As a firm owner for over a years, I depend on software and automation to streamline procedures and provide results. So when GoHighLevel arised on the scene couple of years back, it most definitely captured my focus GoHighLevel Split Testing.
The concept was enticing– an all-in-one client administration system with marketing, sales, and solution devices incorporated together. As an entrepreneur constantly looking to streamline and scale my company, it felt like a dream happened theoretically. Who wouldn’t want a solitary remedy that does it all?
Yet in this thorough GoHighLevel evaluation, I’ll take you inside my tragic journey of attempting (and falling short) to switch over to this prominent new software program. You’ll learn:
If you’re considering whether GoHighLevel is right for your very own organization requirements, ideally you can gain from my excruciating errors and inflated assumptions.
Looter: I do NOT suggest GoHighLevel. If you need a CRM, begin with this checklist of best CRMs rather. I utilize Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re looking for a sales, marketing, and job administration choice to GoHighLevel, then here are a couple of we suggest.
Backstory: Why I Thought About Changing from Keap
To comprehend what attracted me to GoHighLevel to begin with, you need context about my previous setup. For over 5 years I had been happily relying on Keap (previously Infusionsoft) to satisfy all my client management and automation needs.
I found Keap instinctive to make use of and it managed every little thing I needed– CRM, email marketing, sales funnels, membership sites, and client support.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are created to assist local business keep their clients while including brand-new ones effortlessly. Automate follow-ups with emails and messages, guaranteeing leads and clients get the best messages at the correct time. Usage internet site and social media sites forms to improve lead follow-up, and manage your development with simple consultation scheduling and lead monitoring. Boost sales with automated pricing estimate, invoicing, and settlement processing, liberating your time. With Keap, small companies can save 10 hours per week and rise income by 39%. Begin with a 14-day free trial, no credit card needed.
Why we like Keap
Keap offers a thorough client partnership management (CRM) and marketing automation service tailored for small businesses and entrepreneurs. We appreciate Keap’s concentrate on enhancing sales procedures and nurturing consumer partnerships with powerful automation tools. The platform’s all-in-one strategy incorporates CRM, e-mail marketing, invoicing, and task management, making it particularly eye-catching for services wanting to settle their tech pile.
Essentially, it simply worked accurately with minimal hassle or maintenance needed. My open and click-through prices were wonderful (like 35% great). Automations ran smoothly without problems.
So why on earth was I attracted to uproot my whole functional foundation from a system that functioned to try something unproven and untried?
In knowledge I can confess I got attracted by the siren phone call of “glossy things syndrome”. You understand the feeling: when everyone’s talking about a new tool that will certainly change your organization … The yard commonly looks greener on the other side, and I questioned whether GoHighLevel may lower friction points that I would certainly found out to endure for many years with Keap.
I withstood in the beginning, but a few more disappointments led me to believe possibly it was time for a modification.
The Financial investment: Migrating My Company to GoHighLevel
Earlier this year I decided to take the plunge. I registered for HighLevel’s Company plan at $297/month, spending substantially greater than the $97/month starter cost.
This had not been a decision I took lightly. I knew changing platforms was mosting likely to call for migrating all my Keap data and basically reconstructing my whole technology infrastructure from scratch using all of the GoHighLevel integrations available.
Right here’s a summary of simply some of the initiative required:
- Manually exporting 20,000+ email client documents
- Recreating lots of automations and workflows
- Relocating customer accounts, notes, and project data to the new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe payment integration
- Setting up landing pages, discounts, and sales funnels throughout again
- Learning an entirely foreign UX and interface layout
Done in, I spent around 30-40 tiresome hours of setup job transitioning everything over– in addition to managing lost performance throughout the switch.
However inevitably, it was a computed investment I was willing to make. I figured some temporary discomfort would pay off with GoHighLevel supplying a better long-lasting solution for my service, Dripify. Oh exactly how incorrect I was …
It only took me regarding a month of hands-on use to understand I had actually made a large mistake. The problems began piling up promptly, up until it got to a factor I had to cut my losses and switch over back to Keap completely.
Let’s walk through the nightmarish issues I encountered.
Safety And Security Issues & Lots of Vermin
Given GoHighLevel positioned itself as an all-in-one automation platform, I took care to thoroughly recreate every workflow from my old Keap account.
These included sequences for onboarding new email clients, onboarding brand-new clients, automating follow-ups for webinar enrollments, sending occasion reminders, taking care of subscription expiries and far more.
Whatever seemed to be functioning fine … up until instantly it wasn’t. One morning, I awoke to find 171 entirely irrelevant e-mails had been sent to users who should NOT have received them. This happened three days straight, with a different set of 160 people every day.
I desperately attempted fixing and reconstructing the automation from scratch. However the trouble continued.
When I desperately connected to their assistance group, they vaguely asserted “server problems” were to blame. Yet this explanation really did not make any type of sense, considering that the errors proceeded occurring each morning like clockwork unconnected to any kind of downtime.
In my mind, this large failing was completely undesirable and simply didn’t benefit my organization. I have countless calls depending on my automated campaigns running efficiently.
So if GoHighLevel was mosting likely to be absolutely unstable, how could I delegate mission-critical workflows and sensitive customer data to their modern technology?
The unintuitive interface just worsened these issues …
Frustrating UX
Originating from Keap where every little thing was seamless and intuitive, GoHighLevel’s learning contour felt high and complex.
Straightforward jobs like editing workflows entailed excavating via menu systems that were all over the place. Key setups were unexplainably spread in completely various sections. Moving in between functions felt disjointed or complex.
I’ll inform you what I imply by speaking about their funnel builder as an instance. There were 3 separate setups panels to take care of total, individual, and product setups. Yet for some insane reason, the links to access each of these core setups were expanded on opposite sides of the display. What!?
As somebody who values clean, thoughtful style, this seriously irritated me.
It reinforced that GoHighLevel still seemed like a work-in-progress as opposed to a polished product ready for prime-time usage. Their concerns seemed focused on cramming in every feature imaginable, with poor usability as an afterthought.
And talking features, I soon recognized the small cost tag included pricey concessions …
Deceptive Pricing GoHighLevel Split Testing
Among GoHighLevel’s most significant selling points is the inexpensive rate for accessibility to a lot of features. Yet I quickly learned this cheap base cost was deceitful.
They nickle-and-dimed individuals with sporadic fees for core performance. All of a sudden my credit card statements had obscure $10 costs from GoHighLevel occasionally.
As it turned out, you get billed every time you send an e-mail via their servers. So for high quantity users, this amounted to numerous bucks in unexpected costs.
Between these per-email costs and paying extra for deliverability attachments like Mailgun, my “affordable” GoHighLevel subscription ended up costing significantly greater than my Keap plan.
The low price tag was alluring, however just not realistic in practice. This bait-and-switch left a negative taste in my mouth.
Email Rates Suffered
The final dealbreaker was seeing my meticulously nurtured e-mail open prices plummet virtually overnight after switching to GoHighLevel.
Previously, my target market involvement constantly struck 35-40% open prices in Keap month after month. Once I moved their documents over to GoHighLevel, efficiency tanked instantly to a worthless 9% open rate.
Despite just how much I enhanced my sending techniques or tried every fixing trick, I could hardly nudge open rates back into the teenagers– still a 50%+ decline from my previous benchmarks GoHighLevel Split Testing.
Let me repeat: my exact same target market and e-mails all of a sudden had awful interaction. The only thing I could think that would certainly be triggering this was whatever was taking place behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a company so based on e-mail marketing, this was a big deal.
Between the crippling deliverability problems, hidden fees, busted features, and terrible interface, I had finally reached my limitation …
Why I Quit GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Just 45 days after migrating my firm to GoHighLevel, I knew I had made a massive blunder. The cons significantly outweighed any benefits.
No software application is perfect, however the large quantity of troubles was past acceptable.
At the end of the day, software program boils down to depend on. If I can’t trust it to deal with vital features capably or believe a vendor has my best interests in mind, then it’s time to leave– even after spending significant time, cash, and effort migrating.
So I made the difficult phone call to reverse course and return back to Keap entirely just 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 summed up as a costly misadventure. But in hindsight, it educated me a couple of vital lessons:
- Stay with what works. Don’t distress what’s functioning unless something is definitively much better across the board. Change brings risk.
- Vet asserts completely. Marketing buzz around brand-new software application usually obscures larger underlying defects. Deep due diligence is vital.
- Pick simplicity over features. Properly designed devices ought to make your work life simpler, not much more complex and untidy.
- Transparency constructs trust fund. Nontransparent pricing, unethical reseller terms, and finger-pointing to avert problems destroys trust.
- Look for unbiased evaluations. Happy assistance examines mean less if too much problems imply inadequate total usability.
- Excellence is difficult. No single remedy can completely fulfill every special service need. Locate the least-bad fit.
- Development over change. Incremental renovations commonly exceed risky wholesale reinvention of what already functions fine.
In other words, I found out to be a lot more hesitant of “also good to be real” marketing cases and less tempted by the appeal of shiny new objects. The tools you make use of daily need to earn trust fund through openness and performance, not glossy advertising.