As an agency owner for over a decade, I rely upon software and automation to improve operations and supply results. So when GoHighLevel emerged on the scene couple of years back, it certainly captured my focus GoHighLevel Toll Free.
The idea was appealing– an all-in-one customer management system with marketing, sales, and service devices incorporated with each other. As an entrepreneur constantly aiming to streamline and scale my business, it looked like a desire happened on paper. Who would not desire a single remedy that does it all?
Yet in this extensive GoHighLevel evaluation, I’ll take you inside my devastating journey of attempting (and failing) to switch over to this preferred brand-new software. You’ll discover:
If you’re thinking about whether GoHighLevel is right for your own service needs, ideally you can gain from my painful errors and blew up assumptions.
Looter: I do NOT recommend GoHighLevel. If you need a CRM, begin with this list of finest CRMs rather. I make use of Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re trying to find a sales, marketing, and task monitoring alternative to GoHighLevel, then below are a few we recommend.
Backstory: Why I Thought About Switching from Keap
To understand what attracted me to GoHighLevel to begin with, you require context regarding my previous arrangement. For over 5 years I had actually been happily relying upon Keap (previously Infusionsoft) to meet all my client administration and automation demands.
I located Keap instinctive to use and it dealt with every little thing I needed– CRM, email marketing, sales funnels, membership sites, and customer support.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are developed to assist small companies keep their clients while including brand-new ones effortlessly. Automate follow-ups with e-mails and texts, guaranteeing leads and clients obtain the best messages at the right time. Usage site and social networks kinds to enhance lead follow-up, and handle your growth with very easy visit organizing and lead tracking. Boost sales with automated estimating, invoicing, and repayment handling, maximizing your time. With Keap, small businesses can save 10 hours weekly and boost earnings by 39%. Start with a 14-day free trial, no charge card needed.
Why we like Keap
Keap provides a detailed client partnership administration (CRM) and marketing automation option tailored for small companies and entrepreneurs. We value Keap’s concentrate on enhancing sales processes and supporting customer connections through effective automation devices. The platform’s all-in-one strategy combines CRM, email marketing, invoicing, and task management, making it specifically eye-catching for companies wanting to consolidate their technology pile.
Essentially, it simply worked accurately with very little difficulty or upkeep needed. My open and click-through prices were wonderful (like 35% great). Automations ran efficiently without problems.
So why on earth was I attracted to uproot my entire functional foundation from a system that functioned to attempt something unproven and untried?
In hindsight I can confess I got attracted by the siren call of “shiny item disorder”. You know the sensation: when every person’s discussing a new device that will change your organization … The yard typically looks greener on the other side, and I wondered whether GoHighLevel might lower rubbing factors that I would certainly discovered to endure for many years with Keap.
I resisted initially, yet a couple of even more frustrations led me to believe maybe it was time for an adjustment.
The Investment: Moving My Firm to GoHighLevel
Earlier this year I made a decision to take the plunge. I enrolled in HighLevel’s Agency plan at $297/month, spending dramatically more than the $97/month starter expense.
This had not been a decision I took lightly. I knew changing platforms was going to need moving all my Keap information and basically reconstructing my entire tech infrastructure from the ground up utilizing every one of the GoHighLevel integrations offered.
Right here’s an introduction of simply a few of the effort needed:
- Manually exporting 20,000+ e-mail subscriber documents
- Recreating lots of automations and workflows
- Moving customer accounts, notes, and project information to the brand-new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe payment integration
- Establishing landing pages, promotions, and sales funnels around again
- Learning an entirely international UX and user interface design
All in, I invested around 30-40 tiresome hours of arrangement work transitioning whatever over– and also dealing with shed productivity throughout the switch.
Yet ultimately, it was a computed financial investment I agreed to make. I figured some temporary discomfort would certainly pay off with GoHighLevel supplying a much better long-lasting remedy for my organization, Dripify. Oh exactly how wrong I was …
It just took me regarding a month of hands-on use to recognize I had made a huge error. The problems started accumulating swiftly, until it reached a factor I needed to reduce my losses and switch over back to Keap completely.
Let’s walk through the horrible issues I ran into.
Safety And Security Issues & Numerous Vermin
Offered GoHighLevel positioned itself as an all-in-one automation platform, I took care to thoroughly recreate every workflow from my old Keap account.
These included sequences for onboarding new e-mail subscribers, onboarding new customers, automating follow-ups for webinar enrollments, sending out occasion pointers, taking care of membership expiries and a lot more.
Whatever appeared to be working penalty … till unexpectedly it wasn’t. One morning, I woke up to discover 171 entirely irrelevant emails had actually been sent to customers that need to NOT have received them. This took place 3 days straight, with a various batch of 160 people every day.
I desperately attempted troubleshooting and restoring the automation from the ground up. Yet the trouble lingered.
When I frantically connected to their assistance group, they slightly claimed “web server problems” were at fault. However this explanation really did not make any type of feeling, since the errors continued taking place each early morning like clockwork unassociated to any kind of downtime.
In my mind, this large failing was totally inappropriate and simply didn’t work for my company. I have thousands of get in touches with depending on my automated campaigns running efficiently.
So if GoHighLevel was mosting likely to be completely unreliable, just how could I hand over mission-critical workflows and delicate customer data to their technology?
The unintuitive interface only compounded these issues …
Irritating UX
Coming from Keap where every little thing was seamless and user-friendly, GoHighLevel’s learning contour felt high and difficult.
Easy jobs like editing workflows involved digging with food selection systems that were all over the place. Key settings were unexplainably scattered in absolutely various areas. Moving in between functions felt disjointed or confusing.
I’ll tell you what I suggest by discussing their funnel builder as an instance. There were 3 different settings panels to manage total, private, and product configurations. Yet for some insane reason, the links to gain access to each of these core settings were spread out on contrary sides of the screen. What!?
As somebody that values clean, thoughtful style, this seriously annoyed me.
It strengthened that GoHighLevel still seemed like a work-in-progress as opposed to a polished item ready for prime-time usage. Their concerns seemed concentrated on stuffing in every feature imaginable, with inadequate use as an afterthought.
And speaking of features, I soon understood the affordable price tag came with costly compromises …
Deceptive Pricing GoHighLevel Toll Free
One of GoHighLevel’s most significant marketing points is the budget-friendly rate for access to many features. But I quickly discovered this inexpensive base price was misleading.
They nickle-and-dimed customers with erratic charges for core capability. Instantly my charge card declarations had unclear $10 charges from GoHighLevel occasionally.
As it turned out, you obtain billed every single time you send out an email with their servers. So for high quantity customers, this added up to hundreds of bucks in unforeseen prices.
Between these per-email charges and paying extra for deliverability add-ons like Mailgun, my “affordable” GoHighLevel subscription ended up costing significantly MORE than my Keap plan.
The low price tag was alluring, but simply not realistic in practice. This bait-and-switch left a poor taste in my mouth.
Email Rates Suffered
The last dealbreaker was seeing my thoroughly supported e-mail open rates plummet practically overnight after changing to GoHighLevel.
Formerly, my audience involvement constantly hit 35-40% open rates in Keap month after month. But once I moved their records over to GoHighLevel, efficiency tanked immediately to a pathetic 9% open rate.
Despite how much I enhanced my sending methods or attempted every troubleshooting method, I can barely nudge open prices back right into the teens– still a 50%+ decline from my previous standards GoHighLevel Toll Free.
Let me repeat: my exact same audience and e-mails suddenly had horrible interaction. The only thing I can assume that would be causing this was whatever was happening behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For an agency so based on e-mail marketing, this was a big deal.
Between the debilitating deliverability concerns, concealed charges, broken features, and horrible interface, I had actually lastly reached my limit …
Why I Give up GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Simply 45 days after moving my agency to GoHighLevel, I knew I had made a massive mistake. The cons dramatically surpassed any kind of advantages.
No software is best, but the large quantity of problems was beyond appropriate.
At the end of the day, software program boils down to trust fund. If I can’t trust it to manage crucial functions capably or think a vendor has my benefits in mind, then it’s time to walk away– also after spending substantial time, cash, and initiative moving.
So I made the tough phone call to reverse program and return back to Keap completely simply weeks after going done in on GoHighLevel. Let’s explore what I learned from this fiasco.
Trick Takeaways: What I Gained from My GoHighLevel Blunder
My time with HighLevel can be summed up as an expensive accident. But in knowledge, it educated me a couple of crucial lessons:
- Adhere to what jobs. Do not disturb what’s functioning unless something is definitively better across the board. Change brings danger.
- Vet claims extensively. Marketing hype around brand-new software application often obscures larger underlying imperfections. Deep due persistance is crucial.
- Pick simplicity over features. Well-designed tools need to make your job life easier, not a lot more complicated and unpleasant.
- Openness constructs trust fund. Opaque pricing, questionable reseller terms, and finger-pointing to evade issues damages count on.
- Look for honest testimonials. Pleased support assesses indicate less if too much problems imply poor general usability.
- Excellence is difficult. No solitary remedy can perfectly satisfy every special organization requirement. Find the least-bad fit.
- Evolution over transformation. Step-by-step enhancements normally surpass risky wholesale reinvention of what currently works penalty.
In other words, I learned to be a lot more cynical of “as well good to be true” marketing claims and less lured by the attraction of shiny new objects. The tools you use daily ought to gain depend on through openness and performance, not glossy advertising.