As an agency owner for over a years, I depend on software and automation to enhance operations and provide outcomes. So when GoHighLevel arised on the scene couple of years back, it most definitely caught my focus GoHighLevel Snapshot Marketplace.
The concept was appealing– an all-in-one customer monitoring platform with marketing, sales, and solution tools incorporated with each other. As a business owner constantly wanting to simplify and scale my organization, it seemed like a desire come to life on paper. Who wouldn’t desire a single remedy that does it all?
Yet in this comprehensive GoHighLevel testimonial, I’ll take you inside my disastrous journey of trying (and falling short) to switch to this prominent brand-new software. You’ll discover:
If you’re thinking about whether GoHighLevel is right for your very own business requirements, hopefully you can pick up from my painful errors and inflated assumptions.
Spoiler: I do NOT advise GoHighLevel. If you need a CRM, begin with this listing of ideal CRMs instead. I utilize Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re trying to find a sales, marketing, and task administration alternative to GoHighLevel, after that right here are a few we recommend.
Backstory: Why I Thought About Switching Over from Keap
To understand what attracted me to GoHighLevel in the first place, you require context concerning my previous configuration. For over 5 years I had been gladly relying on Keap (previously Infusionsoft) to satisfy all my client management and automation demands.
I found Keap instinctive to utilize and it dealt with everything I needed– CRM, email marketing, sales funnels, membership sites, and customer assistance.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are designed to assist small businesses keep their customers while including brand-new ones easily. Automate follow-ups with emails and texts, making sure leads and clients receive the best messages at the right time. Use internet site and social networks kinds to streamline lead follow-up, and manage your growth with very easy visit scheduling and lead monitoring. Boost sales with automated pricing estimate, invoicing, and payment processing, freeing up your time. With Keap, small businesses can conserve 10 hours per week and increase income by 39%. Beginning with a 14-day free trial, no charge card called for.
Why we like Keap
Keap provides a comprehensive consumer partnership monitoring (CRM) and marketing automation solution tailored for local business and entrepreneurs. We appreciate Keap’s concentrate on enhancing sales processes and supporting client relationships with powerful automation tools. The system’s all-in-one strategy combines CRM, email marketing, invoicing, and job monitoring, making it particularly appealing for companies seeking to consolidate their technology pile.
Essentially, it just worked dependably with very little fuss or upkeep needed. My open and click-through rates were wonderful (like 35% excellent). Automations ran efficiently with no issues.
So why on earth was I tempted to uproot my entire functional foundation from a system that worked to try something unproven and untested?
In knowledge I can confess I obtained attracted by the siren call of “shiny item syndrome”. You know the feeling: when everybody’s talking about a new tool that will change your organization … The turf commonly looks greener beyond, and I asked yourself whether GoHighLevel might decrease friction points that I ‘d found out to tolerate throughout the years with Keap.
I withstood at first, yet a couple of even more aggravations led me to assume perhaps it was time for an adjustment.
The Investment: Migrating My Firm to GoHighLevel
Previously this year I decided to take the plunge. I signed up for HighLevel’s Company plan at $297/month, spending considerably greater than the $97/month starter expense.
This had not been a decision I took lightly. I recognized changing systems was going to need moving all my Keap information and basically reconstructing my whole tech framework from the ground up utilizing all of the GoHighLevel integrations readily available.
Right here’s an introduction of just some of the effort needed:
- Manually exporting 20,000+ email customer records
- Recreating lots of automations and workflows
- Moving customer accounts, notes, and task data to the brand-new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe invoicing integration
- Setting up landing pages, promotions, and sales funnels throughout once again
- Learning a completely international UX and user interface style
Done in, I invested around 30-40 tedious hours of configuration job transitioning every little thing over– not to mention taking care of lost productivity during the button.
But eventually, it was a calculated investment I was willing to make. I figured some short-term pain would certainly repay with GoHighLevel giving a much better long-term solution for my company, Dripify. Oh exactly how incorrect I was …
It just took me concerning a month of hands-on use to understand I had made a large blunder. The issues began accumulating swiftly, until it got to a point I needed to reduce my losses and change back to Keap entirely.
Allow’s go through the horrible problems I experienced.
Protection Issues & Several Bugs
Given GoHighLevel positioned itself as an all-in-one automation system, I took care to meticulously recreate every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These consisted of sequences for onboarding new e-mail subscribers, onboarding new customers, automating follow-ups for webinar registrations, sending out occasion tips, managing membership expirations and a lot more.
Everything appeared to be operating fine … up until unexpectedly it wasn’t. One morning, I woke up to locate 171 completely pointless emails had actually been sent to users who must NOT have gotten them. This happened three days straight, with a different set of 160 people daily.
I hysterically attempted troubleshooting and rebuilding the automation from square one. Yet the issue continued.
When I frantically reached out to their assistance team, they vaguely asserted “server concerns” were to blame. However this explanation didn’t make any type of feeling, given that the errors proceeded occurring each morning like clockwork unconnected to any type of downtime.
In my mind, this huge failing was entirely inappropriate and simply didn’t benefit my organization. I have thousands of calls counting on my automated campaigns running smoothly.
So if GoHighLevel was mosting likely to be absolutely unreliable, just how could I leave mission-critical workflows and delicate client data to their innovation?
The unintuitive user interface only worsened these problems …
Irritating UX
Coming from Keap where every little thing was smooth and instinctive, GoHighLevel’s learning curve really felt high and complicated.
Easy tasks like editing and enhancing workflows included digging with food selection systems that were all over the place. Secret settings were unexplainably spread in totally different sections. Moving in between functions felt disjointed or complex.
I’ll inform you what I mean by talking about their funnel builder as an instance. There were 3 different setups panels to manage total, individual, and product setups. Yet for some crazy factor, the links to accessibility each of these core setups were spread out on opposite sides of the display. What!?
As someone that values tidy, thoughtful layout, this seriously frustrated me.
It reinforced that GoHighLevel still felt like a work-in-progress rather than a polished item ready for prime-time use. Their priorities appeared focused on cramming in every feature under the sun, with poor functionality as an afterthought.
And speaking of features, I soon recognized the small cost tag came with costly concessions …
Deceptive Pricing GoHighLevel Snapshot Marketplace
Among GoHighLevel’s most significant marketing points is the cost effective rate for access to numerous features. But I rapidly learned this cheap base price was deceptive.
They nickle-and-dimed users with sporadic costs for core performance. Suddenly my bank card statements had vague $10 fees from GoHighLevel occasionally.
As it ended up, you get billed whenever you send out an email through their servers. So for high volume customers, this added up to thousands of bucks in unanticipated expenses.
Between these per-email fees and paying added for deliverability add-ons like Mailgun, my “inexpensive” GoHighLevel registration ended up costing dramatically greater than my Keap plan.
The reduced price tag was tempting, yet simply not sensible in practice. This bait-and-switch left a bad preference in my mouth.
Email Rates Suffered
The last dealbreaker was seeing my thoroughly supported e-mail open prices plummet practically over night after switching over to GoHighLevel.
Formerly, my audience interaction constantly struck 35-40% open rates in Keap month after month. But once I migrated their records over to GoHighLevel, performance tanked immediately to a pitiful 9% open rate.
Despite how much I optimized my sending techniques or attempted every fixing technique, I could hardly push open rates back into the teens– still a 50%+ decrease from my previous benchmarks GoHighLevel Snapshot Marketplace.
Let me repeat: my exact same target market and e-mails all of a sudden had horrible engagement. The only point I could assume that would certainly be causing this was whatever was occurring behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a company so depending on e-mail marketing, this was a big deal.
Between the debilitating deliverability concerns, hidden costs, broken features, and dreadful interface, I had actually ultimately reached my limitation …
Why I Stop GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Just 45 days after migrating my agency to GoHighLevel, I understood I had made a big blunder. The disadvantages drastically exceeded any type of advantages.
No software is best, however the sheer quantity of issues was past appropriate.
At the end of the day, software boils down to trust. If I can’t trust it to take care of essential features effectively or think a vendor has my benefits in mind, after that it’s time to leave– even after spending substantial time, cash, and initiative migrating.
So I made the tough contact us to reverse program and return back to Keap completely just weeks after going all in on GoHighLevel. Allow’s explore what I learned from this fiasco.
Trick Takeaways: What I Picked up from My GoHighLevel Mistake
My time with HighLevel can be summed up as an expensive ill fortune. But in hindsight, it taught me a couple of vital lessons:
- Stay with what works. Don’t disturb what’s functioning unless something is definitively better across the board. Change brings threat.
- Vet asserts thoroughly. Marketing buzz around brand-new software program commonly covers larger underlying defects. Deep due persistance is essential.
- Select simpleness over features. Well-designed devices must make your job life less complicated, not more complex and messy.
- Transparency develops trust. Nontransparent pricing, shady reseller terms, and finger-pointing to avert problems damages count on.
- Seek objective testimonials. Happy assistance assesses imply much less if too much concerns suggest inadequate total use.
- Excellence is impossible. No solitary option can completely fulfill every one-of-a-kind company requirement. Locate the least-bad fit.
- Development over change. Step-by-step enhancements usually exceed risky wholesale reinvention of what currently works fine.
Simply put, I learned to be a lot more doubtful of “as well great to be real” marketing claims and much less lured by the appeal of shiny brand-new objects. The devices you utilize daily must gain depend on via openness and efficiency, not slick advertising.