As a firm owner for over a years, I rely on software and automation to streamline operations and deliver outcomes. So when GoHighLevel emerged on the scene couple of years back, it certainly captured my focus GoHighLevel Set Your Own Markup.
The concept was attractive– an all-in-one customer administration system with marketing, sales, and solution devices integrated with each other. As a business owner constantly seeking to simplify and scale my business, it looked like a dream become a reality theoretically. That wouldn’t desire a solitary option that does it all?
But in this thorough GoHighLevel review, I’ll take you inside my tragic trip of attempting (and stopping working) to switch to this preferred brand-new software application. You’ll learn:
If you’re taking into consideration whether GoHighLevel is right for your very own business needs, ideally you can pick up from my excruciating blunders and pumped up expectations.
Looter: I do NOT advise GoHighLevel. If you require a CRM, start with this list of ideal CRMs instead. I use Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re looking for a sales, marketing, and job administration alternative to GoHighLevel, then here are a couple of we recommend.
Backstory: Why I Considered Switching from Keap
To recognize what attracted me to GoHighLevel to begin with, you require context concerning my previous configuration. For over 5 years I had actually been gladly relying on Keap (previously Infusionsoft) to satisfy all my customer management and automation demands.
I located Keap intuitive to make use of and it took care of every little thing I required– CRM, e-mail marketing, sales funnels, subscription websites, and client assistance.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are developed to assist small businesses keep their customers while including new ones easily. Automate follow-ups with emails and messages, making sure leads and customers get the right messages at the correct time. Use website and social networks kinds to streamline lead follow-up, and manage your development with very easy appointment organizing and lead tracking. Boost sales with automated pricing estimate, invoicing, and settlement processing, liberating your time. With Keap, small businesses can save 10 hours weekly and increase profits by 39%. Start with a 14-day free trial, no charge card called for.
Why we like Keap
Keap provides a comprehensive customer relationship monitoring (CRM) and marketing automation solution tailored for small businesses and entrepreneurs. We value Keap’s focus on streamlining sales processes and nurturing customer relationships via effective automation tools. The system’s all-in-one method integrates CRM, e-mail marketing, invoicing, and job monitoring, making it specifically appealing for services aiming to consolidate their tech stack.
Generally, it simply worked reliably with very little difficulty or upkeep required. My open and click-through prices were terrific (like 35% excellent). Automations ran smoothly without issues.
So why on earth was I lured to uproot my entire operational structure from a system that functioned to attempt something unproven and untried?
In knowledge I can admit I obtained attracted by the siren telephone call of “shiny things syndrome”. You understand the sensation: when everybody’s discussing a brand-new device that will certainly reinvent your company … The lawn frequently looks greener on the other side, and I wondered whether GoHighLevel could reduce friction factors that I ‘d found out to endure throughout the years with Keap.
I stood up to initially, however a couple of even more stress led me to believe maybe it was time for a modification.
The Investment: Migrating My Agency to GoHighLevel
Earlier this year I decided to take the plunge. I enrolled in HighLevel’s Agency plan at $297/month, investing dramatically more than the $97/month starter cost.
This wasn’t a choice I took lightly. I knew changing platforms was mosting likely to need moving all my Keap data and basically reconstructing my whole tech framework from scratch making use of all of the GoHighLevel integrations available.
Here’s an overview of just several of the effort required:
- Manually exporting 20,000+ e-mail subscriber records
- Recreating lots of automations and workflows
- Moving customer accounts, notes, and task data to the new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe billing integration
- Setting up landing pages, promotions, and sales funnels throughout again
- Learning a totally foreign UX and interface style
All in, I invested around 30-40 tedious hours of arrangement work transitioning everything over– in addition to dealing with lost 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 supplying a far better long-lasting remedy for my organization, Dripify. Oh exactly how wrong I was …
It only took me concerning a month of hands-on usage to realize I had actually made a large blunder. The concerns started accumulating rapidly, until it reached a factor I had to reduce my losses and switch back to Keap totally.
Let’s walk through the horrible troubles I ran into.
Safety And Security Issues & Many Vermin
Provided GoHighLevel positioned itself as an all-in-one automation platform, I took care to diligently recreate each and every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These consisted of sequences for onboarding brand-new e-mail subscribers, onboarding new clients, automating follow-ups for webinar registrations, sending occasion pointers, managing subscription expirations and a lot more.
Everything seemed to be functioning fine … until instantly it had not been. One early morning, I woke up to find 171 totally unnecessary e-mails had actually been sent out to customers that must NOT have received them. This took place three days in a row, with a various set of 160 individuals every day.
I anxiously attempted fixing and rebuilding the automation from square one. However the problem lingered.
When I seriously reached out to their assistance team, they slightly declared “web server problems” were at fault. But this description really did not make any kind of feeling, given that the mistakes proceeded taking place each early morning like clockwork unrelated to any kind of downtime.
In my mind, this enormous failure was totally unacceptable and simply didn’t help my organization. I have thousands of get in touches with relying on my automated campaigns running smoothly.
So if GoHighLevel was mosting likely to be totally unreliable, exactly how could I hand over mission-critical workflows and sensitive client information to their innovation?
The unintuitive interface only worsened these concerns …
Discouraging UX
Originating from Keap where everything was smooth and user-friendly, GoHighLevel’s learning contour really felt high and challenging.
Straightforward jobs like editing workflows entailed digging with menu systems that were all over the place. Key settings were unexplainably spread in absolutely various areas. Relocating in between features felt disjointed or confusing.
I’ll tell you what I indicate by discussing their funnel builder as an instance. There were 3 different setups panels to handle general, private, and item setups. Yet for some crazy factor, the web links to access each of these core setups were spread out on contrary sides of the display. What!?
As a person that values clean, thoughtful design, this seriously frustrated me.
It enhanced that GoHighLevel still felt like a work-in-progress as opposed to a polished product all set for prime-time use. Their priorities appeared focused on packing in every feature imaginable, with bad functionality as an afterthought.
And speaking of features, I soon understood the affordable price tag came with pricey concessions …
Deceptive Pricing GoHighLevel Set Your Own Markup
Among GoHighLevel’s greatest selling points is the economical cost for access to numerous features. However I rapidly learned this inexpensive base price was misleading.
They nickle-and-dimed individuals with sporadic charges for core functionality. All of a sudden my charge card statements had unclear $10 costs from GoHighLevel occasionally.
As it ended up, you get billed whenever you send out an e-mail via their servers. So for high quantity individuals, this added up to thousands of bucks in unanticipated expenses.
In between these per-email fees and paying additional for deliverability add-ons like Mailgun, my “cost effective” GoHighLevel subscription ended up costing considerably MORE than my Keap plan.
The reduced price tag was tempting, however just not practical in practice. This bait-and-switch left a bad preference in my mouth.
Email Rates Suffered
The last dealbreaker was seeing my carefully nurtured email open rates plummet almost overnight after switching to GoHighLevel.
Formerly, my target market interaction continually hit 35-40% open rates in Keap month after month. Once I moved their records over to GoHighLevel, performance tanked quickly to a worthless 9% open price.
Regardless of how much I optimized my sending techniques or tried every repairing method, I could hardly push open rates back right into the teens– still a 50%+ decline from my previous standards GoHighLevel Set Your Own Markup.
Let me repeat: my exact same audience and emails suddenly had awful involvement. The only point I can believe that would be triggering this was whatever was taking place behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a firm so depending on e-mail marketing, this was a big deal.
Between the crippling deliverability concerns, hidden fees, busted features, and awful user interface, I had lastly reached my limitation …
Why I Give up GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Simply 45 days after migrating my firm to GoHighLevel, I knew I had made a significant mistake. The disadvantages significantly outweighed any kind of benefits.
No software is ideal, yet the large quantity of troubles was past acceptable.
At the end of the day, software application comes down to depend on. If I can not trust it to take care of vital features properly or think a supplier has my best interests in mind, then it’s time to walk away– even after spending substantial time, money, and effort migrating.
So I made the difficult phone call to turn around training course and return back to Keap entirely just weeks after going all in on GoHighLevel. Allow’s discover what I gained from this ordeal.
Secret Takeaways: What I Gained from My GoHighLevel Blunder
My time with HighLevel can be summarized as a costly ill fortune. But in knowledge, it taught me a couple of key lessons:
- Stick to what works. Don’t distress what’s working unless something is definitively better across the board. Modification brings risk.
- Vet asserts thoroughly. Marketing buzz around new software commonly covers bigger underlying imperfections. Deep due persistance is necessary.
- Select simplicity over features. Properly designed devices ought to make your work life simpler, not much more complex and unpleasant.
- Transparency builds trust fund. Opaque pricing, unethical reseller terms, and finger-pointing to escape problems ruins trust.
- Seek impartial reviews. Pleased assistance assesses indicate less if extreme issues suggest poor total use.
- Excellence is impossible. No single option can perfectly fulfill every distinct organization requirement. Locate the least-bad fit.
- Advancement over change. Incremental improvements typically outweigh high-risk wholesale reinvention of what already works fine.
In short, I discovered to be more skeptical of “as well great to be true” marketing insurance claims and much less lured by the allure of shiny new objects. The devices you use daily should gain trust fund with openness and performance, not slick advertising.