As an agency owner for over a years, I rely on software program and automation to improve procedures and supply outcomes. So when GoHighLevel arised on the scene couple of years back, it absolutely caught my focus GoHighLevel Snapshot Pour Massage.
The concept was attractive– an all-in-one customer management system with marketing, sales, and service tools integrated with each other. As an entrepreneur constantly aiming to simplify and scale my company, it appeared like a desire become a reality on paper. That would not want a solitary option that does it all?
But in this comprehensive GoHighLevel review, I’ll take you inside my tragic journey of attempting (and failing) to switch over to this preferred new software. You’ll find out:
If you’re considering whether GoHighLevel is right for your own business needs, ideally you can gain from my uncomfortable blunders and blew up assumptions.
Looter: I do NOT suggest GoHighLevel. If you need a CRM, begin with this listing of finest CRMs instead. I use Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re looking for a sales, marketing, and project monitoring option to GoHighLevel, then here are a couple of we advise.
Backstory: Why I Thought About Changing from Keap
To understand what attracted me to GoHighLevel to begin with, you need context regarding my previous setup. For over 5 years I had been happily relying upon Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) to fulfill all my customer management and automation demands.
I found Keap intuitive to utilize and it handled every little thing I required– CRM, e-mail marketing, sales funnels, membership sites, and client support.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are developed to aid local business maintain their customers while adding new ones easily. Automate follow-ups with emails and texts, making certain leads and customers receive the ideal messages at the right time. Use site and social media sites types to improve lead follow-up, and handle your development with easy visit organizing and lead monitoring. Boost sales with automated pricing quote, invoicing, and settlement handling, liberating your time. With Keap, small businesses can save 10 hours each week and rise income by 39%. Begin with a 14-day free trial, no bank card required.
Why we like Keap
Keap provides a detailed consumer partnership monitoring (CRM) and marketing automation remedy tailored for small companies and business owners. We value Keap’s concentrate on enhancing sales procedures and nurturing consumer connections with effective automation devices. The platform’s all-in-one strategy combines CRM, email marketing, invoicing, and task monitoring, making it specifically attractive for businesses seeking to consolidate their tech stack.
Essentially, it simply functioned accurately with marginal difficulty or upkeep required. My open and click-through rates were excellent (like 35% wonderful). Automations ran smoothly without concerns.
So why in the world was I attracted to uproot my whole operational structure from a system that functioned to attempt something unproven and untested?
In hindsight I can admit I obtained attracted by the alarm telephone call of “glossy things syndrome”. You know the feeling: when everyone’s speaking about a new tool that will certainly reinvent your business … The yard typically looks greener on the other side, and I questioned whether GoHighLevel might reduce rubbing factors that I ‘d learned to endure over the years with Keap.
I withstood initially, but a few even more frustrations led me to believe perhaps it was time for a change.
The Financial investment: Moving My Company to GoHighLevel
Previously this year I made a decision to take the plunge. I enrolled in HighLevel’s Company plan at $297/month, investing significantly more than the $97/month starter cost.
This wasn’t a decision I ignored. I recognized switching platforms was mosting likely to call for migrating all my Keap data and essentially rebuilding my entire tech framework from square one making use of every one of the GoHighLevel integrations readily available.
Right here’s an introduction of simply a few of the effort required:
- Manually exporting 20,000+ email customer records
- Recreating dozens of automations and workflows
- Relocating client profiles, notes, and project information to the brand-new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe invoicing integration
- Establishing landing pages, coupons, and sales funnels throughout once more
- Learning a totally international UX and interface style
All in, I invested around 30-40 tiresome hours of setup job transitioning every little thing over– and also handling shed efficiency during the button.
But ultimately, it was a computed financial investment I wanted to make. I figured some short-term pain would certainly settle with GoHighLevel giving a far better long-lasting option for my business, Dripify. Oh how incorrect I was …
It only took me concerning a month of hands-on use to recognize I had actually made a huge blunder. The concerns began piling up swiftly, till it got to a factor I needed to reduce my losses and change back to Keap entirely.
Let’s walk through the horrible troubles I experienced.
Security Issues & Lots of Bugs
Given GoHighLevel positioned itself as an all-in-one automation platform, I made sure to carefully recreate each and every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These consisted of sequences for onboarding new email subscribers, onboarding new clients, automating follow-ups for webinar enrollments, sending event suggestions, handling subscription expiries and much more.
Every little thing seemed to be operating penalty … until instantly it wasn’t. One morning, I woke up to discover 171 entirely pointless emails had actually been sent out to individuals who ought to NOT have gotten them. This took place 3 days in a row, with a various batch of 160 individuals every day.
I anxiously tried troubleshooting and rebuilding the automation from scratch. Yet the trouble persisted.
When I frantically connected to their support team, they vaguely declared “web server concerns” were to blame. However this explanation didn’t make any sense, since the errors proceeded taking place each early morning like clockwork unrelated to any downtime.
In my mind, this massive failing was entirely unacceptable and just didn’t benefit my company. I have thousands of contacts counting 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 customer data to their technology?
The unintuitive user interface just compounded these problems …
Aggravating UX
Coming from Keap where everything was smooth and user-friendly, GoHighLevel’s learning curve felt high and challenging.
Straightforward tasks like editing workflows entailed excavating with menu systems that were all over the place. Key settings were unexplainably spread in completely various sections. Relocating between features felt disjointed or confusing.
I’ll tell you what I imply by talking about their funnel builder as an instance. There were 3 different settings panels to take care of total, specific, and product arrangements. Yet for some crazy reason, the links to gain access to each of these core setups were expanded on contrary sides of the display. What!?
As a person who values tidy, thoughtful style, this seriously annoyed me.
It enhanced that GoHighLevel still seemed like a work-in-progress rather than a refined product prepared for prime-time use. Their top priorities seemed concentrated on packing in every feature under the sun, with poor use as a second thought.
And talking features, I soon understood the low cost tag featured pricey compromises …
Deceptive Pricing GoHighLevel Snapshot Pour Massage
Among GoHighLevel’s largest marketing factors is the inexpensive cost for access to so many features. Yet I promptly discovered this inexpensive base price was deceptive.
They nickle-and-dimed customers with occasional fees for core capability. Unexpectedly my credit card statements had vague $10 fees from GoHighLevel here and there.
As it turned out, you obtain charged whenever you send out an email through their web servers. So for high volume customers, this added up to hundreds of bucks in unanticipated costs.
Between these per-email costs and paying added for deliverability add-ons like Mailgun, my “inexpensive” GoHighLevel subscription ended up costing substantially MORE than my Keap plan.
The low sticker price was alluring, but simply not sensible in practice. This bait-and-switch left a negative taste in my mouth.
Email Rates Suffered
The final dealbreaker was seeing my very carefully supported email open rates plummet nearly over night after changing to GoHighLevel.
Formerly, my audience interaction constantly hit 35-40% open rates in Keap month after month. But once I migrated their documents over to GoHighLevel, efficiency tanked instantaneously to a useless 9% open rate.
Regardless of just how much I enhanced my sending out techniques or attempted every repairing technique, I can hardly push open prices back into the teens– still a 50%+ decrease from my previous criteria GoHighLevel Snapshot Pour Massage.
Let me repeat: my exact same target market and emails suddenly had dreadful involvement. The only thing I could assume that would certainly be creating this was whatever was happening behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a firm so based on email marketing, this was a big deal.
Between the debilitating deliverability concerns, hidden costs, broken features, and horrible user interface, I had actually lastly reached my limitation …
Why I Give up GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Just 45 days after moving my agency to GoHighLevel, I recognized I had actually made a huge mistake. The disadvantages significantly outweighed any benefits.
No software program is ideal, but the large volume of issues was beyond appropriate.
At the end of the day, software program boils down to count on. If I can not trust it to take care of essential features effectively or believe a vendor has my benefits in mind, after that it’s time to walk away– even after investing considerable time, cash, and initiative moving.
So I made the hard call to turn around program and return back to Keap totally simply weeks after going done in on GoHighLevel. Allow’s explore what I gained from this ordeal.
Trick Takeaways: What I Learned From My GoHighLevel Blunder
My time with HighLevel can be summarized as a pricey misadventure. Yet in hindsight, it educated me a few crucial lessons:
- Adhere to what works. Don’t upset what’s working unless something is definitively far better across the board. Modification brings danger.
- Veterinarian declares completely. Marketing buzz around new software often obscures larger underlying imperfections. Deep due diligence is essential.
- Choose simplicity over features. Well-designed tools should make your job life less complicated, not extra complex and messy.
- Openness develops trust fund. Nontransparent pricing, unethical reseller terms, and finger-pointing to avert issues damages trust fund.
- Look for unbiased evaluations. Pleased support evaluates indicate much less if extreme concerns imply poor overall usability.
- Excellence is impossible. No single option can completely satisfy every one-of-a-kind service need. Locate the least-bad fit.
- Evolution over change. Incremental enhancements normally exceed dangerous wholesale reinvention of what already works penalty.
In other words, I found out to be more hesitant of “too excellent to be real” marketing insurance claims and much less lured by the appeal of glossy brand-new items. The tools you utilize daily must earn depend on via transparency and performance, not slick advertising.