As an agency proprietor for over a years, I depend on software application and automation to streamline procedures and supply outcomes. So when GoHighLevel emerged on the scene couple of years back, it most definitely caught my interest GoHighLevel Snapshot Report.
The concept was attractive– an all-in-one client management system with marketing, sales, and solution devices integrated together. As a business owner constantly looking to simplify and scale my service, it seemed like a dream happened on paper. Who wouldn’t desire a single option that does it all?
But in this comprehensive GoHighLevel testimonial, I’ll take you inside my devastating trip of trying (and failing) to switch to this popular new software. You’ll find out:
If you’re taking into consideration whether GoHighLevel is right for your own company demands, with any luck you can gain from my excruciating mistakes and blew up expectations.
Looter: I do NOT advise GoHighLevel. If you require a CRM, begin with this listing of ideal CRMs rather. I use Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re looking for a sales, marketing, and project administration alternative to GoHighLevel, after that right here are a couple of we advise.
Backstory: Why I Thought About Switching from Keap
To understand what attracted me to GoHighLevel in the first place, you need context about my previous setup. For over 5 years I had actually been happily relying on Keap (previously Infusionsoft) to fulfill all my customer management and automation needs.
I located Keap instinctive to utilize and it dealt with everything I needed– CRM, email marketing, sales funnels, membership sites, and customer support.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are made to help local business maintain their clients while adding new ones easily. Automate follow-ups with e-mails and texts, making sure leads and clients get the right messages at the correct time. Usage web site and social media sites forms to enhance lead follow-up, and handle your development with easy appointment organizing and lead monitoring. Boost sales with automated estimating, invoicing, and settlement processing, maximizing your time. With Keap, local business can conserve 10 hours each week and increase earnings by 39%. Beginning with a 14-day free trial, no credit card required.
Why we like Keap
Keap offers a thorough customer partnership monitoring (CRM) and marketing automation service customized for small businesses and entrepreneurs. We value Keap’s concentrate on improving sales procedures and supporting consumer connections via powerful automation tools. The system’s all-in-one technique incorporates CRM, e-mail marketing, invoicing, and job monitoring, making it particularly attractive for companies seeking to settle their technology pile.
For the most part, it just worked dependably with minimal fuss or upkeep called for. My open and click-through prices were terrific (like 35% excellent). Automations ran efficiently without issues.
So why on earth was I attracted to uproot my entire operational foundation from a system that functioned to try something unverified and untried?
In knowledge I can admit I got seduced by the siren phone call of “shiny object syndrome”. You understand the sensation: when everyone’s speaking about a brand-new tool that will revolutionize your business … The lawn commonly looks greener on the other side, and I wondered whether GoHighLevel may decrease friction factors that I would certainly found out to endure throughout the years with Keap.
I withstood initially, however a few even more irritations led me to believe perhaps it was time for a modification.
The Investment: Migrating My Agency to GoHighLevel
Earlier this year I decided to start. I signed up for HighLevel’s Firm plan at $297/month, spending dramatically greater than the $97/month starter expense.
This had not been a decision I ignored. I recognized switching systems was mosting likely to call for migrating all my Keap information and basically restoring my whole technology framework from square one making use of all of the GoHighLevel integrations offered.
Below’s an overview of simply several of the initiative required:
- Manually exporting 20,000+ e-mail customer documents
- Recreating lots of automations and workflows
- Moving client accounts, notes, and job data to the new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe billing integration
- Setting up landing pages, promotions, and sales funnels around again
- Learning a completely international UX and user interface design
All in, I invested around 30-40 tiresome hours of arrangement work transitioning whatever over– in addition to dealing with lost performance throughout the switch.
However eventually, it was a calculated investment I was willing to make. I figured some short-term pain would repay with GoHighLevel supplying a better long-lasting option for my organization, Dripify. Oh exactly how wrong I was …
It just took me about a month of hands-on usage to realize I had actually made a large blunder. The problems began piling up quickly, until it reached a point I had to cut my losses and switch over back to Keap entirely.
Allow’s go through the horrible troubles I came across.
Security Issues & Lots of Vermin
Offered GoHighLevel positioned itself as an all-in-one automation system, I made sure to diligently recreate each and every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These consisted of sequences for onboarding brand-new e-mail customers, onboarding brand-new customers, automating follow-ups for webinar enrollments, sending out event tips, taking care of subscription expirations and far more.
Every little thing seemed to be operating penalty … up until unexpectedly it had not been. One morning, I woke up to find 171 totally unimportant emails had been sent to users who ought to NOT have actually gotten them. This occurred three days straight, with a various batch of 160 individuals each day.
I frantically tried fixing and reconstructing the automation from the ground up. But the issue lingered.
When I seriously reached out to their assistance team, they slightly claimed “web server problems” were responsible. Yet this description really did not make any sense, since the mistakes continued occurring each early morning like clockwork unrelated to any type of downtime.
In my mind, this enormous failing was completely inappropriate and simply really did not benefit my organization. I have hundreds of contacts counting on my automated campaigns running smoothly.
So if GoHighLevel was going to be entirely unreliable, exactly how could I entrust mission-critical workflows and delicate client information to their technology?
The unintuitive user interface only worsened these problems …
Aggravating UX
Coming from Keap where everything was seamless and intuitive, GoHighLevel’s learning curve felt steep and complicated.
Easy jobs like modifying workflows included digging through menu systems that were all over the place. Secret setups were unexplainably scattered in absolutely different areas. Moving between functions really felt disjointed or complicated.
I’ll tell you what I mean by discussing their funnel builder as an example. There were 3 different settings panels to take care of overall, private, and product setups. Yet for some crazy reason, the web links to access each of these core settings were spread out on contrary sides of the screen. What!?
As someone who values tidy, thoughtful design, this seriously annoyed me.
It reinforced that GoHighLevel still felt like a work-in-progress as opposed to a refined product ready for prime-time usage. Their top priorities appeared focused on stuffing in every feature under the sun, with bad functionality as a second thought.
And speaking of features, I quickly recognized the small cost tag came with pricey compromises …
Deceptive Pricing GoHighLevel Snapshot Report
One of GoHighLevel’s biggest selling points is the budget friendly rate for access to many features. But I rapidly discovered this low-cost base price was deceptive.
They nickle-and-dimed individuals with sporadic charges for core performance. Instantly my bank card declarations had vague $10 charges from GoHighLevel occasionally.
As it ended up, you get charged each time you send out an e-mail via their servers. So for high volume individuals, this amounted to numerous dollars in unexpected expenses.
In between these per-email costs and paying extra for deliverability attachments like Mailgun, my “affordable” GoHighLevel registration ended up costing dramatically MORE than my Keap plan.
The reduced price tag was tempting, but just not realistic in practice. This bait-and-switch left a bad taste in my mouth.
Email Rates Suffered
The last dealbreaker was seeing my meticulously nurtured e-mail open prices drop almost overnight after switching to GoHighLevel.
Formerly, my target market engagement continually struck 35-40% open prices in Keap month after month. Once I migrated their documents over to GoHighLevel, efficiency tanked quickly to a useless 9% open rate.
No matter how much I enhanced my sending out techniques or tried every repairing technique, I can barely push open rates back right into the teens– still a 50%+ decrease from my previous criteria GoHighLevel Snapshot Report.
Let me repeat: my exact same target market and e-mails unexpectedly had dreadful engagement. The only thing I can assume that would be causing 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 debilitating deliverability issues, concealed costs, broken features, and awful interface, I had finally reached my restriction …
Why I Give up GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Just 45 days after moving my company to GoHighLevel, I recognized I had actually made a huge blunder. The cons significantly surpassed any type of advantages.
No software application is ideal, yet the sheer volume of problems was beyond appropriate.
At the end of the day, software application boils down to depend on. If I can’t trust it to take care of important features properly or believe a vendor has my benefits in mind, after that it’s time to leave– also after investing significant time, cash, and initiative moving.
So I made the challenging contact us to turn around course and return back to Keap completely simply weeks after going all in on GoHighLevel. Let’s explore what I picked up from this debacle.
Secret Takeaways: What I Picked up from My GoHighLevel Blunder
My time with HighLevel can be summarized as a pricey misadventure. However in hindsight, it educated me a couple of crucial lessons:
- Stick to what jobs. Don’t distress what’s functioning unless something is definitively better across the board. Change brings threat.
- Vet declares completely. Marketing hype around brand-new software usually covers bigger underlying problems. Deep due diligence is important.
- Pick simpleness over features. Properly designed tools need to make your job life easier, not extra complex and unpleasant.
- Transparency develops depend on. Nontransparent pricing, questionable reseller terms, and finger-pointing to evade issues destroys trust fund.
- Seek honest testimonials. Delighted assistance assesses mean less if extreme problems imply bad overall usability.
- Perfection is difficult. No solitary service can flawlessly meet every one-of-a-kind service demand. Find the least-bad fit.
- Evolution over change. Step-by-step enhancements commonly surpass high-risk wholesale reinvention of what currently functions fine.
Basically, I learned to be much more hesitant of “too great to be real” marketing insurance claims and less tempted by the appeal of shiny new things. The devices you utilize daily need to gain depend on via transparency and performance, not glossy advertising.