As a company proprietor for over a years, I rely upon software application and automation to improve operations and supply outcomes. So when GoHighLevel emerged on the scene couple of years back, it most definitely caught my attention GoHighLevel Testimonials.
The concept was attractive– an all-in-one client management system with marketing, sales, and service tools incorporated with each other. As a business owner constantly seeking to simplify and scale my company, it seemed like a dream happened on paper. Who would not want a single option that does it all?
Yet in this in-depth GoHighLevel testimonial, I’ll take you inside my devastating journey of trying (and stopping working) to switch to this prominent brand-new software application. You’ll learn:
If you’re taking into consideration whether GoHighLevel is right for your very own service demands, hopefully you can learn from my excruciating errors and blew up assumptions.
Spoiler: I do NOT recommend GoHighLevel. If you need a CRM, begin with this checklist of best CRMs instead. I use Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re trying to find a sales, marketing, and task monitoring option to GoHighLevel, then below are a couple of we advise.
Backstory: Why I Took Into Consideration Changing from Keap
To understand what attracted me to GoHighLevel in the first place, you require context concerning my previous setup. For over 5 years I had actually been gladly counting on Keap (previously Infusionsoft) to satisfy all my client management and automation needs.
I located Keap intuitive to utilize and it handled everything I required– CRM, email marketing, sales funnels, membership sites, and customer assistance.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are created to aid small businesses maintain their clients while adding brand-new ones easily. Automate follow-ups with emails and texts, making certain leads and customers obtain the appropriate messages at the right time. Usage site and social media sites forms to simplify lead follow-up, and manage your growth with very easy appointment organizing and lead tracking. Boost sales with automated pricing estimate, invoicing, and settlement processing, freeing up your time. With Keap, small businesses can save 10 hours weekly and rise earnings by 39%. Begin with a 14-day free trial, no credit card needed.
Why we like Keap
Keap uses an extensive customer relationship monitoring (CRM) and marketing automation service tailored for small companies and entrepreneurs. We appreciate Keap’s concentrate on streamlining sales processes and nurturing consumer partnerships through effective automation tools. The platform’s all-in-one strategy combines CRM, e-mail marketing, invoicing, and job administration, making it specifically eye-catching for businesses aiming to consolidate their technology stack.
Essentially, it simply functioned reliably with very little hassle or upkeep needed. My open and click-through rates were terrific (like 35% fantastic). Automations ran smoothly without problems.
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 hindsight I can confess I obtained attracted by the siren telephone call of “glossy object disorder”. You know the sensation: when everyone’s talking about a new tool that will certainly change your business … The lawn frequently looks greener beyond, and I asked yourself whether GoHighLevel might minimize friction factors that I would certainly found out to endure for many years with Keap.
I stood up to at first, yet a few more frustrations led me to believe maybe it was time for an adjustment.
The Investment: Moving My Company to GoHighLevel
Earlier this year I determined to take the plunge. I signed up for HighLevel’s Company plan at $297/month, investing considerably greater than the $97/month starter expense.
This had not been a choice I took lightly. I knew switching systems was mosting likely to require moving all my Keap data and basically rebuilding my entire technology framework from the ground up utilizing all of the GoHighLevel integrations offered.
Right here’s an introduction of simply a few of the effort called for:
- By hand exporting 20,000+ email customer records
- Recreating lots of automations and workflows
- Moving client profiles, 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 totally international UX and interface layout
All in, I spent around 30-40 tedious hours of setup job transitioning whatever over– and also dealing with lost efficiency throughout the switch.
Yet eventually, it was a calculated financial investment I wanted to make. I figured some short-term discomfort would settle with GoHighLevel offering a better long-term service for my business, Dripify. Oh just how wrong I was …
It only took me about a month of hands-on use to understand I had made a huge error. The issues began piling up rapidly, up until it reached a point I needed to reduce my losses and switch over back to Keap entirely.
Let’s walk through the nightmarish issues I experienced.
Protection Issues & Lots of Bugs
Given GoHighLevel positioned itself as an all-in-one automation system, I made sure to thoroughly recreate every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These consisted of series for onboarding brand-new email clients, onboarding new customers, automating follow-ups for webinar registrations, sending out occasion pointers, managing membership expirations and a lot more.
Every little thing seemed to be functioning penalty … till instantly it wasn’t. One early morning, I awoke to locate 171 completely pointless emails had actually been sent out to individuals that ought to NOT have received them. This occurred three days straight, with a various batch of 160 people daily.
I hysterically attempted troubleshooting and reconstructing the automation from the ground up. But the problem continued.
When I desperately reached out to their assistance team, they slightly declared “web server concerns” were at fault. However this description didn’t make any kind of feeling, given that the errors continued taking place each early morning like clockwork unrelated to any downtime.
In my mind, this huge failure was completely undesirable and simply really did not work for my company. I have countless contacts relying on my automated campaigns running smoothly.
So if GoHighLevel was going to be totally unreliable, exactly how could I delegate mission-critical workflows and delicate client information to their modern technology?
The unintuitive interface only intensified these problems …
Irritating UX
Coming from Keap where everything was seamless and intuitive, GoHighLevel’s learning curve felt steep and complex.
Simple tasks like modifying workflows involved digging with food selection systems that were all over the place. Trick settings were unexplainably scattered in absolutely different sections. Moving in between functions really felt disjointed or complex.
I’ll inform you what I mean by discussing their funnel builder as an instance. There were 3 separate setups panels to take care of overall, specific, and product setups. Yet for some crazy reason, the links to access each of these core settings were spread out on contrary sides of the screen. What!?
As someone that values tidy, thoughtful layout, this seriously upset me.
It strengthened that GoHighLevel still seemed like a work-in-progress as opposed to a refined item ready for prime-time use. Their priorities seemed concentrated on packing in every feature under the sun, with bad functionality as a second thought.
And speaking of features, I soon recognized the small cost tag featured expensive compromises …
Misleading Pricing GoHighLevel Testimonials
Among GoHighLevel’s greatest selling factors is the budget-friendly cost for accessibility to a lot of features. Yet I swiftly discovered this low-cost base price was misleading.
They nickle-and-dimed users with erratic costs for core capability. Instantly my charge card declarations had obscure $10 fees from GoHighLevel occasionally.
As it turned out, you get billed each time you send out an e-mail with their servers. So for high quantity individuals, this amounted to numerous dollars in unexpected costs.
Between these per-email fees and paying extra for deliverability attachments like Mailgun, my “inexpensive” GoHighLevel subscription ended up costing substantially greater than my Keap plan.
The reduced sticker price was tempting, but simply not sensible in practice. This bait-and-switch left a negative preference in my mouth.
Email Rates Suffered
The final dealbreaker was seeing my thoroughly supported email open prices plunge virtually overnight after changing to GoHighLevel.
Previously, my audience interaction regularly hit 35-40% open prices in Keap month after month. But once I moved their documents over to GoHighLevel, efficiency tanked instantaneously to a useless 9% open rate.
No matter how much I maximized my sending practices or tried every troubleshooting method, I might barely push open rates back right into the teens– still a 50%+ decrease from my previous criteria GoHighLevel Testimonials.
Let me repeat: my exact same target market and e-mails suddenly had horrible involvement. The only point I could believe that would be creating this was whatever was occurring behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For an agency so based on e-mail marketing, this was a big deal.
In between the crippling deliverability problems, concealed charges, damaged features, and terrible interface, I had actually ultimately reached my limit …
Why I Stop GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Simply 45 days after moving my company to GoHighLevel, I recognized I had actually made a massive error. The cons considerably outweighed any advantages.
No software is excellent, however the large quantity of problems was beyond acceptable.
At the end of the day, software comes down to depend on. If I can’t trust it to manage vital features properly or think a supplier has my benefits in mind, after that it’s time to walk away– even after spending significant time, cash, and initiative moving.
So I made the tough phone call to turn around program and return back to Keap entirely just weeks after going all in on GoHighLevel. Allow’s explore what I learned from this ordeal.
Trick Takeaways: What I Picked up from My GoHighLevel Error
My time with HighLevel can be summed up as an expensive ill fortune. Yet in hindsight, it taught me a couple of key lessons:
- Stay with what jobs. Don’t disturb what’s functioning unless something is definitively better across the board. Change brings risk.
- Vet asserts thoroughly. Marketing buzz around brand-new software application commonly covers bigger underlying problems. Deep due persistance is crucial.
- Select simpleness over features. Well-designed devices must make your work life easier, not extra complicated and unpleasant.
- Transparency constructs trust fund. Nontransparent pricing, questionable reseller terms, and finger-pointing to avert troubles ruins count on.
- Seek honest testimonials. Delighted support assesses imply less if excessive concerns indicate bad general functionality.
- Perfection is impossible. No single service can perfectly meet every special business need. Discover the least-bad fit.
- Development over transformation. Incremental improvements normally exceed dangerous wholesale reinvention of what already works penalty.
Basically, I discovered to be a lot more cynical of “also great to be real” marketing cases and much less lured by the attraction of glossy new objects. The tools you use daily should earn count on with transparency and efficiency, not slick advertising.