As a firm owner for over a years, I depend on software program and automation to improve operations and supply outcomes. So when GoHighLevel arised on the scene few years back, it certainly caught my interest GoHighLevel Terms and Conditions.
The idea was attractive– an all-in-one client management system with marketing, sales, and solution devices integrated with each other. As an entrepreneur constantly looking to streamline and scale my company, it felt like a desire come true theoretically. That would not desire a single remedy that does it all?
Yet in this in-depth GoHighLevel evaluation, I’ll take you inside my devastating journey of attempting (and failing) to switch over to this popular new software program. You’ll learn:
If you’re considering whether GoHighLevel is right for your own business requirements, hopefully you can learn from my excruciating blunders and blew up expectations.
Looter: I do NOT recommend GoHighLevel. If you need a CRM, begin with this list of ideal CRMs instead. I make use of Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re searching for a sales, marketing, and job monitoring option to GoHighLevel, after that right here are a few we advise.
Backstory: Why I Took Into Consideration Switching Over from Keap
To comprehend what attracted me to GoHighLevel to begin with, you need context about my previous configuration. For over 5 years I had actually been happily relying on Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) to fulfill all my client management and automation needs.
I discovered Keap instinctive to use and it handled every little thing I required– CRM, email marketing, sales funnels, subscription websites, and client assistance.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are created to aid small businesses maintain their clients while adding new ones easily. Automate follow-ups with emails and messages, ensuring leads and clients receive the best messages at the right time. Usage web site and social media forms to streamline lead follow-up, and handle your development with very easy appointment scheduling and lead monitoring. Boost sales with automated pricing quote, invoicing, and payment processing, freeing up your time. With Keap, local business can save 10 hours each week and rise income by 39%. Begin with a 14-day free trial, no credit card called for.
Why we like Keap
Keap provides a thorough consumer partnership monitoring (CRM) and marketing automation option tailored for local business and business owners. We value Keap’s focus on enhancing sales processes and nurturing consumer relationships with powerful automation tools. The system’s all-in-one strategy combines CRM, e-mail marketing, invoicing, and task management, making it especially appealing for companies looking to settle their technology pile.
For the most part, it just worked reliably with marginal fuss or upkeep called for. My open and click-through prices were terrific (like 35% wonderful). Automations ran smoothly without issues.
So why on earth was I tempted to uproot my whole functional structure from a system that functioned to try something unproven and untried?
In knowledge I can confess I got seduced by the siren phone call of “glossy item disorder”. You recognize the feeling: when everyone’s speaking about a brand-new device that will certainly change your organization … The lawn frequently looks greener on the other side, and I wondered whether GoHighLevel may decrease rubbing points that I ‘d discovered to tolerate over the years with Keap.
I withstood in the beginning, yet a couple of more stress led me to think perhaps it was time for a change.
The Investment: Moving My Agency to GoHighLevel
Earlier this year I made a decision to start. I enrolled in HighLevel’s Company plan at $297/month, investing dramatically more than the $97/month starter price.
This had not been a choice I ignored. I knew switching over systems was mosting likely to need moving all my Keap information and basically reconstructing my whole tech facilities from square one using every one of the GoHighLevel integrations readily available.
Here’s a review of just a few of the initiative called for:
- Manually exporting 20,000+ email customer documents
- Recreating loads of automations and workflows
- Relocating client profiles, notes, and project information to the brand-new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe billing integration
- Establishing landing pages, promotions, and sales funnels throughout once more
- Learning a completely international UX and user interface design
All in, I spent around 30-40 laborious hours of arrangement job transitioning every little thing over– and also handling lost efficiency during the button.
Yet ultimately, it was a computed investment I was willing to make. I figured some temporary pain would pay off with GoHighLevel giving a far better long-lasting remedy for my company, Dripify. Oh just how incorrect I was …
It only took me regarding a month of hands-on use to understand I had actually made a big mistake. The problems started piling up quickly, up until it reached a factor I had to cut my losses and switch back to Keap completely.
Allow’s walk through the horrible problems I ran into.
Security Issues & Many Bugs
Provided GoHighLevel positioned itself as an all-in-one automation platform, I took care to carefully recreate every workflow from my old Keap account.
These included sequences for onboarding brand-new email subscribers, onboarding new customers, automating follow-ups for webinar registrations, sending out occasion suggestions, managing membership expiries and far more.
Every little thing appeared to be functioning fine … until suddenly it wasn’t. One morning, I woke up to discover 171 completely unimportant emails had actually been sent out to customers who need to NOT have actually gotten them. This happened three days in a row, with a various set of 160 individuals daily.
I desperately tried fixing and reconstructing the automation from the ground up. But the trouble lingered.
When I seriously reached out to their support team, they slightly claimed “web server issues” were responsible. But this explanation didn’t make any type of sense, because the mistakes proceeded taking place each early morning like clockwork unassociated to any type of downtime.
In my mind, this huge failing was entirely undesirable and simply didn’t work for my organization. I have thousands of calls relying upon my automated campaigns running efficiently.
So if GoHighLevel was mosting likely to be absolutely unreliable, how could I turn over mission-critical workflows and sensitive client data to their innovation?
The unintuitive user interface only worsened these problems …
Aggravating UX
Originating from Keap where every little thing was smooth and instinctive, GoHighLevel’s learning contour really felt steep and challenging.
Simple tasks like modifying workflows entailed digging through menu systems that were all over the place. Key setups were unexplainably scattered in absolutely various sections. Relocating in between functions felt disjointed or complex.
I’ll inform you what I imply by talking about their funnel builder as an example. There were 3 separate settings panels to manage general, specific, and product configurations. Yet for some insane reason, the web links to accessibility each of these core setups were expanded on opposite sides of the screen. What!?
As somebody who values tidy, thoughtful design, this seriously frustrated me.
It reinforced that GoHighLevel still felt like a work-in-progress as opposed to a sleek product prepared for prime-time usage. Their concerns seemed concentrated on packing in every feature under the sun, with bad use as a second thought.
And speaking of features, I quickly understood the affordable price tag came with costly compromises …
Misleading Pricing GoHighLevel Terms and Conditions
Among GoHighLevel’s greatest marketing points is the budget-friendly price for access to a lot of features. Yet I rapidly discovered this inexpensive base price was deceitful.
They nickle-and-dimed customers with sporadic charges for core performance. Instantly my charge card declarations had obscure $10 charges from GoHighLevel here and there.
As it turned out, you obtain charged every single time you send an email via their web servers. So for high volume users, this amounted to thousands of dollars in unexpected prices.
Between these per-email fees and paying extra for deliverability attachments like Mailgun, my “affordable” GoHighLevel registration wound up setting you back substantially MORE than my Keap plan.
The reduced sticker price was appealing, but just not practical in practice. This bait-and-switch left a negative preference in my mouth.
Email Rates Suffered
The last dealbreaker was seeing my carefully supported e-mail open rates drop practically over night after changing to GoHighLevel.
Formerly, my target market interaction continually hit 35-40% open rates in Keap month after month. Once I moved their documents over to GoHighLevel, efficiency tanked promptly to a useless 9% open rate.
Regardless of just how much I optimized my sending out practices or attempted every repairing trick, I might hardly nudge open rates back right into the teenagers– still a 50%+ decrease from my previous benchmarks GoHighLevel Terms and Conditions.
Let me repeat: my exact same audience and e-mails all of a sudden had horrible involvement. The only point I can believe that would be creating this was whatever was occurring behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a company so depending on e-mail marketing, this was a big deal.
Between the debilitating deliverability concerns, hidden fees, broken features, and awful user interface, I had actually finally reached my limit …
Why I Give up GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Just 45 days after migrating my firm to GoHighLevel, I knew I had actually made a massive blunder. The cons considerably exceeded any kind of advantages.
No software is perfect, but the sheer quantity of troubles was past acceptable.
At the end of the day, software comes down to trust fund. If I can not trust it to handle critical features capably or believe a vendor has my best interests in mind, after that it’s time to leave– also after spending significant time, cash, and effort moving.
So I made the tough contact us to turn around program and return back to Keap completely simply weeks after going done in on GoHighLevel. Let’s discover what I learned from this debacle.
Key Takeaways: What I Learned From My GoHighLevel Error
My time with HighLevel can be summed up as a pricey misadventure. But in hindsight, it educated me a few crucial lessons:
- Stay with what jobs. Do not disturb what’s functioning unless something is definitively much better across the board. Modification brings risk.
- Veterinarian asserts completely. Marketing buzz around brand-new software usually obscures bigger underlying flaws. Deep due diligence is important.
- Pick simpleness over features. Well-designed tools ought to make your job life simpler, not much more complex and messy.
- Transparency develops trust fund. Opaque pricing, questionable reseller terms, and finger-pointing to escape problems damages depend on.
- Look for unbiased evaluations. Pleased support examines indicate less if extreme issues indicate bad overall use.
- Perfection is impossible. No solitary service can perfectly satisfy every unique service demand. Discover the least-bad fit.
- Evolution over transformation. Incremental improvements generally outweigh dangerous wholesale reinvention of what currently works penalty.
Basically, I learned to be more hesitant of “as well good to be real” marketing claims and much less lured by the appeal of shiny new objects. The tools you utilize daily should gain trust via transparency and efficiency, not slick advertising.