As a company owner for over a years, I count on software program and automation to improve operations and supply outcomes. So when GoHighLevel emerged on the scene few years back, it definitely caught my interest GoHighLevel Stock.
The concept was attractive– an all-in-one client monitoring system with marketing, sales, and solution tools integrated with each other. As a business owner always aiming to streamline and scale my service, it felt like a desire come to life on paper. That wouldn’t desire a single service that does it all?
But in this thorough GoHighLevel review, I’ll take you inside my devastating journey of trying (and falling short) to change to this preferred new software. You’ll learn:
If you’re thinking about whether GoHighLevel is right for your own company needs, with any luck you can pick up from my painful blunders and pumped up assumptions.
Looter: I do NOT recommend GoHighLevel. If you need a CRM, begin with this list of best CRMs rather. I make use of Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re trying to find a sales, marketing, and task management option to GoHighLevel, after that below are a couple of we advise.
Backstory: Why I Considered Switching from Keap
To understand what attracted me to GoHighLevel in the first place, you need context concerning my previous setup. For over 5 years I had actually been gladly relying on Keap (previously Infusionsoft) to satisfy all my customer administration and automation needs.
I found Keap intuitive to utilize and it dealt with whatever I needed– CRM, email marketing, sales funnels, membership sites, and client assistance.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are made to aid small companies keep their clients while adding new ones effortlessly. Automate follow-ups with e-mails and messages, making certain leads and customers get the appropriate messages at the correct time. Usage web site and social media kinds to improve lead follow-up, and manage your development with simple appointment scheduling and lead monitoring. Boost sales with automated pricing quote, invoicing, and repayment processing, maximizing your time. With Keap, small businesses can conserve 10 hours weekly and increase profits by 39%. Beginning with a 14-day free trial, no charge card required.
Why we like Keap
Keap supplies a detailed consumer relationship monitoring (CRM) and marketing automation option customized for small businesses and entrepreneurs. We value Keap’s concentrate on streamlining sales processes and nurturing client connections via effective automation tools. The platform’s all-in-one technique integrates CRM, email marketing, invoicing, and job administration, making it especially eye-catching for organizations wanting to combine their tech stack.
Generally, it simply functioned accurately with minimal fuss or maintenance 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 lured to uproot my entire functional foundation from a system that functioned to attempt something unproven and untried?
In knowledge I can admit I got attracted by the alarm phone call of “shiny things disorder”. You know the sensation: when everyone’s speaking about a brand-new device that will certainly transform your business … The grass typically looks greener on the other side, and I questioned whether GoHighLevel may lower friction factors that I would certainly discovered to endure throughout the years with Keap.
I withstood in the beginning, but a few more irritations led me to believe possibly it was time for a change.
The Investment: Migrating My Company to GoHighLevel
Earlier this year I chose to start. I signed up for HighLevel’s Agency plan at $297/month, investing dramatically greater than the $97/month starter expense.
This had not been a choice I took lightly. I recognized switching systems was going to require migrating all my Keap information and essentially rebuilding my whole technology infrastructure from scratch using all of the GoHighLevel integrations available.
Right here’s an overview of simply a few of the initiative required:
- By hand exporting 20,000+ e-mail customer records
- Recreating loads of automations and workflows
- Moving client accounts, notes, and task information to the brand-new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe billing integration
- Setting up landing pages, discounts, and sales funnels all over once again
- Learning a completely foreign UX and interface style
All in, I spent around 30-40 laborious hours of arrangement work transitioning everything over– not to mention managing shed performance throughout the switch.
However ultimately, it was a calculated investment I wanted to make. I figured some temporary pain would settle with GoHighLevel providing a far better long-lasting solution for my business, Dripify. Oh exactly how incorrect I was …
It only took me about a month of hands-on usage to recognize I had made a big blunder. The problems started accumulating quickly, up until it got to a factor I had to reduce my losses and change back to Keap entirely.
Let’s walk through the nightmarish issues I encountered.
Safety Issues & Lots of Bugs
Provided GoHighLevel positioned itself as an all-in-one automation system, I took care to carefully recreate each and every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These included series for onboarding new e-mail clients, onboarding new clients, automating follow-ups for webinar registrations, sending out occasion suggestions, handling membership expiries and far more.
Every little thing appeared to be working fine … until instantly it had not been. One early morning, I woke up to find 171 entirely irrelevant emails had been sent out to customers that must NOT have obtained them. This took place three days straight, with a various batch of 160 individuals every day.
I anxiously tried fixing and restoring the automation from square one. But the issue lingered.
When I seriously reached out to their assistance group, they slightly declared “server concerns” were at fault. Yet this explanation didn’t make any type of feeling, because the errors proceeded occurring each early morning like clockwork unassociated to any type of downtime.
In my mind, this enormous failing was entirely unacceptable and just didn’t help my business. 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 turn over mission-critical workflows and delicate client data to their innovation?
The unintuitive interface just compounded these issues …
Discouraging UX
Coming from Keap where whatever was smooth and user-friendly, GoHighLevel’s learning contour really felt high and complicated.
Easy tasks like modifying workflows entailed excavating via menu systems that were all over the place. Key setups were unexplainably spread in absolutely different areas. Relocating in between features felt disjointed or complex.
I’ll inform you what I mean by discussing their funnel builder as an instance. There were 3 separate setups panels to manage general, specific, and item setups. Yet for some insane factor, the links to access each of these core setups were spread out on opposite sides of the screen. What!?
As somebody who values tidy, thoughtful design, this seriously upset me.
It enhanced that GoHighLevel still felt like a work-in-progress instead of a polished item ready for prime-time usage. Their top priorities appeared focused on cramming in every feature under the sun, with poor use as a second thought.
And speaking of features, I soon realized the affordable price tag included costly compromises …
Deceptive Pricing GoHighLevel Stock
Among GoHighLevel’s greatest selling points is the budget friendly cost for access to numerous features. However I rapidly discovered this inexpensive base price was deceitful.
They nickle-and-dimed customers with erratic fees for core capability. Suddenly my bank card declarations had vague $10 costs from GoHighLevel occasionally.
As it turned out, you obtain charged every single time you send an email with their web servers. So for high quantity individuals, this added up to numerous bucks in unexpected prices.
Between these per-email charges and paying added for deliverability add-ons like Mailgun, my “budget-friendly” GoHighLevel subscription wound up setting you back significantly greater than my Keap plan.
The low sticker price was alluring, yet simply not realistic in practice. This bait-and-switch left a bad preference in my mouth.
Email Fees Suffered
The last dealbreaker was seeing my carefully supported e-mail open rates plunge virtually over night after switching to GoHighLevel.
Formerly, my audience engagement constantly hit 35-40% open rates in Keap month after month. Once I migrated their documents over to GoHighLevel, efficiency tanked quickly to a pitiful 9% open price.
Regardless of just how much I optimized my sending methods or attempted every repairing trick, I might hardly nudge open rates back right into the teenagers– still a 50%+ decrease from my previous standards GoHighLevel Stock.
Let me repeat: my exact same audience and emails instantly had awful engagement. The only thing I could believe that would certainly be triggering 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 crippling deliverability concerns, hidden costs, damaged features, and terrible interface, I had actually lastly reached my limitation …
Why I Give up GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Simply 45 days after migrating my firm to GoHighLevel, I recognized I had actually made a substantial blunder. The disadvantages drastically exceeded any advantages.
No software program is best, yet the sheer volume of issues was past appropriate.
At the end of the day, software program comes down to count on. If I can not trust it to manage important functions competently or think a supplier has my benefits in mind, then it’s time to leave– even after spending considerable time, money, and effort moving.
So I made the difficult call to reverse course and return back to Keap completely just weeks after going done in on GoHighLevel. Let’s discover what I gained from this ordeal.
Trick Takeaways: What I Learned From My GoHighLevel Error
My time with HighLevel can be summed up as an expensive ill fortune. But in hindsight, it instructed me a few crucial lessons:
- Stick to what jobs. Don’t distress what’s working unless something is definitively far better across the board. Modification brings danger.
- Veterinarian claims thoroughly. Marketing buzz around new software typically covers larger underlying problems. Deep due diligence is important.
- Choose simpleness over features. Well-designed tools ought to make your job life much easier, not much more challenging and unpleasant.
- Openness develops count on. Opaque pricing, dubious reseller terms, and finger-pointing to escape problems ruins trust fund.
- Seek impartial evaluations. Delighted assistance reviews suggest much less if extreme problems imply poor general functionality.
- Excellence is difficult. No solitary service can flawlessly satisfy every one-of-a-kind company requirement. Find the least-bad fit.
- Development over transformation. Step-by-step enhancements commonly exceed high-risk wholesale reinvention of what currently functions penalty.
Basically, I learned to be more unconvinced of “also excellent to be real” marketing insurance claims and less lured by the appeal of glossy new objects. The tools you make use of daily ought to gain trust through openness and efficiency, not slick advertising.