As a firm owner for over a decade, I rely on software and automation to streamline operations and deliver results. So when GoHighLevel arised on the scene few years back, it certainly caught my attention GoHighLevel Two-Factor Authentication.
The idea was enticing– an all-in-one customer administration platform with marketing, sales, and solution tools incorporated together. As an entrepreneur constantly aiming to streamline and scale my organization, it felt like a desire become a reality theoretically. Who would not desire a solitary service that does it all?
But in this in-depth GoHighLevel testimonial, I’ll take you inside my disastrous journey of attempting (and failing) to switch to this preferred brand-new software application. You’ll learn:
If you’re thinking about whether GoHighLevel is right for your very own business needs, ideally you can learn from my uncomfortable errors and blew up expectations.
Looter: I do NOT recommend GoHighLevel. If you need a CRM, start with this checklist of finest CRMs rather. I make use of Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re looking for a sales, marketing, and project administration choice to GoHighLevel, after that right here are a couple of we suggest.
Backstory: Why I Thought About Switching Over from Keap
To recognize what attracted me to GoHighLevel in the first place, you need context concerning my previous setup. For over 5 years I had been gladly counting on Keap (previously Infusionsoft) to satisfy all my client administration and automation demands.
I found Keap user-friendly to use and it handled whatever I needed– CRM, email marketing, sales funnels, membership sites, and client assistance.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are created to assist small businesses maintain their clients while including brand-new ones easily. Automate follow-ups with emails and messages, making sure leads and clients get the appropriate messages at the correct time. Usage internet site and social networks forms to simplify lead follow-up, and handle your development with easy visit scheduling and lead tracking. Boost sales with automated pricing estimate, invoicing, and repayment handling, maximizing your time. With Keap, small businesses can conserve 10 hours each week and boost profits by 39%. Beginning with a 14-day free trial, no bank card needed.
Why we like Keap
Keap uses a comprehensive customer connection monitoring (CRM) and marketing automation remedy tailored for small businesses and business owners. We appreciate Keap’s focus on enhancing sales processes and nurturing customer connections through effective automation tools. The system’s all-in-one approach integrates CRM, e-mail marketing, invoicing, and task monitoring, making it especially appealing for businesses seeking to combine their tech pile.
For the most part, it just functioned accurately with marginal hassle or upkeep called for. My open and click-through prices were wonderful (like 35% great). Automations ran efficiently with no problems.
So why in the world was I tempted to uproot my entire functional foundation from a system that functioned to try something unverified and untested?
In knowledge I can admit I got seduced by the siren call of “glossy item syndrome”. You recognize the sensation: when every person’s discussing a new tool that will certainly change your business … The yard usually looks greener beyond, and I wondered whether GoHighLevel could decrease friction factors that I would certainly learned to tolerate throughout the years with Keap.
I stood up to in the beginning, yet a few even more stress led me to believe perhaps it was time for an adjustment.
The Investment: Moving My Firm to GoHighLevel
Earlier this year I decided to start. I registered for HighLevel’s Firm plan at $297/month, spending dramatically more than the $97/month starter cost.
This wasn’t a choice I ignored. I knew changing systems was going to require moving all my Keap information and essentially rebuilding my entire technology facilities from the ground up using all of the GoHighLevel integrations readily available.
Below’s a review of simply some of the effort needed:
- By hand exporting 20,000+ email subscriber records
- Recreating loads of automations and workflows
- Moving customer profiles, notes, and job information to the new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe payment integration
- Establishing landing pages, promos, and sales funnels around once again
- Learning a totally international UX and interface layout
All in, I invested around 30-40 laborious hours of configuration work transitioning everything over– and also dealing with lost performance throughout the switch.
But ultimately, it was a computed financial investment I wanted to make. I figured some temporary discomfort would certainly repay with GoHighLevel providing a much better lasting remedy for my service, Dripify. Oh just how incorrect I was …
It only took me about a month of hands-on use to recognize I had actually made a big mistake. The problems started accumulating quickly, up until it reached a point I had to reduce my losses and switch back to Keap totally.
Let’s walk through the nightmarish troubles I came across.
Safety Issues & Lots of Bugs
Offered GoHighLevel positioned itself as an all-in-one automation system, I took care to thoroughly recreate every workflow from my old Keap account.
These included series for onboarding new email customers, onboarding new customers, automating follow-ups for webinar registrations, sending occasion reminders, handling subscription expiries and much more.
Everything appeared to be operating penalty … until suddenly it wasn’t. One morning, I woke up to discover 171 completely unnecessary e-mails had been sent out to individuals that ought to NOT have actually gotten them. This occurred three days straight, with a different set of 160 individuals daily.
I anxiously attempted repairing and reconstructing the automation from square one. But the trouble continued.
When I seriously reached out to their support team, they vaguely asserted “web server issues” were responsible. However this explanation didn’t make any kind of feeling, because the errors continued taking place each morning like clockwork unrelated to any type of downtime.
In my mind, this enormous failing was completely unacceptable and just really did not benefit my business. I have countless contacts depending on my automated campaigns running efficiently.
So if GoHighLevel was mosting likely to be absolutely unreliable, how could I turn over mission-critical workflows and sensitive client data to their technology?
The unintuitive interface just worsened these concerns …
Irritating UX
Coming from Keap where whatever was smooth and instinctive, GoHighLevel’s learning curve really felt steep and challenging.
Basic tasks like editing and enhancing workflows entailed digging with food selection systems that were all over the place. Secret setups were unexplainably spread in completely various areas. Moving between features felt disjointed or complicated.
I’ll inform you what I imply by talking about their funnel builder as an instance. There were 3 different setups panels to handle total, individual, and item arrangements. Yet for some crazy reason, the web links to accessibility each of these core setups were expanded on opposite sides of the display. What!?
As a person who values clean, thoughtful design, this seriously irritated me.
It enhanced that GoHighLevel still seemed like a work-in-progress rather than a sleek item prepared for prime-time use. Their concerns seemed concentrated on packing in every feature under the sun, with poor use as an afterthought.
And talking features, I quickly realized the affordable price tag featured expensive compromises …
Deceptive Pricing GoHighLevel Two-Factor Authentication
Among GoHighLevel’s greatest selling points is the inexpensive cost for accessibility to a lot of features. But I rapidly learned this cheap base expense was deceptive.
They nickle-and-dimed individuals with sporadic charges for core performance. All of a sudden my bank card declarations had unclear $10 charges from GoHighLevel occasionally.
As it turned out, you obtain charged every single time you send out an e-mail with their web servers. So for high volume users, this added up to numerous bucks in unanticipated expenses.
In between these per-email charges and paying added for deliverability add-ons like Mailgun, my “economical” GoHighLevel subscription ended up costing dramatically greater than my Keap plan.
The low sticker price was appealing, however simply not practical in practice. This bait-and-switch left a bad preference in my mouth.
Email Rates Suffered
The last dealbreaker was seeing my carefully supported email open prices drop virtually over night after switching to GoHighLevel.
Previously, my audience involvement consistently struck 35-40% open rates in Keap month after month. Once I migrated their records over to GoHighLevel, performance tanked instantly to a useless 9% open rate.
Regardless of how much I enhanced my sending out methods or attempted every fixing trick, I might barely push open rates back into the teenagers– still a 50%+ decline from my previous benchmarks GoHighLevel Two-Factor Authentication.
Let me repeat: my exact same target market and e-mails all of a sudden had terrible engagement. The only thing I might assume that would be creating this was whatever was taking place behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a firm so dependent on e-mail marketing, this was a big deal.
Between the debilitating deliverability issues, concealed fees, damaged features, and awful user interface, I had actually lastly reached my restriction …
Why I Give up GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Just 45 days after moving my agency to GoHighLevel, I recognized I had made a massive blunder. The disadvantages substantially surpassed any benefits.
No software program is excellent, but the large quantity of issues was beyond appropriate.
At the end of the day, software boils down to count on. If I can’t trust it to handle critical functions effectively or think a supplier has my benefits in mind, then it’s time to walk away– also after spending considerable time, money, and initiative moving.
So I made the challenging contact us to turn around course and return back to Keap entirely just weeks after going done in on GoHighLevel. Let’s explore what I gained from this fiasco.
Secret Takeaways: What I Gained from My GoHighLevel Mistake
My time with HighLevel can be summarized as an expensive accident. However in hindsight, it educated me a few vital lessons:
- Stick to what works. Do not disturb what’s working unless something is definitively far better across the board. Adjustment brings threat.
- Veterinarian declares completely. Marketing hype around brand-new software application frequently obscures bigger underlying defects. Deep due persistance is essential.
- Choose simpleness over features. Properly designed devices should make your job life much easier, not much more challenging and unpleasant.
- Transparency builds trust. Opaque pricing, shady reseller terms, and finger-pointing to evade troubles damages depend on.
- Look for objective reviews. Satisfied assistance assesses imply less if too much concerns imply poor general use.
- Excellence is difficult. No single remedy can flawlessly satisfy every special service demand. Find the least-bad fit.
- Advancement over change. Step-by-step enhancements typically outweigh risky wholesale reinvention of what already works penalty.
In other words, I found out to be more doubtful of “too great to be true” marketing insurance claims and less attracted by the allure of shiny brand-new things. The devices you use daily need to gain trust with openness and performance, not glossy advertising.