As a firm owner for over a years, I count on software program and automation to simplify operations and supply results. So when GoHighLevel arised on the scene couple of years back, it certainly captured my attention GoHighLevel Robin Alex.
The concept was attractive– an all-in-one customer administration platform with marketing, sales, and service devices incorporated with each other. As a business owner always wanting to simplify and scale my service, it seemed like a dream happened on paper. Who would not want a solitary remedy that does it all?
Yet in this extensive GoHighLevel evaluation, I’ll take you inside my disastrous journey of trying (and falling short) to switch to this popular brand-new software. You’ll find out:
If you’re taking into consideration whether GoHighLevel is right for your own company demands, hopefully you can gain from my unpleasant mistakes and inflated assumptions.
Looter: I do NOT suggest GoHighLevel. If you need a CRM, begin with this checklist of best CRMs rather. I utilize Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re seeking a sales, marketing, and job administration alternative to GoHighLevel, after that right here are a couple of we recommend.
Backstory: Why I Thought About Changing from Keap
To understand what attracted me to GoHighLevel to begin with, you require context concerning my previous setup. For over 5 years I had been gladly counting on Keap (previously Infusionsoft) to meet all my customer monitoring and automation demands.
I located Keap intuitive to utilize and it dealt with everything I required– CRM, e-mail marketing, sales funnels, subscription websites, and customer support.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are designed to help small companies keep their customers while including brand-new ones easily. Automate follow-ups with emails and messages, ensuring leads and clients get the best messages at the correct time. Usage web site and social media types to improve lead follow-up, and manage your growth with easy visit scheduling and lead tracking. Boost sales with automated quoting, invoicing, and settlement handling, freeing up your time. With Keap, small businesses can save 10 hours each week and boost revenue by 39%. Begin with a 14-day free trial, no credit card called for.
Why we like Keap
Keap supplies a comprehensive customer connection administration (CRM) and marketing automation remedy tailored for local business and business owners. We appreciate Keap’s focus on enhancing sales procedures and nurturing consumer connections via powerful automation tools. The system’s all-in-one method integrates CRM, email marketing, invoicing, and task administration, making it specifically appealing for companies looking to consolidate their technology stack.
Essentially, it simply functioned reliably with minimal difficulty or upkeep needed. My open and click-through rates were fantastic (like 35% great). Automations ran smoothly without concerns.
So why on earth was I lured to uproot my entire operational foundation from a system that functioned to attempt something unproven and untested?
In knowledge I can confess I obtained attracted by the alarm phone call of “shiny item disorder”. You understand the sensation: when everybody’s talking about a new tool that will change your service … The grass often looks greener on the other side, and I questioned whether GoHighLevel may decrease rubbing points that I ‘d learned to endure throughout the years with Keap.
I withstood initially, yet a few even more irritations led me to believe possibly it was time for a change.
The Investment: Moving My Firm to GoHighLevel
Previously this year I determined to take the plunge. I registered for HighLevel’s Company plan at $297/month, investing substantially more than the $97/month starter cost.
This had not been a choice I took lightly. I understood switching systems was going to call for migrating all my Keap data and basically rebuilding my whole tech framework from scratch utilizing all of the GoHighLevel integrations available.
Here’s an overview of just several of the effort needed:
- Manually exporting 20,000+ email subscriber documents
- Recreating lots of automations and workflows
- Relocating client profiles, notes, and project data to the new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe billing integration
- Setting up landing pages, promotions, and sales funnels all over again
- Learning an entirely international UX and interface layout
Done in, I spent around 30-40 tedious hours of arrangement job transitioning every little thing over– in addition to taking care of lost performance during the switch.
Yet ultimately, it was a computed investment I agreed to make. I figured some short-term pain would pay off with GoHighLevel giving a better lasting service for my service, Dripify. Oh exactly how incorrect I was …
It just took me concerning a month of hands-on use to understand I had actually made a large mistake. The issues began piling up quickly, up until it got to a point I needed to reduce my losses and switch over back to Keap totally.
Let’s go through the horrible issues I encountered.
Security Issues & Many Bugs
Given GoHighLevel placed itself as an all-in-one automation platform, I took care to diligently recreate every workflow from my old Keap account.
These consisted of sequences for onboarding brand-new e-mail clients, onboarding brand-new customers, automating follow-ups for webinar registrations, sending out occasion reminders, managing membership expiries and much more.
Every little thing seemed to be operating fine … till suddenly it wasn’t. One morning, I woke up to discover 171 entirely unnecessary e-mails had actually been sent out to users that must NOT have obtained them. This happened three days in a row, with a different set of 160 individuals each day.
I anxiously tried repairing and restoring the automation from scratch. But the issue continued.
When I desperately connected to their support team, they vaguely asserted “web server issues” were to blame. However this description really did not make any kind of sense, given that the mistakes continued occurring each early morning like clockwork unconnected to any downtime.
In my mind, this huge failure was entirely unacceptable and just really did not help my organization. I have thousands of contacts counting on my automated campaigns running efficiently.
So if GoHighLevel was mosting likely to be absolutely unstable, just how could I leave mission-critical workflows and sensitive customer data to their technology?
The unintuitive user interface only compounded these concerns …
Discouraging UX
Originating from Keap where whatever was smooth and user-friendly, GoHighLevel’s learning contour felt steep and complex.
Basic tasks like modifying workflows entailed digging via food selection systems that were all over the place. Secret setups were unexplainably spread in totally different sections. Relocating between features felt disjointed or complex.
I’ll inform you what I imply by speaking about their funnel builder as an example. There were 3 separate settings panels to handle general, specific, and product setups. 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 a person that values tidy, thoughtful design, this seriously frustrated me.
It enhanced that GoHighLevel still seemed like a work-in-progress as opposed to a polished product prepared for prime-time usage. Their priorities appeared concentrated on cramming in every feature under the sun, with bad use as a second thought.
And talking features, I quickly realized the low price tag featured expensive compromises …
Deceptive Pricing GoHighLevel Robin Alex
One of GoHighLevel’s largest marketing factors is the budget-friendly rate for accessibility to so many features. But I quickly discovered this cheap base expense was misleading.
They nickle-and-dimed users with occasional costs for core capability. Unexpectedly my bank card declarations had obscure $10 costs from GoHighLevel here and there.
As it ended up, you get billed every single time you send out an e-mail with their web servers. So for high volume users, this added up to numerous dollars in unexpected costs.
In between these per-email costs and paying additional for deliverability add-ons like Mailgun, my “budget friendly” GoHighLevel subscription wound up costing considerably greater than my Keap plan.
The low sticker price was appealing, yet just not practical in practice. This bait-and-switch left a negative preference in my mouth.
Email Fees Suffered
The last dealbreaker was seeing my thoroughly supported email open rates drop virtually overnight after changing to GoHighLevel.
Previously, my target market involvement regularly struck 35-40% open prices in Keap month after month. But once I moved their records over to GoHighLevel, efficiency tanked instantaneously to a pathetic 9% open rate.
Regardless of just how much I optimized my sending methods or tried every repairing method, I can barely nudge open rates back into the teens– still a 50%+ decrease from my previous benchmarks GoHighLevel Robin Alex.
Let me repeat: my exact same audience and emails suddenly had dreadful interaction. The only point I could believe that would certainly be causing 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 crippling deliverability problems, concealed costs, broken features, and terrible user interface, I had actually ultimately reached my limit …
Why I Give up GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Simply 45 days after migrating my firm to GoHighLevel, I understood I had actually made a massive blunder. The cons significantly surpassed any benefits.
No software application is perfect, however the large quantity of problems was beyond acceptable.
At the end of the day, software boils down to count on. If I can not trust it to handle important features capably or think a vendor has my best interests in mind, after that it’s time to leave– also after spending significant time, money, and effort migrating.
So I made the difficult contact us to reverse course and return back to Keap totally simply weeks after going all in on GoHighLevel. Let’s explore what I learned from this ordeal.
Key Takeaways: What I Gained from My GoHighLevel Mistake
My time with HighLevel can be summed up as a costly ill fortune. However in hindsight, it educated me a few vital lessons:
- Adhere to what jobs. Do not distress what’s functioning unless something is definitively better across the board. Modification brings risk.
- Veterinarian asserts extensively. Marketing hype around brand-new software application frequently obscures larger underlying defects. Deep due persistance is important.
- Choose simpleness over features. Well-designed tools should make your job life less complicated, not much more complex and untidy.
- Transparency develops depend on. Opaque pricing, unethical reseller terms, and finger-pointing to escape problems destroys count on.
- Look for unbiased testimonials. Delighted support examines suggest less if excessive problems suggest inadequate general functionality.
- Perfection is impossible. No solitary option can completely fulfill every one-of-a-kind business requirement. Find the least-bad fit.
- Advancement over revolution. Incremental renovations normally exceed dangerous wholesale reinvention of what currently works penalty.
In other words, I discovered to be much more hesitant of “as well good to be true” marketing insurance claims and less attracted by the allure of shiny brand-new items. The devices you utilize daily ought to gain depend on through transparency and efficiency, not slick advertising.