As a company proprietor for over a decade, I rely upon software application and automation to streamline procedures and deliver results. So when GoHighLevel emerged on the scene few years back, it definitely caught my focus GoHighLevel Twilio Integration.
The idea was appealing– an all-in-one client monitoring platform with marketing, sales, and solution tools integrated together. As a business owner constantly aiming to streamline and scale my business, it looked like a desire come to life theoretically. Who would not desire a single solution that does it all?
However in this comprehensive GoHighLevel testimonial, I’ll take you inside my devastating trip of trying (and failing) to change to this popular brand-new software. You’ll find out:
If you’re taking into consideration whether GoHighLevel is right for your own business requirements, hopefully you can learn from my painful mistakes and pumped up assumptions.
Looter: I do NOT suggest GoHighLevel. If you require a CRM, start with this listing of best CRMs instead. I utilize Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re trying to find a sales, marketing, and job management choice to GoHighLevel, after that below are a couple of we advise.
Backstory: Why I Took Into Consideration Switching from Keap
To understand what attracted me to GoHighLevel in the first place, you need context concerning my previous setup. For over 5 years I had been gladly relying upon Keap (previously Infusionsoft) to fulfill all my customer management and automation requirements.
I found Keap instinctive to use and it took care of every little thing I required– CRM, email marketing, sales funnels, membership sites, and customer support.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are developed to assist small companies maintain their customers while adding brand-new ones easily. Automate follow-ups with e-mails and texts, making sure leads and customers receive the best messages at the correct time. Usage website and social media sites kinds to streamline lead follow-up, and handle your development with easy appointment scheduling and lead tracking. Boost sales with automated pricing quote, invoicing, and payment processing, maximizing your time. With Keap, local business can save 10 hours per week and rise revenue by 39%. Beginning with a 14-day free trial, no bank card needed.
Why we like Keap
Keap offers a detailed customer connection administration (CRM) and marketing automation option customized for local business and business owners. We appreciate Keap’s concentrate on simplifying sales processes and nurturing client relationships through effective automation devices. The platform’s all-in-one approach incorporates CRM, e-mail marketing, invoicing, and task administration, making it especially attractive for organizations looking to settle their technology pile.
For the most part, it simply functioned reliably with minimal difficulty or upkeep required. My open and click-through rates were great (like 35% excellent). Automations ran efficiently without any problems.
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 knowledge I can admit I got attracted by the siren call of “shiny item syndrome”. You know the feeling: when everybody’s talking about a brand-new tool that will change your service … The turf frequently looks greener beyond, and I questioned whether GoHighLevel may lower friction points that I ‘d discovered to tolerate throughout the years with Keap.
I withstood at first, but a few more disappointments led me to assume possibly it was time for a modification.
The Financial investment: Migrating My Firm to GoHighLevel
Previously this year I determined to take the plunge. I enrolled in HighLevel’s Agency plan at $297/month, spending substantially more than the $97/month starter expense.
This wasn’t a decision I ignored. I knew switching over platforms was going to call for moving all my Keap data and essentially rebuilding my whole tech infrastructure from the ground up making use of every one of the GoHighLevel integrations available.
Right here’s an overview of simply a few of the effort needed:
- Manually exporting 20,000+ email client documents
- Recreating lots of automations and workflows
- Relocating customer profiles, notes, and task information to the new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe payment integration
- Establishing landing pages, coupons, and sales funnels all over again
- Learning an entirely foreign UX and interface style
All in, I invested around 30-40 tiresome hours of setup work transitioning every little thing over– in addition to managing lost productivity throughout the switch.
However inevitably, it was a computed investment I wanted to make. I figured some temporary discomfort would certainly repay with GoHighLevel supplying a far better lasting service for my organization, Dripify. Oh just how incorrect I was …
It just took me concerning a month of hands-on usage to realize I had actually made a large error. The issues started piling up rapidly, until it got to a point I needed to cut my losses and switch over back to Keap completely.
Allow’s walk through the horrible problems I experienced.
Safety And Security Issues & Numerous Vermin
Offered GoHighLevel placed itself as an all-in-one automation platform, I made sure to meticulously recreate every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These included sequences for onboarding new email customers, onboarding new customers, automating follow-ups for webinar enrollments, sending out occasion tips, taking care of membership expiries and a lot more.
Every little thing appeared to be operating penalty … up until all of a sudden it had not been. One early morning, I awoke to locate 171 totally pointless emails had actually been sent to users who ought to NOT have gotten them. This occurred 3 days in a row, with a different set of 160 people daily.
I desperately tried repairing and reconstructing the automation from square one. But the problem persisted.
When I desperately connected to their assistance group, they slightly asserted “server problems” were at fault. But this description really did not make any sense, since the mistakes proceeded taking place each early morning like clockwork unrelated to any kind of downtime.
In my mind, this enormous failing was totally unacceptable and simply didn’t help my business. I have thousands of get in touches with depending on my automated campaigns running efficiently.
So if GoHighLevel was going to be totally unstable, how could I delegate mission-critical workflows and delicate client information to their technology?
The unintuitive user interface only compounded these problems …
Irritating UX
Originating from Keap where every little thing was smooth and user-friendly, GoHighLevel’s learning curve felt high and complex.
Basic jobs like modifying workflows involved digging with menu systems that were all over the place. Key setups were unexplainably scattered in completely various areas. Relocating between functions really felt disjointed or complex.
I’ll inform you what I imply by discussing their funnel builder as an example. There were 3 separate setups panels to handle general, individual, and item arrangements. Yet for some crazy reason, the links to accessibility each of these core settings were spread out on contrary sides of the screen. What!?
As somebody who values tidy, thoughtful design, this seriously annoyed me.
It reinforced that GoHighLevel still felt like a work-in-progress instead of a refined item ready for prime-time use. Their priorities seemed concentrated on packing in every feature under the sun, with poor functionality as a second thought.
And talking features, I quickly realized the affordable price tag featured pricey compromises …
Deceptive Pricing GoHighLevel Twilio Integration
Among GoHighLevel’s largest marketing points is the cost effective price for access to so many features. However I quickly discovered this cheap base cost was misleading.
They nickle-and-dimed individuals with sporadic fees for core capability. Instantly my bank card declarations had obscure $10 costs from GoHighLevel occasionally.
As it turned out, you obtain charged each time you send out an email via their web servers. So for high quantity customers, this added up to numerous dollars in unforeseen costs.
Between these per-email fees and paying added for deliverability add-ons like Mailgun, my “affordable” GoHighLevel membership ended up costing significantly MORE than my Keap plan.
The reduced sticker price was alluring, but just not practical in practice. This bait-and-switch left a poor taste in my mouth.
Email Fees Suffered
The final dealbreaker was seeing my meticulously nurtured email open prices drop practically overnight after switching to GoHighLevel.
Formerly, my target market involvement constantly hit 35-40% open rates in Keap month after month. Once I migrated their documents over to GoHighLevel, efficiency tanked instantly to a worthless 9% open rate.
Regardless of how much I enhanced my sending practices or attempted every troubleshooting method, I could barely nudge open rates back into the teenagers– still a 50%+ decrease from my previous standards GoHighLevel Twilio Integration.
Let me repeat: my exact same audience and e-mails suddenly had awful involvement. The only point I could think that would be causing this was whatever was happening behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For an agency so based on email marketing, this was a big deal.
In between the crippling deliverability problems, concealed fees, damaged features, and terrible user interface, I had finally reached my limit …
Why I Give up GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Just 45 days after migrating my agency to GoHighLevel, I recognized I had made a significant mistake. The cons substantially surpassed any kind of advantages.
No software program is ideal, yet the sheer volume of problems was past acceptable.
At the end of the day, software application comes down to count on. If I can not trust it to manage important functions effectively or think a supplier has my benefits in mind, after that it’s time to walk away– even after spending substantial time, money, and initiative migrating.
So I made the difficult contact us to turn around course and return back to Keap totally just weeks after going done in on GoHighLevel. Allow’s discover what I learned from this debacle.
Secret Takeaways: What I Picked up from My GoHighLevel Mistake
My time with HighLevel can be summarized as a costly misadventure. But in hindsight, it showed me a couple of key lessons:
- Stay with what works. Do not upset what’s working unless something is definitively much better across the board. Adjustment brings danger.
- Vet asserts completely. Marketing hype around new software commonly covers larger underlying flaws. Deep due persistance is important.
- Select simplicity over features. Well-designed devices must make your job life less complicated, not much more difficult and messy.
- Transparency builds count on. Opaque pricing, questionable reseller terms, and finger-pointing to evade issues damages trust fund.
- Look for objective evaluations. Happy assistance examines imply less if extreme concerns indicate inadequate general use.
- Excellence is impossible. No single service can flawlessly meet every one-of-a-kind company requirement. Find the least-bad fit.
- Advancement over revolution. Incremental enhancements usually exceed high-risk wholesale reinvention of what already works fine.
In short, I discovered to be more hesitant of “too excellent to be true” marketing claims and much less attracted by the attraction of glossy new objects. The tools you use daily need to make trust fund through transparency and performance, not slick advertising.