As an agency owner for over a years, I count on software program and automation to improve operations and supply outcomes. So when GoHighLevel arised on the scene couple of years back, it absolutely captured my interest GoHighLevel Strategies.
The concept was enticing– an all-in-one client monitoring platform with marketing, sales, and solution devices incorporated with each other. As a business owner always looking to streamline and scale my company, it appeared like a desire come true on paper. That wouldn’t desire a solitary service that does it all?
However in this thorough GoHighLevel review, I’ll take you inside my dreadful journey of trying (and falling short) to switch over to this popular new software program. You’ll find out:
If you’re taking into consideration whether GoHighLevel is right for your very own business demands, hopefully you can gain from my uncomfortable blunders and inflated expectations.
Looter: I do NOT recommend GoHighLevel. If you need a CRM, start with this checklist of finest CRMs instead. I make use of Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re searching for a sales, marketing, and task monitoring choice to GoHighLevel, after that below are a couple of we suggest.
Backstory: Why I Thought About Switching Over from Keap
To recognize what attracted me to GoHighLevel in the first place, you need context regarding my previous setup. For over 5 years I had been gladly relying on Keap (previously Infusionsoft) to satisfy all my client monitoring and automation demands.
I discovered Keap intuitive to utilize and it took care of every little thing I needed– CRM, e-mail marketing, sales funnels, subscription sites, and customer support.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are designed to help small companies maintain their customers while adding brand-new ones easily. Automate follow-ups with emails and messages, making certain leads and customers receive the appropriate messages at the right time. Usage web site and social media sites forms to streamline lead follow-up, and manage your growth with very easy visit scheduling and lead tracking. Boost sales with automated pricing estimate, invoicing, and settlement processing, liberating your time. With Keap, local business can save 10 hours per week and rise income by 39%. Begin with a 14-day free trial, no bank card needed.
Why we like Keap
Keap supplies a thorough customer relationship management (CRM) and marketing automation solution customized for local business and business owners. We appreciate Keap’s focus on simplifying sales procedures and nurturing consumer partnerships with effective automation tools. The platform’s all-in-one method incorporates CRM, email marketing, invoicing, and task administration, making it specifically appealing for organizations seeking to combine their technology stack.
Essentially, it just functioned accurately with very little difficulty or maintenance called for. My open and click-through prices were fantastic (like 35% great). Automations ran efficiently without any issues.
So why on earth was I tempted to uproot my entire functional foundation from a system that functioned to try something unverified and untested?
In hindsight I can confess I obtained seduced by the alarm call of “shiny object disorder”. You know the feeling: when everyone’s talking about a new tool that will change your company … The turf commonly looks greener on the other side, and I asked yourself whether GoHighLevel may decrease rubbing factors that I ‘d discovered to endure throughout the years with Keap.
I withstood initially, however a few more frustrations led me to assume possibly it was time for an adjustment.
The Investment: Migrating My Company to GoHighLevel
Earlier this year I made a decision to start. I signed up for HighLevel’s Agency 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 going to need moving all my Keap information and basically rebuilding my whole technology facilities from square one using all of the GoHighLevel integrations available.
Below’s an overview of simply several of the effort needed:
- By hand exporting 20,000+ e-mail client documents
- Recreating loads of automations and workflows
- Moving customer accounts, notes, and project information to the brand-new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe payment integration
- Establishing landing pages, discounts, and sales funnels around once more
- Learning an entirely international UX and user interface style
Done in, I spent around 30-40 tedious hours of setup work transitioning whatever over– not to mention handling lost productivity throughout the button.
But ultimately, it was a computed financial investment I was willing to make. I figured some temporary pain would pay off with GoHighLevel supplying a far better long-lasting option for my organization, Dripify. Oh exactly how incorrect I was …
It just took me about a month of hands-on use to understand I had actually made a big mistake. The concerns started accumulating swiftly, up until it reached a point I had to reduce my losses and switch back to Keap completely.
Let’s go through the nightmarish troubles I experienced.
Safety And Security Issues & Many Bugs
Provided GoHighLevel placed itself as an all-in-one automation system, I made sure to diligently recreate every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These consisted of sequences for onboarding brand-new email customers, onboarding brand-new customers, automating follow-ups for webinar enrollments, sending out event reminders, managing subscription expiries and far more.
Every little thing appeared to be working penalty … until suddenly it had not been. One early morning, I woke up to find 171 completely pointless emails had been sent out to users that need to NOT have actually gotten them. This took place three days in a row, with a different batch of 160 people each day.
I hysterically tried repairing and rebuilding the automation from the ground up. However the problem lingered.
When I frantically reached out to their support team, they slightly claimed “server concerns” were to blame. Yet this description really did not make any kind of feeling, considering that the errors continued occurring each early morning like clockwork unassociated to any kind of downtime.
In my mind, this enormous failure was completely undesirable and just really did not work for my organization. I have thousands of contacts counting on my automated campaigns running smoothly.
So if GoHighLevel was going to be absolutely unstable, exactly how could I leave mission-critical workflows and sensitive customer information to their innovation?
The unintuitive user interface only worsened these issues …
Frustrating UX
Originating from Keap where everything was seamless and user-friendly, GoHighLevel’s learning curve felt high and complicated.
Easy jobs like modifying workflows involved digging through menu systems that were all over the place. Secret setups were unexplainably spread in absolutely various areas. Moving between functions felt disjointed or confusing.
I’ll inform you what I imply by discussing their funnel builder as an instance. There were 3 different setups panels to take care of general, specific, and product arrangements. Yet for some insane factor, the links to gain access to each of these core settings were expanded on opposite sides of the display. What!?
As someone that values clean, thoughtful style, this seriously annoyed me.
It enhanced that GoHighLevel still felt like a work-in-progress rather than a polished product ready for prime-time use. Their top priorities appeared concentrated on cramming in every feature imaginable, with bad functionality as a second thought.
And speaking of features, I soon realized the small cost tag included costly concessions …
Deceptive Pricing GoHighLevel Strategies
One of GoHighLevel’s greatest selling factors is the budget-friendly price for access to numerous features. But I rapidly learned this low-cost base expense was misleading.
They nickle-and-dimed individuals with occasional charges for core functionality. Suddenly my charge card statements had vague $10 fees from GoHighLevel occasionally.
As it turned out, you obtain billed each time you send an email through their web servers. So for high quantity customers, this added up to hundreds of dollars in unexpected prices.
Between these per-email costs and paying additional for deliverability attachments like Mailgun, my “cost effective” GoHighLevel membership wound up costing significantly greater than my Keap plan.
The low sticker price was appealing, however just not realistic in practice. This bait-and-switch left a bad preference in my mouth.
Email Rates Suffered
The last dealbreaker was seeing my carefully nurtured e-mail open prices plummet practically over night after changing to GoHighLevel.
Formerly, my audience involvement continually struck 35-40% open rates in Keap month after month. Once I migrated their documents over to GoHighLevel, efficiency tanked instantaneously to a pitiful 9% open price.
Regardless of just how much I optimized my sending practices or attempted every fixing technique, I could hardly nudge open prices back into the teens– still a 50%+ decline from my previous standards GoHighLevel Strategies.
Let me repeat: my exact same target market and e-mails suddenly had awful involvement. The only point I can think that would be causing this was whatever was taking place behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a company so based on email marketing, this was a big deal.
In between the debilitating deliverability issues, hidden costs, broken features, and horrible user interface, I had actually finally reached my limitation …
Why I Quit GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Just 45 days after moving my agency to GoHighLevel, I recognized I had actually made a big error. The cons drastically outweighed any kind of advantages.
No software application is ideal, but the large volume of problems was beyond acceptable.
At the end of the day, software program comes down to count on. If I can not trust it to handle important functions effectively or think a vendor has my best interests in mind, after that it’s time to walk away– also after investing considerable time, cash, and initiative migrating.
So I made the difficult call to reverse course and return back to Keap totally just weeks after going done in on GoHighLevel. Allow’s explore what I gained from this ordeal.
Key Takeaways: What I Picked up from My GoHighLevel Error
My time with HighLevel can be summarized as an expensive ill fortune. But in knowledge, it showed me a few crucial lessons:
- Adhere to what jobs. Do not disturb what’s working unless something is definitively better across the board. Adjustment brings threat.
- Veterinarian asserts extensively. Marketing hype around new software program usually obscures bigger underlying imperfections. Deep due diligence is important.
- Choose simplicity over features. Well-designed tools should make your job life easier, not much more difficult and untidy.
- Transparency builds trust. Opaque pricing, unethical reseller terms, and finger-pointing to evade issues destroys depend on.
- Seek unbiased reviews. Satisfied assistance evaluates indicate less if extreme concerns imply bad total functionality.
- Perfection is impossible. No solitary option can completely meet every distinct company demand. Locate the least-bad fit.
- Evolution over revolution. Incremental enhancements generally outweigh dangerous wholesale reinvention of what already functions penalty.
In other words, I found out to be more doubtful of “too excellent to be true” marketing cases and much less attracted by the allure of glossy brand-new things. The tools you utilize daily must gain count on with openness and efficiency, not glossy advertising.