-switch left a bad taste in my mouth.
Email Rates Suffered
The final dealbreaker was seeing my carefully nurtured email open prices plummet almost over night after switching to GoHighLevel.
Formerly, my audience interaction regularly struck 35-40% open prices in Keap month after month. Once I moved their documents over to GoHighLevel, performance tanked instantaneously to a pathetic 9% open rate.
No matter just how much I maximized my sending techniques or tried every repairing method, I could hardly nudge open rates back right into the teenagers– still a 50%+ decrease from my previous benchmarks GoHighLevel RingCentral.
Let me repeat: my exact same target market and e-mails instantly had dreadful engagement. The only point I might believe that would be creating this was whatever was taking place behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a company so based on email marketing, this was a big deal.
In between the debilitating deliverability issues, hidden fees, broken features, and awful user interface, I had lastly reached my restriction …
Why I Stop GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Just 45 days after migrating my agency to GoHighLevel, I understood I had actually made a significant error. The disadvantages dramatically exceeded any kind of benefits.
No software program is best, however the large quantity of troubles was beyond appropriate.
At the end of the day, software program boils down to count on. If I can not trust it to deal with important functions effectively or think a supplier has my best interests in mind, after that it’s time to walk away– even after investing substantial time, cash, and effort moving.
So I made the hard call to turn around course and return back to Keap completely just weeks after going all in on GoHighLevel. Allow’s discover what I gained from this fiasco.
Secret Takeaways: What I Picked up from My GoHighLevel Blunder
My time with HighLevel can be summed up as a costly accident. Yet in knowledge, it showed me a couple of crucial lessons:
- Adhere to what works. Don’t upset what’s working unless something is definitively much better across the board. Change brings danger.
- Veterinarian declares thoroughly. Marketing hype around new software usually obscures larger underlying flaws. Deep due persistance is essential.
- Pick simplicity over features. Properly designed devices should make your job life less complicated, not a lot more difficult and unpleasant.
- Transparency builds trust fund. Nontransparent pricing, unethical reseller terms, and finger-pointing to escape problems ruins count on.
- Look for objective testimonials. Pleased assistance evaluates imply much less if excessive issues suggest poor total use.
- Perfection is difficult. No single remedy can perfectly satisfy every unique company need. Locate the least-bad fit.
- Evolution over revolution. Incremental enhancements normally exceed high-risk wholesale reinvention of what currently functions penalty.
In other words, I found out to be more cynical of “as well excellent to be real” marketing cases and much less attracted by the attraction of shiny brand-new objects. The devices you make use of daily ought to gain trust fund with openness and performance, not slick advertising.