As a company proprietor for over a years, I rely on software and automation to enhance operations and provide results. So when GoHighLevel emerged on the scene couple of years back, it absolutely captured my attention GoHighLevel Scan Your Business.
The concept was enticing– an all-in-one customer monitoring platform with marketing, sales, and service devices incorporated with each other. As an entrepreneur constantly looking to streamline and scale my service, it seemed like a dream happened theoretically. Who would not desire a single service that does it all?
However in this extensive GoHighLevel review, I’ll take you inside my disastrous trip of attempting (and falling short) to switch to this preferred brand-new software application. You’ll discover:
If you’re thinking about whether GoHighLevel is right for your own company demands, hopefully you can learn from my uncomfortable blunders and pumped up assumptions.
Spoiler: I do NOT suggest GoHighLevel. If you require a CRM, start with this list of best CRMs instead. I make use of Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re looking for a sales, marketing, and project administration alternative to GoHighLevel, then below are a few we recommend.
Backstory: Why I Thought About Changing from Keap
To comprehend what attracted me to GoHighLevel to begin with, you need context concerning my previous setup. For over 5 years I had been happily relying on Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) to meet all my client management and automation requirements.
I found Keap user-friendly to make use of and it handled every little thing I required– CRM, email marketing, sales funnels, membership websites, and client assistance.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are designed to aid small companies maintain their clients while adding new ones easily. Automate follow-ups with e-mails and texts, guaranteeing leads and customers obtain the ideal messages at the correct time. Use site and social media sites forms to improve lead follow-up, and manage your development with very easy visit organizing and lead tracking. Boost sales with automated estimating, invoicing, and repayment processing, liberating your time. With Keap, small businesses can conserve 10 hours per week and increase revenue by 39%. Beginning with a 14-day free trial, no credit card required.
Why we like Keap
Keap offers a detailed consumer relationship monitoring (CRM) and marketing automation option customized for small companies and business owners. We appreciate Keap’s focus on enhancing sales procedures and nurturing client connections via powerful automation tools. The system’s all-in-one approach incorporates CRM, e-mail marketing, invoicing, and task administration, making it especially eye-catching for companies looking to consolidate their tech pile.
Essentially, it simply worked dependably with marginal fuss or upkeep called for. My open and click-through prices were excellent (like 35% terrific). Automations ran efficiently with no problems.
So why on earth was I tempted to uproot my whole functional foundation from a system that worked to attempt something unverified and untried?
In hindsight I can confess I got attracted by the siren phone call of “shiny object disorder”. You know the feeling: when every person’s speaking about a new tool that will certainly reinvent your organization … The yard often looks greener on the other side, and I asked yourself whether GoHighLevel could minimize friction points that I would certainly discovered to tolerate throughout the years with Keap.
I stood up to at first, however a few more aggravations led me to assume possibly it was time for a change.
The Financial investment: Moving My Company to GoHighLevel
Earlier this year I made a decision to start. I registered for HighLevel’s Company plan at $297/month, spending dramatically more than the $97/month starter expense.
This wasn’t a choice I ignored. I recognized switching platforms was going to call for migrating all my Keap information and essentially reconstructing my entire technology framework from square one utilizing every one of the GoHighLevel integrations available.
Here’s an introduction of simply several of the initiative called for:
- Manually exporting 20,000+ email customer records
- Recreating dozens of automations and workflows
- Moving customer accounts, notes, and project information to the new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe payment integration
- Setting up landing pages, promos, and sales funnels around again
- Learning a completely foreign UX and user interface style
Done in, I invested around 30-40 laborious hours of setup work transitioning every little thing over– not to mention dealing with shed performance during the switch.
But inevitably, it was a computed investment I wanted to make. I figured some temporary discomfort would repay with GoHighLevel supplying a better long-lasting remedy for my organization, Dripify. Oh exactly how wrong I was …
It just took me regarding a month of hands-on usage to recognize I had actually made a big mistake. The issues began accumulating promptly, until it reached a point I had to cut my losses and switch back to Keap totally.
Allow’s walk through the nightmarish troubles I encountered.
Protection Issues & Many Vermin
Given GoHighLevel positioned itself as an all-in-one automation system, I made sure to thoroughly recreate every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These consisted of sequences for onboarding brand-new e-mail customers, onboarding brand-new clients, automating follow-ups for webinar enrollments, sending occasion suggestions, taking care of membership expirations and a lot more.
Whatever appeared to be working penalty … up until all of a sudden it wasn’t. One morning, I awoke to locate 171 entirely pointless e-mails had actually been sent out to individuals who need to NOT have actually received them. This happened 3 days in a row, with a various batch of 160 individuals every day.
I hysterically attempted repairing and rebuilding the automation from the ground up. But the trouble continued.
When I frantically connected to their support group, they slightly claimed “web server problems” were to blame. However this description really did not make any type of sense, given that the mistakes proceeded occurring each early morning like clockwork unconnected to any kind of downtime.
In my mind, this massive failing was completely undesirable and simply really did not help my organization. I have hundreds of contacts relying on my automated campaigns running smoothly.
So if GoHighLevel was going to be totally unstable, just how could I turn over mission-critical workflows and sensitive client data to their technology?
The unintuitive user interface only worsened these concerns …
Discouraging UX
Coming from Keap where whatever was seamless and instinctive, GoHighLevel’s learning curve really felt steep and complicated.
Basic jobs like editing and enhancing workflows entailed digging with menu systems that were all over the place. Trick settings were unexplainably scattered in totally different areas. Relocating between features felt disjointed or complicated.
I’ll tell you what I indicate by speaking about their funnel builder as an instance. There were 3 different settings panels to take care of general, private, and item setups. Yet for some insane reason, the web links to gain access to each of these core setups were spread out on opposite sides of the screen. What!?
As a person who values tidy, thoughtful design, this seriously upset me.
It reinforced that GoHighLevel still felt like a work-in-progress as opposed to a refined product prepared for prime-time usage. Their top priorities seemed concentrated on stuffing in every feature under the sun, with poor functionality as an afterthought.
And speaking of features, I soon understood the small cost tag featured expensive compromises …
Deceptive Pricing GoHighLevel Scan Your Business
Among GoHighLevel’s greatest selling factors is the inexpensive price for accessibility to so many features. However I promptly discovered this cheap base cost was deceptive.
They nickle-and-dimed customers with erratic costs for core functionality. Instantly my credit card statements had vague $10 charges from GoHighLevel here and there.
As it turned out, you get charged every time you send an e-mail via their web servers. So for high quantity users, this amounted to hundreds of bucks in unanticipated costs.
In between these per-email charges and paying added for deliverability add-ons like Mailgun, my “affordable” GoHighLevel subscription wound up costing significantly greater than my Keap plan.
The low sticker price was alluring, however just not sensible in practice. This bait-and-switch left a poor taste in my mouth.
Email Rates Suffered
The final dealbreaker was seeing my meticulously supported e-mail open rates drop almost over night after switching to GoHighLevel.
Formerly, my audience engagement consistently hit 35-40% open rates in Keap month after month. Once I moved their records over to GoHighLevel, efficiency tanked promptly to a worthless 9% open rate.
Regardless of how much I optimized my sending practices or attempted every troubleshooting method, I can hardly nudge open prices back into the teens– still a 50%+ decrease from my previous standards GoHighLevel Scan Your Business.
Let me repeat: my exact same target market and emails all of a sudden had horrible involvement. The only thing I might believe that would be triggering this was whatever was occurring behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a company so dependent on e-mail marketing, this was a big deal.
In between the crippling deliverability issues, concealed charges, busted features, and awful interface, I had actually ultimately reached my limit …
Why I Give up GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Simply 45 days after migrating my agency to GoHighLevel, I knew I had actually made a massive blunder. The cons drastically surpassed any benefits.
No software program is ideal, however the large quantity of problems was past acceptable.
At the end of the day, software application comes down to depend on. If I can’t trust it to handle important features effectively or think a supplier has my benefits in mind, after that it’s time to walk away– even after investing substantial time, money, and effort migrating.
So I made the difficult contact us to reverse program and return back to Keap totally simply weeks after going done in on GoHighLevel. Let’s explore what I learned from this debacle.
Key Takeaways: What I Learned From My GoHighLevel Blunder
My time with HighLevel can be summarized as a costly ill fortune. But in knowledge, it educated me a few key lessons:
- Adhere to what jobs. Do not disturb what’s functioning unless something is definitively better across the board. Adjustment brings danger.
- Veterinarian claims thoroughly. Marketing hype around brand-new software usually obscures bigger underlying flaws. Deep due persistance is vital.
- Choose simpleness over features. Well-designed devices must make your work life easier, not a lot more challenging and untidy.
- Transparency constructs trust. Opaque pricing, unethical reseller terms, and finger-pointing to avert troubles damages count on.
- Seek honest testimonials. Happy assistance assesses imply much less if extreme concerns suggest inadequate general use.
- Perfection is difficult. No solitary service can completely satisfy every one-of-a-kind company need. Locate the least-bad fit.
- Advancement over change. Step-by-step renovations generally outweigh high-risk wholesale reinvention of what already functions fine.
In other words, I discovered to be more hesitant of “also great to be real” marketing claims and much less tempted by the attraction of shiny brand-new things. The devices you utilize daily ought to make trust fund via transparency and performance, not slick advertising.