As a firm proprietor for over a years, I rely on software program and automation to improve operations and supply outcomes. So when GoHighLevel emerged on the scene couple of years back, it certainly captured my attention GoHighLevel Test Card.
The concept was enticing– an all-in-one customer management system with marketing, sales, and service tools integrated together. As a business owner always seeking to simplify and scale my business, it felt like a desire come true theoretically. Who would not want a solitary service that does it all?
However in this extensive GoHighLevel review, I’ll take you inside my dreadful journey of trying (and stopping working) to change to this popular new software. You’ll learn:
If you’re taking into consideration whether GoHighLevel is right for your very own organization needs, hopefully you can learn from my uncomfortable mistakes and pumped up assumptions.
Looter: I do NOT advise GoHighLevel. If you require a CRM, begin with this checklist of best CRMs rather. I make use of Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re looking for a sales, marketing, and project administration alternative to GoHighLevel, after that here are a couple of we advise.
Backstory: Why I Took Into Consideration Switching Over from Keap
To comprehend what attracted me to GoHighLevel in the first place, you require context concerning my previous arrangement. For over 5 years I had been gladly relying upon Keap (previously Infusionsoft) to satisfy all my customer administration and automation needs.
I discovered Keap intuitive to use and it dealt with whatever I needed– CRM, email marketing, sales funnels, subscription sites, and customer support.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are made to assist small companies maintain their clients while adding brand-new ones effortlessly. Automate follow-ups with e-mails and messages, ensuring leads and customers receive the best messages at the correct time. Usage site and social networks forms to improve lead follow-up, and manage your development with very easy appointment organizing and lead tracking. Boost sales with automated estimating, invoicing, and settlement handling, liberating your time. With Keap, local business can save 10 hours each week and rise income by 39%. Beginning with a 14-day free trial, no bank card called for.
Why we like Keap
Keap provides a comprehensive client relationship monitoring (CRM) and marketing automation solution tailored for small businesses and business owners. We appreciate Keap’s focus on enhancing sales procedures and supporting consumer relationships through powerful automation devices. The system’s all-in-one method integrates CRM, e-mail marketing, invoicing, and task monitoring, making it particularly attractive for companies wanting to combine their technology pile.
Essentially, it just functioned dependably with minimal hassle or maintenance required. My open and click-through prices were excellent (like 35% wonderful). Automations ran efficiently without any issues.
So why in the world was I attracted to uproot my whole operational structure from a system that functioned to try something unverified and untested?
In hindsight I can admit I got attracted by the alarm phone call of “shiny things syndrome”. You recognize the sensation: when everyone’s speaking about a new tool that will certainly revolutionize your organization … The grass typically looks greener on the other side, and I questioned whether GoHighLevel might lower rubbing points that I would certainly found out to tolerate throughout the years with Keap.
I resisted initially, however a couple of even more irritations led me to believe possibly it was time for an adjustment.
The Financial investment: Migrating My Agency to GoHighLevel
Earlier this year I made a decision to start. I signed up for HighLevel’s Agency plan at $297/month, spending substantially greater than the $97/month starter price.
This wasn’t a choice I ignored. I understood switching over systems was going to require moving all my Keap data and basically rebuilding my entire technology framework from square one utilizing every one of the GoHighLevel integrations offered.
Below’s an introduction of simply several of the effort needed:
- Manually exporting 20,000+ e-mail subscriber documents
- Recreating dozens of automations and workflows
- Moving client profiles, notes, and task data to the new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe billing integration
- Establishing landing pages, promos, and sales funnels throughout once more
- Learning a completely foreign UX and user interface layout
All in, I spent around 30-40 tedious hours of configuration work transitioning every little thing over– in addition to taking care of shed productivity throughout the button.
Yet ultimately, it was a computed financial investment I was willing to make. I figured some temporary discomfort would certainly pay off with GoHighLevel providing a far better lasting remedy for my business, Dripify. Oh how incorrect I was …
It only took me concerning a month of hands-on use to understand I had actually made a big error. The problems started accumulating quickly, until it got to a factor I needed to cut my losses and switch over back to Keap totally.
Let’s walk through the horrible problems I encountered.
Safety Issues & Many Bugs
Provided GoHighLevel positioned itself as an all-in-one automation platform, I made sure to thoroughly recreate every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These included sequences for onboarding new e-mail customers, onboarding new customers, automating follow-ups for webinar registrations, sending event pointers, managing subscription expiries and a lot more.
Everything appeared to be functioning penalty … up until all of a sudden it wasn’t. One morning, I woke up to find 171 completely unnecessary emails had been sent out to individuals who need to NOT have gotten them. This took place 3 days straight, with a different set of 160 individuals daily.
I anxiously attempted repairing and rebuilding the automation from scratch. However the problem persisted.
When I frantically reached out to their assistance team, they vaguely declared “web server issues” were responsible. However this description really did not make any kind of feeling, since the mistakes proceeded taking place each morning like clockwork unassociated to any type of downtime.
In my mind, this substantial failure was entirely inappropriate and just really did not benefit my organization. I have thousands of calls counting on my automated campaigns running smoothly.
So if GoHighLevel was going to be completely unreliable, how could I delegate mission-critical workflows and sensitive client data to their modern technology?
The unintuitive user interface just intensified these concerns …
Discouraging UX
Coming from Keap where every little thing was seamless and user-friendly, GoHighLevel’s learning contour really felt high and challenging.
Basic tasks like editing workflows included digging through menu systems that were all over the place. Trick setups were unexplainably scattered in absolutely various areas. Relocating between features really felt disjointed or complex.
I’ll inform you what I suggest by talking about their funnel builder as an instance. There were 3 different settings panels to handle general, individual, and item setups. Yet for some crazy reason, the links to accessibility each of these core setups were spread out on contrary sides of the screen. What!?
As a person that values tidy, thoughtful layout, this seriously annoyed me.
It strengthened that GoHighLevel still seemed like a work-in-progress rather than a refined product all set for prime-time usage. Their priorities seemed focused on packing in every feature under the sun, with bad functionality as a second thought.
And talking features, I soon understood the small cost tag included expensive compromises …
Misleading Pricing GoHighLevel Test Card
Among GoHighLevel’s biggest marketing points is the budget friendly cost for access to many features. However I rapidly discovered this low-cost base expense was deceptive.
They nickle-and-dimed individuals with erratic fees for core functionality. Unexpectedly my charge card declarations had obscure $10 costs from GoHighLevel here and there.
As it ended up, you obtain charged every single time you send out an e-mail via their web servers. So for high quantity individuals, this added up to thousands of dollars in unexpected expenses.
Between these per-email costs and paying additional for deliverability add-ons like Mailgun, my “inexpensive” GoHighLevel registration ended up costing dramatically greater than my Keap plan.
The reduced sticker price was appealing, however just not practical in practice. This bait-and-switch left a negative taste in my mouth.
Email Fees Suffered
The last dealbreaker was seeing my carefully supported e-mail open rates plunge nearly over night after changing to GoHighLevel.
Previously, my audience involvement consistently hit 35-40% open prices in Keap month after month. Once I migrated their records over to GoHighLevel, efficiency tanked immediately to a pitiful 9% open rate.
Regardless of just how much I enhanced my sending out methods or tried every troubleshooting method, I can barely nudge open rates back into the teenagers– still a 50%+ decrease from my previous standards GoHighLevel Test Card.
Let me repeat: my exact same target market and e-mails instantly had horrible engagement. The only thing I could think that would be triggering this was whatever was taking place behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For an agency so based on email marketing, this was a big deal.
In between the crippling deliverability issues, hidden charges, busted features, and horrible interface, I had actually finally reached my limit …
Why I Give up GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Simply 45 days after migrating my company to GoHighLevel, I understood I had actually made a substantial blunder. The cons drastically surpassed any type of benefits.
No software application is best, but the sheer quantity of troubles was past acceptable.
At the end of the day, software application boils down to trust. If I can not trust it to manage crucial functions capably or think a supplier has my benefits in mind, then it’s time to walk away– even after investing substantial time, money, and effort migrating.
So I made the tough contact us to turn around training course and return back to Keap completely simply weeks after going done in on GoHighLevel. Let’s explore what I learned from this fiasco.
Key Takeaways: What I Gained from My GoHighLevel Mistake
My time with HighLevel can be summarized as an expensive accident. But in hindsight, it educated me a couple of essential lessons:
- Adhere to what jobs. Don’t disturb what’s functioning unless something is definitively better across the board. Change brings danger.
- Veterinarian asserts thoroughly. Marketing buzz around brand-new software program frequently obscures larger underlying defects. Deep due persistance is crucial.
- Pick simpleness over features. Properly designed devices should make your job life simpler, not more complex and unpleasant.
- Openness constructs count on. Opaque pricing, questionable reseller terms, and finger-pointing to evade troubles destroys count on.
- Seek impartial reviews. Happy support reviews imply much less if extreme issues suggest bad general use.
- Perfection is impossible. No single service can completely meet every one-of-a-kind service need. Find the least-bad fit.
- Development over transformation. Incremental improvements normally outweigh risky wholesale reinvention of what currently works fine.
In other words, I found out to be extra hesitant of “too great to be real” marketing cases and much less attracted by the attraction of shiny new items. The devices you utilize daily need to make trust fund with transparency and performance, not glossy advertising.