As an agency proprietor for over a years, I count on software application and automation to streamline procedures and provide results. So when GoHighLevel arised on the scene couple of years back, it most definitely caught my interest GoHighLevel Themes.
The concept was attractive– an all-in-one client monitoring platform with marketing, sales, and solution tools incorporated together. As an entrepreneur constantly aiming to streamline and scale my service, it appeared like a desire come to life theoretically. Who would not desire a solitary option that does it all?
However in this extensive GoHighLevel review, I’ll take you inside my dreadful journey of attempting (and failing) to change to this prominent new software application. You’ll discover:
If you’re taking into consideration whether GoHighLevel is right for your very own company needs, ideally you can gain from my excruciating mistakes and pumped up expectations.
Spoiler: I do NOT recommend GoHighLevel. If you need a CRM, begin with this listing of finest CRMs rather. I utilize Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re trying to find a sales, marketing, and task management choice 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 require context concerning my previous arrangement. For over 5 years I had been gladly relying on Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) to fulfill all my customer management and automation needs.
I found Keap user-friendly to utilize and it dealt with whatever I needed– CRM, e-mail marketing, sales funnels, membership sites, and client support.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are made to assist small companies keep their clients while adding brand-new ones effortlessly. Automate follow-ups with e-mails and texts, making sure leads and customers obtain the appropriate messages at the right time. Use internet site and social media kinds to improve lead follow-up, and manage your development with very easy appointment scheduling and lead tracking. Boost sales with automated quoting, invoicing, and settlement handling, maximizing your time. With Keap, small businesses can conserve 10 hours each week and boost income by 39%. Beginning with a 14-day free trial, no charge card required.
Why we like Keap
Keap uses a detailed customer partnership monitoring (CRM) and marketing automation remedy tailored for small businesses and business owners. We value Keap’s focus on simplifying sales procedures and nurturing consumer partnerships through effective automation tools. The system’s all-in-one technique incorporates CRM, email marketing, invoicing, and job administration, making it particularly attractive for businesses wanting to settle their technology stack.
For the most part, it just worked dependably with marginal hassle or upkeep called for. My open and click-through rates were great (like 35% wonderful). Automations ran efficiently with no problems.
So why in the world was I tempted to uproot my whole functional structure from a system that functioned to try something unverified and untried?
In hindsight I can admit I got seduced by the siren telephone call of “shiny object disorder”. You recognize the feeling: when everybody’s discussing a brand-new device that will certainly transform your organization … The grass often looks greener on the other side, and I questioned whether GoHighLevel might lower rubbing points that I ‘d learned to endure throughout the years with Keap.
I stood up to at first, however a few even more aggravations led me to think possibly it was time for a modification.
The Investment: Moving My Company to GoHighLevel
Earlier this year I chose to start. I enrolled in HighLevel’s Firm plan at $297/month, investing significantly more than the $97/month starter price.
This wasn’t a choice I ignored. I understood switching platforms was going to require moving all my Keap information and essentially rebuilding my entire technology infrastructure from scratch making use of all of the GoHighLevel integrations readily available.
Below’s a review of simply several of the effort needed:
- By hand exporting 20,000+ e-mail subscriber documents
- Recreating dozens of automations and workflows
- Moving customer profiles, notes, and project data to the brand-new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe payment integration
- Establishing landing pages, promotions, and sales funnels all over once again
- Learning a totally foreign UX and user interface style
All in, I spent around 30-40 tiresome hours of configuration work transitioning everything over– in addition to taking care of lost performance throughout the switch.
Yet inevitably, it was a computed investment I wanted to make. I figured some short-term discomfort would settle with GoHighLevel providing a better long-term option for my organization, Dripify. Oh just how incorrect I was …
It just took me about a month of hands-on usage to understand I had actually made a huge mistake. The problems started piling up promptly, up until it reached a factor I had to reduce my losses and switch over back to Keap entirely.
Allow’s walk through the horrible issues I experienced.
Security Issues & Numerous Vermin
Provided GoHighLevel placed itself as an all-in-one automation system, I made sure to carefully recreate every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These included series for onboarding new e-mail subscribers, onboarding new clients, automating follow-ups for webinar registrations, sending event tips, managing membership expirations and a lot more.
Whatever appeared to be operating penalty … up until all of a sudden it had not been. One morning, I woke up to discover 171 totally unimportant e-mails had been sent out to individuals who should NOT have received them. This took place 3 days in a row, with a various batch of 160 people every day.
I desperately attempted repairing and rebuilding the automation from square one. Yet the trouble persisted.
When I seriously connected to their support group, they vaguely claimed “server concerns” were to blame. Yet this explanation really did not make any feeling, because the mistakes continued happening each morning like clockwork unassociated to any downtime.
In my mind, this enormous failure was entirely unacceptable and simply really did not work for my service. I have hundreds of get in touches with depending on my automated campaigns running efficiently.
So if GoHighLevel was going to be totally unreliable, exactly how could I turn over mission-critical workflows and sensitive client information to their innovation?
The unintuitive interface just intensified these problems …
Aggravating UX
Originating from Keap where whatever was smooth and intuitive, GoHighLevel’s learning curve felt high and complicated.
Simple tasks like editing and enhancing workflows involved digging with food selection systems that were all over the place. Key setups were unexplainably spread in completely various sections. Relocating between features really felt disjointed or confusing.
I’ll tell you what I mean by talking about their funnel builder as an example. There were 3 separate settings panels to manage general, specific, and product arrangements. Yet for some crazy reason, the links to access each of these core settings were spread out on opposite sides of the display. What!?
As someone that values clean, thoughtful style, this seriously annoyed me.
It enhanced that GoHighLevel still felt like a work-in-progress as opposed to a refined product ready for prime-time use. Their top priorities appeared concentrated on packing in every feature imaginable, with inadequate use as a second thought.
And talking features, I soon recognized the low cost tag featured expensive concessions …
Misleading Pricing GoHighLevel Themes
Among GoHighLevel’s most significant marketing points is the economical price for accessibility to a lot of features. But I promptly discovered this cheap base price was misleading.
They nickle-and-dimed individuals with occasional costs for core functionality. Suddenly my charge card declarations had unclear $10 fees from GoHighLevel occasionally.
As it turned out, you get charged every time you send out an e-mail through their web servers. So for high quantity customers, this added up to thousands of bucks in unanticipated prices.
Between these per-email charges and paying extra for deliverability add-ons like Mailgun, my “affordable” GoHighLevel subscription wound up setting you back dramatically MORE than my Keap plan.
The reduced sticker price was appealing, however simply not realistic in practice. This bait-and-switch left a bad taste in my mouth.
Email Fees Suffered
The final dealbreaker was seeing my meticulously supported email open prices drop almost over night after switching over to GoHighLevel.
Formerly, my target market engagement consistently struck 35-40% open prices in Keap month after month. Once I migrated their records over to GoHighLevel, efficiency tanked instantaneously to a pitiful 9% open rate.
No matter how much I enhanced my sending practices or tried every repairing trick, I could barely push open rates back into the teens– still a 50%+ decrease from my previous standards GoHighLevel Themes.
Let me repeat: my exact same target market and emails unexpectedly had dreadful engagement. The only thing I could think that would certainly be causing this was whatever was happening behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a company so based on e-mail marketing, this was a big deal.
In between the debilitating deliverability issues, concealed charges, busted features, and dreadful interface, I had actually finally reached my restriction …
Why I Give up GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Just 45 days after moving my agency to GoHighLevel, I understood I had made a significant blunder. The cons dramatically outweighed any benefits.
No software is excellent, yet the large volume of troubles was beyond acceptable.
At the end of the day, software program boils down to count on. If I can not trust it to manage essential functions capably or think a vendor has my best interests in mind, then it’s time to leave– even after spending substantial time, money, and initiative migrating.
So I made the difficult call to reverse course and return back to Keap completely simply weeks after going all in on GoHighLevel. Allow’s discover what I picked up from this ordeal.
Trick Takeaways: What I Gained from My GoHighLevel Error
My time with HighLevel can be summarized as a pricey misadventure. Yet in hindsight, it educated me a few essential lessons:
- Stick to what works. Do not disturb what’s working unless something is definitively better across the board. Change brings danger.
- Vet declares extensively. Marketing hype around brand-new software program typically obscures bigger underlying imperfections. Deep due persistance is important.
- Select simplicity over features. Properly designed tools should make your job life less complicated, not much more complicated and untidy.
- Openness constructs depend on. Opaque pricing, shady reseller terms, and finger-pointing to evade problems destroys trust.
- Seek impartial reviews. Happy support reviews suggest much less if excessive concerns imply poor overall usability.
- Excellence is difficult. No solitary service can perfectly fulfill every special organization demand. Locate the least-bad fit.
- Development over revolution. Step-by-step improvements commonly surpass dangerous wholesale reinvention of what already works fine.
In other words, I discovered to be extra doubtful of “too great to be true” marketing insurance claims and much less attracted by the appeal of shiny new items. The devices you utilize daily need to gain trust via openness and efficiency, not glossy advertising.