As a company proprietor for over a decade, I rely on software and automation to streamline procedures and supply results. So when GoHighLevel emerged on the scene few years back, it definitely caught my attention GoHighLevel Square Payment Integration.
The idea was appealing– an all-in-one client management platform with marketing, sales, and service tools integrated with each other. As a business owner always aiming to streamline and scale my organization, it appeared like a desire come to life on paper. Who would not want a single option that does it all?
However in this in-depth GoHighLevel review, I’ll take you inside my dreadful trip of trying (and falling short) to switch to this prominent brand-new software application. You’ll find out:
If you’re thinking about whether GoHighLevel is right for your own organization demands, hopefully you can pick up from my uncomfortable mistakes and blew up expectations.
Spoiler: I do NOT recommend GoHighLevel. If you require a CRM, start with this listing of ideal CRMs rather. I utilize Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re trying to find a sales, marketing, and project administration option to GoHighLevel, after that right here are a couple of we suggest.
Backstory: Why I Considered Switching from Keap
To understand what attracted me to GoHighLevel in the first place, you need context regarding my previous setup. For over 5 years I had actually been happily depending on Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) to fulfill all my client monitoring and automation needs.
I discovered Keap instinctive to use and it took care of whatever I required– CRM, email marketing, sales funnels, subscription websites, and client support.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are developed to aid small companies maintain their customers while including new ones effortlessly. Automate follow-ups with e-mails and messages, ensuring leads and clients obtain the best messages at the right time. Usage internet site and social networks types to improve lead follow-up, and handle your growth with simple consultation scheduling and lead tracking. Boost sales with automated pricing estimate, invoicing, and repayment processing, freeing up your time. With Keap, local business can save 10 hours each week and rise profits by 39%. Beginning with a 14-day free trial, no credit card called for.
Why we like Keap
Keap offers a comprehensive customer relationship management (CRM) and marketing automation service customized for local business and business owners. We appreciate Keap’s concentrate on streamlining sales procedures and supporting customer partnerships through effective automation devices. The platform’s all-in-one approach combines CRM, e-mail marketing, invoicing, and job monitoring, making it especially attractive for companies wanting to consolidate their technology stack.
Generally, it just worked dependably with marginal fuss or upkeep needed. My open and click-through prices were excellent (like 35% great). Automations ran smoothly without any issues.
So why in the world was I tempted to uproot my whole operational structure from a system that functioned to try something unproven and untested?
In knowledge I can confess I obtained seduced by the alarm telephone call of “glossy object disorder”. You know the feeling: when everyone’s discussing a new device that will certainly change your service … The lawn often looks greener beyond, and I questioned whether GoHighLevel may reduce friction points that I would certainly found out to tolerate throughout the years with Keap.
I resisted in the beginning, however a few more irritations led me to think maybe it was time for a modification.
The Financial investment: Migrating My Firm to GoHighLevel
Earlier this year I made a decision to take the plunge. I registered for HighLevel’s Company plan at $297/month, investing substantially more than the $97/month starter expense.
This wasn’t a choice I took lightly. I understood switching over platforms was going to require moving all my Keap data and essentially restoring my whole tech infrastructure from square one utilizing every one of the GoHighLevel integrations offered.
Below’s an introduction of simply several of the initiative needed:
- By hand exporting 20,000+ e-mail client documents
- Recreating lots of automations and workflows
- Relocating customer accounts, notes, and task data to the new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe payment integration
- Setting up landing pages, coupons, and sales funnels around again
- Learning a totally international UX and user interface style
Done in, I spent around 30-40 laborious hours of configuration job transitioning whatever over– not to mention dealing with shed efficiency throughout the button.
Yet eventually, it was a calculated financial investment I agreed to make. I figured some short-term discomfort would repay with GoHighLevel giving a far better long-lasting service for my service, Dripify. Oh just how wrong I was …
It just took me about a month of hands-on usage to understand I had actually made a large error. The problems started accumulating quickly, until it reached a factor I had to reduce my losses and change back to Keap totally.
Let’s walk through the nightmarish troubles I ran into.
Safety And Security Issues & Lots of Bugs
Given GoHighLevel positioned itself as an all-in-one automation system, I took care to carefully recreate every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These consisted of sequences for onboarding brand-new e-mail clients, onboarding brand-new clients, automating follow-ups for webinar enrollments, sending occasion reminders, managing membership expiries and far more.
Everything seemed to be working penalty … till all of a sudden it wasn’t. One early morning, I woke up to discover 171 completely unimportant emails had actually been sent to customers who should NOT have actually gotten them. This took place three days in a row, with a different batch of 160 individuals every day.
I hysterically tried troubleshooting and restoring the automation from the ground up. However the trouble lingered.
When I seriously reached out to their support team, they slightly asserted “server concerns” were responsible. But this explanation didn’t make any sense, considering that the errors proceeded occurring each morning like clockwork unrelated to any kind of downtime.
In my mind, this huge failure was totally unacceptable and just really did not help my organization. I have countless calls relying upon my automated campaigns running smoothly.
So if GoHighLevel was mosting likely to be entirely undependable, exactly how could I entrust mission-critical workflows and delicate customer data to their modern technology?
The unintuitive interface just compounded these concerns …
Frustrating UX
Coming from Keap where everything was smooth and instinctive, GoHighLevel’s learning curve really felt high and complex.
Straightforward tasks like editing workflows entailed excavating via menu systems that were all over the place. Key setups were unexplainably spread in absolutely different sections. Relocating in between features felt disjointed or complex.
I’ll inform you what I indicate by discussing their funnel builder as an instance. There were 3 separate setups panels to handle overall, specific, and item setups. Yet for some insane factor, the links to gain access to each of these core setups were spread out on opposite sides of the screen. What!?
As somebody that values clean, thoughtful layout, this seriously frustrated me.
It reinforced that GoHighLevel still seemed like a work-in-progress as opposed to a sleek product ready for prime-time use. Their priorities seemed concentrated on cramming in every feature under the sun, with poor usability as an afterthought.
And speaking of features, I soon recognized the low cost tag featured pricey compromises …
Misleading Pricing GoHighLevel Square Payment Integration
One of GoHighLevel’s most significant marketing factors is the cost effective price for access to many features. Yet I promptly discovered this affordable base expense was misleading.
They nickle-and-dimed individuals with sporadic fees for core capability. Unexpectedly my bank card declarations had obscure $10 charges from GoHighLevel occasionally.
As it ended up, you obtain billed whenever you send out an e-mail via their web servers. So for high volume individuals, this amounted to thousands of dollars in unexpected prices.
In between these per-email fees and paying added for deliverability attachments like Mailgun, my “economical” GoHighLevel membership wound up costing dramatically MORE than my Keap plan.
The low sticker price was alluring, but simply not realistic in practice. This bait-and-switch left a negative taste in my mouth.
Email Fees Suffered
The last dealbreaker was seeing my meticulously supported email open prices plunge almost overnight after switching to GoHighLevel.
Formerly, my target market interaction continually hit 35-40% open rates in Keap month after month. But once I moved their documents over to GoHighLevel, performance tanked immediately to a useless 9% open price.
Regardless of how much I enhanced my sending out methods or tried every troubleshooting technique, I can hardly push open prices back into the teens– still a 50%+ decline from my previous standards GoHighLevel Square Payment Integration.
Let me repeat: my exact same audience and emails instantly had awful engagement. The only point I might assume that would be triggering this was whatever was happening behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a firm so depending on email marketing, this was a big deal.
In between the crippling deliverability concerns, concealed fees, busted features, and terrible user interface, I had actually ultimately reached my limit …
Why I Stop GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Simply 45 days after moving my agency to GoHighLevel, I understood I had made a significant mistake. The disadvantages considerably outweighed any kind of advantages.
No software program is perfect, yet the large quantity of troubles was beyond appropriate.
At the end of the day, software application comes down to trust. If I can not trust it to manage crucial functions competently or think a supplier has my benefits in mind, after that it’s time to walk away– even after spending substantial time, cash, and effort moving.
So I made the hard call to turn around course and return back to Keap totally simply weeks after going all in on GoHighLevel. Allow’s explore what I learned from this debacle.
Key Takeaways: What I Gained from My GoHighLevel Error
My time with HighLevel can be summarized as a costly misadventure. Yet in knowledge, it showed me a few vital lessons:
- Adhere to what works. Don’t distress what’s working unless something is definitively much better across the board. Change brings danger.
- Vet declares thoroughly. Marketing buzz around brand-new software program commonly covers larger underlying problems. Deep due persistance is vital.
- Select simpleness over features. Properly designed devices need to make your work life easier, not much more complicated and unpleasant.
- Openness develops depend on. Opaque pricing, questionable reseller terms, and finger-pointing to avert problems destroys depend on.
- Look for objective testimonials. Satisfied assistance examines imply much less if excessive concerns imply inadequate overall functionality.
- Excellence is difficult. No single remedy can perfectly meet every one-of-a-kind organization demand. Locate the least-bad fit.
- Advancement over revolution. Step-by-step enhancements usually outweigh high-risk wholesale reinvention of what currently works penalty.
Simply put, I found out to be much more unconvinced of “also excellent to be real” marketing insurance claims and less tempted by the appeal of shiny new items. The devices you use daily need to gain depend on with transparency and efficiency, not glossy advertising.