As an agency owner for over a decade, I count on software program and automation to improve procedures and provide outcomes. So when GoHighLevel emerged on the scene couple of years back, it certainly caught my focus GoHighLevel Templates.
The idea was appealing– an all-in-one customer administration system with marketing, sales, and service tools integrated together. As a business owner constantly wanting to streamline and scale my service, it appeared like a desire happened on paper. Who would not desire a solitary solution that does it all?
Yet in this in-depth GoHighLevel evaluation, I’ll take you inside my dreadful trip of attempting (and falling short) to switch over to this preferred brand-new software program. You’ll discover:
If you’re thinking about whether GoHighLevel is right for your very own organization requirements, hopefully you can pick up from my agonizing mistakes and blew up assumptions.
Looter: I do NOT recommend GoHighLevel. If you need a CRM, start with this checklist of finest CRMs instead. I utilize Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re trying to find a sales, marketing, and project monitoring choice to GoHighLevel, after that below are a couple of we suggest.
Backstory: Why I Considered Switching Over from Keap
To recognize what attracted me to GoHighLevel to begin with, you require context about my previous setup. For over 5 years I had been gladly depending on Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) to fulfill all my customer monitoring and automation needs.
I discovered Keap instinctive to use and it took care of everything I required– CRM, e-mail marketing, sales funnels, membership websites, and customer assistance.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are designed to assist local business keep their clients while adding brand-new ones easily. Automate follow-ups with emails and texts, making certain leads and customers receive the ideal messages at the correct time. Usage internet site and social media types to enhance lead follow-up, and handle your growth with easy consultation organizing and lead monitoring. Boost sales with automated pricing quote, invoicing, and payment processing, maximizing your time. With Keap, local business can save 10 hours per week and increase revenue by 39%. Start with a 14-day free trial, no bank card required.
Why we like Keap
Keap supplies an extensive customer connection management (CRM) and marketing automation solution customized for small companies and business owners. We value Keap’s concentrate on simplifying sales processes and supporting customer relationships through powerful automation devices. The platform’s all-in-one technique combines CRM, e-mail marketing, invoicing, and job monitoring, making it specifically appealing for services wanting to combine their tech pile.
Generally, it simply worked accurately with minimal hassle or upkeep required. My open and click-through prices were excellent (like 35% terrific). Automations ran smoothly without issues.
So why in the world was I attracted to uproot my whole operational foundation from a system that worked to try something unproven and untested?
In knowledge I can confess I got seduced by the siren call of “glossy things disorder”. You understand the feeling: when everyone’s speaking about a brand-new device that will transform your company … The grass usually looks greener on the other side, and I questioned whether GoHighLevel could reduce rubbing points that I would certainly found out to endure for many years with Keap.
I resisted at first, however a few more aggravations led me to think perhaps it was time for an adjustment.
The Investment: Moving My Agency to GoHighLevel
Previously this year I made a decision to take the plunge. I registered for HighLevel’s Company plan at $297/month, spending significantly more than the $97/month starter expense.
This had not been a decision I took lightly. I knew changing platforms was going to call for migrating all my Keap information and basically reconstructing my entire tech facilities from the ground up using all of the GoHighLevel integrations offered.
Below’s an introduction of just a few of the effort required:
- Manually exporting 20,000+ e-mail customer records
- Recreating dozens of automations and workflows
- Moving client profiles, notes, and task data to the new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe invoicing integration
- Setting up landing pages, promos, and sales funnels around again
- Learning a completely foreign UX and user interface layout
Done in, I spent around 30-40 tedious hours of arrangement work transitioning everything over– in addition to dealing with shed efficiency during the switch.
But eventually, it was a computed investment I wanted to make. I figured some temporary discomfort would pay off with GoHighLevel providing a far better long-term remedy for my organization, Dripify. Oh just how incorrect I was …
It only took me concerning a month of hands-on usage to understand I had actually made a big error. The problems began piling up swiftly, until it got to a point I needed to reduce my losses and switch over back to Keap completely.
Let’s walk through the horrible problems I ran into.
Security Issues & Lots of Bugs
Offered GoHighLevel positioned itself as an all-in-one automation platform, I made sure to meticulously recreate each and every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These consisted of series for onboarding new e-mail clients, onboarding new clients, automating follow-ups for webinar registrations, sending out occasion reminders, taking care of subscription expiries and far more.
Everything seemed to be operating fine … up until instantly it wasn’t. One early morning, I awoke to discover 171 totally pointless emails had been sent out to customers that ought to NOT have received them. This took place three days in a row, with a different set of 160 people every day.
I frantically attempted repairing and rebuilding the automation from scratch. However the issue persisted.
When I seriously reached out to their support group, they slightly asserted “server issues” were to blame. However this explanation didn’t make any type of feeling, considering that the errors continued taking place each early morning like clockwork unrelated to any kind of downtime.
In my mind, this substantial failure was entirely undesirable and just really did not work for my business. I have thousands of contacts relying on my automated campaigns running smoothly.
So if GoHighLevel was mosting likely to be totally unstable, exactly how could I entrust mission-critical workflows and delicate customer information to their innovation?
The unintuitive interface only intensified these issues …
Aggravating UX
Coming from Keap where every little thing was smooth and intuitive, GoHighLevel’s learning contour really felt steep and complicated.
Simple tasks like editing and enhancing workflows involved excavating via menu systems that were all over the place. Trick settings were unexplainably spread in entirely various sections. Relocating in between functions felt disjointed or complex.
I’ll inform you what I indicate by talking about their funnel builder as an example. There were 3 separate settings panels to take care of total, individual, and product arrangements. Yet for some insane reason, the links to gain access to each of these core setups were expanded on contrary sides of the screen. What!?
As somebody who values tidy, thoughtful design, this seriously annoyed me.
It reinforced that GoHighLevel still seemed like a work-in-progress as opposed to a refined item prepared for prime-time usage. Their concerns seemed focused on cramming in every feature under the sun, with inadequate functionality as a second thought.
And speaking of features, I quickly realized the low cost tag featured expensive concessions …
Deceptive Pricing GoHighLevel Templates
One of GoHighLevel’s greatest marketing factors is the economical rate for accessibility to so many features. But I quickly discovered this cheap base price was deceptive.
They nickle-and-dimed users with occasional costs for core functionality. Unexpectedly my credit card declarations had obscure $10 fees from GoHighLevel here and there.
As it ended up, you get billed every time you send out an email through their web servers. So for high quantity customers, this added up to thousands of dollars in unforeseen prices.
Between these per-email costs and paying additional for deliverability add-ons like Mailgun, my “budget-friendly” GoHighLevel membership wound up costing significantly MORE than my Keap plan.
The low sticker price was tempting, yet just not sensible in practice. This bait-and-switch left a negative preference in my mouth.
Email Rates Suffered
The final dealbreaker was seeing my carefully supported e-mail open rates drop almost over night after switching over to GoHighLevel.
Previously, my audience engagement regularly hit 35-40% open prices in Keap month after month. Once I migrated their records over to GoHighLevel, performance tanked instantaneously to a useless 9% open rate.
Despite just how much I maximized my sending techniques or attempted every repairing trick, I could hardly push open prices back right into the teenagers– still a 50%+ decrease from my previous standards GoHighLevel Templates.
Let me repeat: my exact same audience and e-mails unexpectedly had awful engagement. The only thing I might think that would be triggering this was whatever was taking place behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For an agency so dependent on email marketing, this was a big deal.
In between the debilitating deliverability problems, concealed fees, broken features, and awful interface, I had ultimately reached my limit …
Why I Quit GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Simply 45 days after migrating my firm to GoHighLevel, I recognized I had made a significant mistake. The disadvantages substantially outweighed any kind of benefits.
No software program is ideal, however the sheer quantity of problems was beyond appropriate.
At the end of the day, software application boils down to trust. If I can’t trust it to manage vital features capably or think a supplier has my best interests in mind, after that it’s time to walk away– also after spending significant time, money, and effort moving.
So I made the difficult call to turn around training course and return back to Keap completely just weeks after going done in on GoHighLevel. Let’s explore what I picked up from this fiasco.
Secret Takeaways: What I Learned From My GoHighLevel Mistake
My time with HighLevel can be summarized as an expensive ill fortune. Yet in hindsight, it educated me a few essential lessons:
- Stay with what jobs. Do not upset what’s working unless something is definitively better across the board. Modification brings danger.
- Vet declares completely. Marketing hype around brand-new software application commonly covers bigger underlying defects. Deep due diligence is important.
- Pick simpleness over features. Properly designed devices should make your job life much easier, not extra complex and unpleasant.
- Openness builds trust. Nontransparent pricing, shady reseller terms, and finger-pointing to avert issues ruins depend on.
- Look for objective reviews. Pleased support assesses indicate less if too much concerns suggest poor general use.
- Excellence is difficult. No single remedy can completely fulfill every unique business requirement. Find the least-bad fit.
- Advancement over transformation. Incremental renovations commonly outweigh high-risk wholesale reinvention of what currently functions fine.
Basically, I found out to be extra cynical of “too great to be real” marketing claims and much less attracted by the attraction of glossy new things. The devices you make use of daily should gain trust via transparency and efficiency, not glossy advertising.