As a company owner for over a decade, I rely on software and automation to simplify procedures and provide results. So when GoHighLevel arised on the scene few years back, it most definitely captured my attention GoHighLevel Shipping.
The idea was attractive– an all-in-one customer administration system with marketing, sales, and service devices integrated with each other. As an entrepreneur constantly looking to simplify and scale my company, it appeared like a desire happened on paper. Who would not desire a solitary solution that does it all?
Yet in this in-depth GoHighLevel testimonial, I’ll take you inside my tragic journey of attempting (and falling short) to change to this prominent brand-new software application. You’ll discover:
If you’re thinking about whether GoHighLevel is right for your own business needs, with any luck you can learn from my uncomfortable errors and blew up assumptions.
Looter: I do NOT suggest GoHighLevel. If you require a CRM, begin with this list of best CRMs rather. I use Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re looking for a sales, marketing, and job monitoring choice to GoHighLevel, then right here are a few we advise.
Backstory: Why I Considered Changing from Keap
To recognize what attracted me to GoHighLevel in the first place, you need context concerning my previous configuration. For over 5 years I had been gladly counting on Keap (previously Infusionsoft) to satisfy all my client administration and automation needs.
I located Keap user-friendly to make use of and it managed whatever I required– CRM, email marketing, sales funnels, subscription sites, and customer assistance.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are developed to aid small businesses maintain their customers while adding new ones easily. Automate follow-ups with emails and texts, making sure leads and customers obtain the best messages at the right time. Usage website and social media forms to simplify lead follow-up, and handle your development with very easy visit organizing and lead tracking. Boost sales with automated estimating, invoicing, and settlement handling, maximizing your time. With Keap, local business can save 10 hours per week and rise earnings by 39%. Beginning with a 14-day free trial, no credit card required.
Why we like Keap
Keap provides a thorough consumer relationship monitoring (CRM) and marketing automation service tailored for local business and entrepreneurs. We value Keap’s concentrate on improving sales procedures and supporting consumer relationships via powerful automation devices. The system’s all-in-one technique combines CRM, e-mail marketing, invoicing, and task administration, making it particularly appealing for organizations wanting to settle their tech pile.
For the most part, it simply worked dependably with minimal fuss or upkeep required. My open and click-through rates were terrific (like 35% fantastic). Automations ran smoothly with no concerns.
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 knowledge I can confess I got seduced by the alarm phone call of “glossy item disorder”. You know the feeling: when everybody’s discussing a brand-new tool that will certainly reinvent your service … The lawn often looks greener on the other side, and I wondered whether GoHighLevel might decrease rubbing points that I ‘d discovered to tolerate for many years with Keap.
I withstood initially, but a couple of more irritations led me to think possibly it was time for a change.
The Investment: Migrating My Agency to GoHighLevel
Earlier this year I determined to start. I enrolled in HighLevel’s Agency plan at $297/month, investing significantly more than the $97/month starter price.
This wasn’t a decision I took lightly. I recognized switching platforms was going to require moving all my Keap information and basically rebuilding my entire technology infrastructure from square one making use of all of the GoHighLevel integrations readily available.
Here’s an introduction of just a few of the effort required:
- Manually exporting 20,000+ e-mail customer documents
- Recreating lots of automations and workflows
- Moving customer accounts, notes, and task information to the new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe invoicing integration
- Establishing landing pages, promos, and sales funnels around once again
- Learning an entirely international UX and interface layout
Done in, I invested around 30-40 laborious hours of configuration job transitioning whatever over– not to mention taking care of lost efficiency throughout the switch.
Yet inevitably, it was a computed investment I agreed to make. I figured some short-term discomfort would pay off with GoHighLevel providing a better long-term service for my business, Dripify. Oh just how wrong I was …
It just took me concerning a month of hands-on use to understand I had made a large blunder. The issues started piling up quickly, up until it reached a point I needed to cut my losses and change back to Keap totally.
Let’s go through the nightmarish issues I encountered.
Security Issues & Many Bugs
Offered GoHighLevel placed itself as an all-in-one automation platform, I made sure to carefully recreate every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These included sequences for onboarding new email clients, onboarding new clients, automating follow-ups for webinar registrations, sending out event suggestions, handling membership expiries and far more.
Everything seemed to be operating fine … until unexpectedly it had not been. One morning, I woke up to find 171 totally irrelevant e-mails had actually been sent out to customers that should NOT have actually received them. This happened three days straight, with a different set of 160 people each day.
I anxiously tried troubleshooting and reconstructing the automation from scratch. Yet the trouble persisted.
When I seriously reached out to their assistance team, they slightly asserted “web server problems” were to blame. However this description really did not make any type of feeling, given that the errors proceeded happening each morning like clockwork unrelated to any kind of downtime.
In my mind, this substantial failure was totally inappropriate and simply didn’t help my company. I have hundreds of contacts relying upon my automated campaigns running smoothly.
So if GoHighLevel was mosting likely to be completely undependable, just how could I hand over mission-critical workflows and sensitive client data to their technology?
The unintuitive interface just worsened these concerns …
Irritating UX
Originating from Keap where every little thing was smooth and intuitive, GoHighLevel’s learning curve felt steep and complicated.
Easy jobs like editing workflows entailed excavating with food selection systems that were all over the place. Trick settings were unexplainably scattered in totally different areas. Relocating between features felt disjointed or confusing.
I’ll inform you what I suggest 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 crazy factor, the links to accessibility each of these core setups were expanded on opposite sides of the display. What!?
As someone that values tidy, thoughtful layout, this seriously annoyed me.
It reinforced that GoHighLevel still felt like a work-in-progress rather than a sleek item ready for prime-time use. Their top priorities appeared focused on stuffing in every feature imaginable, with inadequate usability as a second thought.
And speaking of features, I soon realized the low cost tag came with costly compromises …
Misleading Pricing GoHighLevel Shipping
Among GoHighLevel’s largest marketing points is the affordable cost for accessibility to many features. However I swiftly learned this economical base cost was deceptive.
They nickle-and-dimed individuals with sporadic charges for core performance. Instantly my credit card declarations had vague $10 fees from GoHighLevel here and there.
As it ended up, you obtain charged every single time you send an email through their servers. So for high quantity customers, this amounted to numerous dollars in unanticipated costs.
In between these per-email costs and paying additional for deliverability add-ons like Mailgun, my “economical” GoHighLevel subscription wound up costing significantly greater than my Keap plan.
The reduced sticker price was appealing, however simply not realistic in practice. This bait-and-switch left a bad taste in my mouth.
Email Rates Suffered
The final dealbreaker was seeing my carefully nurtured e-mail open prices plunge practically over night after changing to GoHighLevel.
Formerly, my target market interaction constantly hit 35-40% open prices in Keap month after month. But once I migrated their records over to GoHighLevel, efficiency tanked quickly to a worthless 9% open rate.
Despite just how much I enhanced my sending methods or tried every troubleshooting trick, I might barely push open rates back right into the teens– still a 50%+ decline from my previous standards GoHighLevel Shipping.
Let me repeat: my exact same audience and emails all of a sudden had terrible interaction. The only point I might think that would be creating this was whatever was occurring behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a firm so depending on email marketing, this was a big deal.
Between the crippling deliverability issues, concealed fees, damaged features, and awful user interface, I had lastly reached my restriction …
Why I Stop GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Simply 45 days after migrating my company to GoHighLevel, I understood I had actually made a big mistake. The cons considerably exceeded any type of advantages.
No software application is perfect, however the large quantity of problems was past appropriate.
At the end of the day, software program comes down to count on. If I can’t trust it to take care of vital functions effectively or think a vendor has my best interests in mind, after that it’s time to leave– even after spending significant time, money, and effort moving.
So I made the hard phone call to reverse training course and return back to Keap totally simply weeks after going done in on GoHighLevel. Let’s explore what I gained from this debacle.
Key Takeaways: What I Picked up from My GoHighLevel Error
My time with HighLevel can be summarized as a costly accident. But in hindsight, it taught me a few key lessons:
- Stick to what jobs. Don’t disturb what’s working unless something is definitively far better across the board. Adjustment brings risk.
- Vet declares extensively. Marketing hype around brand-new software program commonly obscures bigger underlying imperfections. Deep due diligence is crucial.
- Pick simpleness over features. Properly designed tools should make your job life much easier, not more difficult and messy.
- Openness constructs trust fund. Opaque pricing, dubious reseller terms, and finger-pointing to escape issues destroys trust fund.
- Seek unbiased reviews. Satisfied assistance reviews suggest less if extreme concerns imply poor overall functionality.
- Excellence is difficult. No solitary service can completely fulfill every distinct company demand. Discover the least-bad fit.
- Development over change. Step-by-step renovations commonly exceed high-risk wholesale reinvention of what already functions penalty.
In other words, I discovered to be more doubtful of “too good to be real” marketing claims and much less tempted by the attraction of glossy new items. The devices you make use of daily ought to gain count on with transparency and performance, not glossy advertising.