As a firm owner for over a years, I rely upon software application and automation to enhance operations and supply outcomes. So when GoHighLevel arised on the scene few years back, it most definitely captured my focus GoHighLevel Tasks.
The concept was attractive– an all-in-one client administration platform with marketing, sales, and service tools integrated with each other. As a business owner always seeking to simplify and scale my company, it appeared like a desire come to life on paper. That wouldn’t desire a single service that does it all?
But in this comprehensive GoHighLevel testimonial, I’ll take you inside my tragic trip of trying (and falling short) to switch to this preferred new software. You’ll learn:
If you’re thinking about whether GoHighLevel is right for your very own company needs, ideally you can gain from my agonizing errors and blew up assumptions.
Spoiler: I do NOT recommend GoHighLevel. If you require a CRM, start with this checklist of finest CRMs rather. I use Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re searching for a sales, marketing, and project management option to GoHighLevel, after that below are a couple of we advise.
Backstory: Why I Took Into Consideration Switching Over from Keap
To understand what attracted me to GoHighLevel in the first place, you require context concerning my previous configuration. For over 5 years I had been happily counting on Keap (previously Infusionsoft) to satisfy all my customer management and automation needs.
I found Keap instinctive to utilize and it dealt with every little thing I needed– CRM, email marketing, sales funnels, subscription websites, and client assistance.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are made to help small companies maintain their customers while adding brand-new ones effortlessly. Automate follow-ups with e-mails and texts, ensuring leads and clients receive the best messages at the correct time. Usage website and social media types to simplify lead follow-up, and handle your growth with very easy appointment scheduling and lead tracking. Boost sales with automated pricing estimate, invoicing, and repayment processing, liberating your time. With Keap, small companies can conserve 10 hours per week and increase income by 39%. Beginning with a 14-day free trial, no charge card required.
Why we like Keap
Keap offers a comprehensive consumer partnership administration (CRM) and marketing automation service customized for local business and business owners. We value Keap’s focus on enhancing sales processes and supporting customer relationships with effective automation devices. The platform’s all-in-one method combines CRM, email marketing, invoicing, and job monitoring, making it particularly eye-catching for businesses wanting to settle their tech pile.
Generally, it just worked reliably with marginal difficulty or maintenance needed. My open and click-through prices were wonderful (like 35% fantastic). Automations ran smoothly with no concerns.
So why on earth was I lured to uproot my entire operational structure from a system that worked to attempt something unproven and untried?
In hindsight I can admit I got attracted by the alarm call of “shiny things syndrome”. You understand the feeling: when everybody’s speaking about a brand-new device that will certainly revolutionize your company … The grass commonly looks greener beyond, and I asked yourself whether GoHighLevel may decrease rubbing factors that I ‘d discovered to tolerate over the years with Keap.
I stood up to at first, yet a couple of even more stress led me to think perhaps it was time for an adjustment.
The Financial investment: Moving My Firm to GoHighLevel
Previously this year I chose to take the plunge. I enrolled in HighLevel’s Firm plan at $297/month, spending substantially more than the $97/month starter expense.
This had not been a decision I took lightly. I knew changing platforms was mosting likely to need moving all my Keap data and essentially reconstructing my entire technology framework from scratch making use of every one of the GoHighLevel integrations offered.
Right here’s an introduction of simply a few of the initiative required:
- Manually exporting 20,000+ e-mail customer documents
- Recreating loads of automations and workflows
- Relocating client accounts, notes, and project information to the new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe invoicing integration
- Setting up landing pages, promotions, and sales funnels all over again
- Learning a completely international UX and user interface layout
Done in, I spent around 30-40 tedious hours of configuration job transitioning whatever over– not to mention handling lost performance during the switch.
However inevitably, it was a computed financial investment I agreed to make. I figured some short-term discomfort would repay with GoHighLevel providing a better long-term option for my service, Dripify. Oh how wrong I was …
It just took me concerning a month of hands-on use to understand I had actually made a big mistake. The concerns started accumulating quickly, till it reached a point I needed to reduce my losses and change back to Keap totally.
Let’s go through the nightmarish issues I encountered.
Protection Issues & Numerous Bugs
Provided GoHighLevel positioned itself as an all-in-one automation platform, I took care to meticulously recreate each and every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These included series for onboarding brand-new email customers, onboarding brand-new customers, automating follow-ups for webinar enrollments, sending out occasion pointers, managing subscription expirations and a lot more.
Whatever seemed to be functioning fine … up until unexpectedly it had not been. One morning, I woke up to discover 171 entirely pointless emails had actually been sent out to users that must NOT have gotten them. This occurred 3 days straight, with a various set of 160 people every day.
I desperately attempted troubleshooting and reconstructing the automation from scratch. However the issue persisted.
When I seriously reached out to their support team, they vaguely asserted “web server issues” were responsible. However this explanation didn’t make any feeling, because the mistakes continued taking place each morning like clockwork unrelated to any kind of downtime.
In my mind, this enormous failing was entirely undesirable and simply really did not help my organization. I have thousands of contacts counting on my automated campaigns running efficiently.
So if GoHighLevel was mosting likely to be absolutely undependable, how could I delegate mission-critical workflows and delicate customer information to their modern technology?
The unintuitive interface just intensified these problems …
Discouraging UX
Coming from Keap where everything was smooth and instinctive, GoHighLevel’s learning curve felt high and challenging.
Easy jobs like editing and enhancing workflows entailed digging via food selection systems that were all over the place. Key settings were unexplainably spread in completely different areas. Moving between functions really felt disjointed or confusing.
I’ll tell you what I mean by talking about their funnel builder as an instance. There were 3 separate setups panels to take care of general, private, and item arrangements. Yet for some crazy factor, the web links to accessibility each of these core setups were spread out on contrary sides of the display. What!?
As somebody that values clean, thoughtful design, this seriously annoyed me.
It reinforced that GoHighLevel still felt like a work-in-progress as opposed to a sleek product ready for prime-time usage. Their concerns seemed focused on stuffing in every feature imaginable, with poor use as an afterthought.
And talking features, I quickly recognized the low cost tag came with expensive concessions …
Misleading Pricing GoHighLevel Tasks
Among GoHighLevel’s greatest marketing points is the budget-friendly price for accessibility to so many features. Yet I quickly learned this cheap base expense was deceitful.
They nickle-and-dimed individuals with sporadic fees for core performance. Unexpectedly my bank card declarations had obscure $10 charges from GoHighLevel here and there.
As it ended up, you get billed whenever you send an email via their web servers. So for high quantity users, this added up to numerous dollars in unexpected prices.
In between these per-email charges and paying extra for deliverability attachments like Mailgun, my “affordable” GoHighLevel membership wound up costing considerably MORE than my Keap plan.
The low price tag was alluring, but just not sensible in practice. This bait-and-switch left a poor taste in my mouth.
Email Fees Suffered
The last dealbreaker was seeing my very carefully supported email open rates plummet nearly over night after switching to GoHighLevel.
Previously, my audience interaction regularly struck 35-40% open prices in Keap month after month. Once I moved their records over to GoHighLevel, performance tanked instantly to a pathetic 9% open price.
Regardless of how much I maximized my sending out practices or tried every fixing trick, I could hardly push open prices back right into the teens– still a 50%+ decrease from my previous criteria GoHighLevel Tasks.
Let me repeat: my exact same target market and emails unexpectedly had awful involvement. The only point I can believe that would certainly be triggering this was whatever was happening behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a company so depending on e-mail marketing, this was a big deal.
In between the crippling deliverability problems, hidden charges, damaged features, and dreadful user interface, I had finally reached my limit …
Why I Give up GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Simply 45 days after migrating my firm to GoHighLevel, I understood I had made a huge mistake. The cons drastically exceeded any advantages.
No software is ideal, but the sheer quantity of troubles was beyond appropriate.
At the end of the day, software application comes down to trust fund. If I can not trust it to deal with essential functions effectively or believe a supplier has my benefits in mind, then it’s time to walk away– also after spending considerable time, cash, and effort moving.
So I made the hard call to reverse program and return back to Keap totally just weeks after going all in on GoHighLevel. Allow’s discover what I learned from this fiasco.
Trick Takeaways: What I Gained from My GoHighLevel Mistake
My time with HighLevel can be summed up as a pricey misadventure. Yet in hindsight, it taught me a couple of crucial lessons:
- Stick to what works. Don’t disturb what’s functioning unless something is definitively better across the board. Adjustment brings risk.
- Veterinarian asserts completely. Marketing hype around brand-new software usually obscures bigger underlying flaws. Deep due persistance is important.
- Choose simpleness over features. Well-designed devices should make your work life less complicated, not a lot more difficult and unpleasant.
- Openness builds trust. Nontransparent pricing, shady reseller terms, and finger-pointing to escape problems destroys depend on.
- Look for objective testimonials. Delighted assistance evaluates imply less if too much problems suggest inadequate overall usability.
- Perfection is impossible. No single service can flawlessly meet every one-of-a-kind service need. Discover the least-bad fit.
- Advancement over change. Incremental renovations usually outweigh risky wholesale reinvention of what already works fine.
In other words, I learned to be more doubtful of “too excellent to be real” marketing insurance claims and less attracted by the attraction of shiny brand-new objects. The devices you use daily should make depend on through openness and efficiency, not glossy advertising.