As a company owner for over a years, I count on software application and automation to streamline procedures and deliver outcomes. So when GoHighLevel arised on the scene couple of years back, it certainly caught my attention GoHighLevel Udemy.
The idea was appealing– an all-in-one customer monitoring platform with marketing, sales, and solution devices integrated with each other. As a business owner always aiming to streamline and scale my company, it appeared like a desire come to life theoretically. That wouldn’t desire a single option that does it all?
However in this in-depth GoHighLevel review, I’ll take you inside my dreadful journey of attempting (and stopping working) to change to this popular brand-new software. You’ll discover:
If you’re considering whether GoHighLevel is right for your very own organization demands, hopefully you can learn from my uncomfortable errors and blew up assumptions.
Looter: I do NOT suggest GoHighLevel. If you need a CRM, start with this listing of finest CRMs instead. I make use of Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re seeking a sales, marketing, and task administration option to GoHighLevel, after that below are a couple of we advise.
Backstory: Why I Thought About Switching Over from Keap
To understand what attracted me to GoHighLevel in the first place, you need context regarding my previous arrangement. For over 5 years I had been happily relying upon Keap (previously Infusionsoft) to meet all my client management and automation demands.
I discovered Keap user-friendly to make use of and it dealt with everything I needed– CRM, email marketing, sales funnels, membership sites, and customer assistance.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are developed to help local business maintain their customers while including brand-new ones easily. Automate follow-ups with emails and messages, ensuring leads and clients obtain the best messages at the correct time. Use web site and social media forms to simplify lead follow-up, and handle your growth with simple appointment organizing and lead tracking. Boost sales with automated estimating, invoicing, and payment processing, liberating your time. With Keap, small companies can conserve 10 hours weekly and boost revenue by 39%. Start with a 14-day free trial, no bank card needed.
Why we like Keap
Keap uses a thorough client relationship administration (CRM) and marketing automation solution customized for small businesses and entrepreneurs. We value Keap’s focus on enhancing sales processes and nurturing consumer partnerships via effective automation devices. The platform’s all-in-one method incorporates CRM, email marketing, invoicing, and task administration, making it particularly appealing for organizations aiming to settle their technology stack.
Generally, it simply worked reliably with very little difficulty or maintenance called for. My open and click-through rates were wonderful (like 35% great). Automations ran efficiently with no concerns.
So why on earth was I lured to uproot my entire functional structure from a system that worked to attempt something unproven and untested?
In knowledge I can admit I got seduced by the siren call of “shiny things disorder”. You recognize the sensation: when everybody’s talking about a new tool that will change your business … The turf frequently looks greener beyond, and I wondered whether GoHighLevel might lower friction points that I would certainly discovered to tolerate over the years with Keap.
I stood up to at first, however a few even more disappointments led me to believe possibly it was time for a change.
The Financial investment: Migrating My Company to GoHighLevel
Previously this year I decided to take the plunge. I signed up for HighLevel’s Company plan at $297/month, investing substantially more than the $97/month starter price.
This had not been a decision I ignored. I understood switching systems was going to call for migrating all my Keap information and essentially reconstructing my entire technology infrastructure from square one utilizing every one of the GoHighLevel integrations available.
Below’s a summary of simply some of the effort required:
- Manually exporting 20,000+ e-mail customer records
- Recreating loads of automations and workflows
- Moving customer accounts, notes, and project information to the new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe invoicing integration
- Setting up landing pages, promos, and sales funnels throughout once more
- Learning a completely international UX and interface layout
All in, I spent around 30-40 tiresome hours of setup work transitioning everything over– as well as taking care of lost performance throughout the button.
But eventually, it was a calculated financial investment I wanted to make. I figured some temporary discomfort would certainly pay off with GoHighLevel providing a much better lasting solution for my organization, Dripify. Oh just how wrong I was …
It only took me regarding a month of hands-on use to understand I had actually made a large mistake. The issues began piling up rapidly, till it got to a factor I had to cut my losses and switch over back to Keap completely.
Allow’s go through the horrible troubles I came across.
Protection Issues & Numerous Bugs
Provided GoHighLevel positioned itself as an all-in-one automation system, I took care to meticulously recreate every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These consisted of sequences for onboarding new e-mail customers, onboarding new customers, automating follow-ups for webinar registrations, sending occasion pointers, taking care of membership expirations and far more.
Every little thing seemed to be working penalty … until instantly it had not been. One early morning, I woke up to locate 171 completely irrelevant e-mails had actually been sent to users who should NOT have obtained them. This happened three days in a row, with a different batch of 160 people every day.
I hysterically attempted fixing and rebuilding the automation from square one. Yet the issue persisted.
When I seriously connected to their support group, they slightly asserted “server issues” were responsible. However this explanation really did not make any sense, because the mistakes proceeded occurring each morning like clockwork unassociated to any type of downtime.
In my mind, this large failure was completely inappropriate and simply didn’t work for my company. I have hundreds of calls counting on my automated campaigns running smoothly.
So if GoHighLevel was mosting likely to be absolutely undependable, just how could I leave mission-critical workflows and sensitive client data to their innovation?
The unintuitive interface only compounded these issues …
Irritating UX
Coming from Keap where every little thing was smooth and user-friendly, GoHighLevel’s learning curve felt high and difficult.
Easy jobs like editing and enhancing workflows entailed excavating via menu systems that were all over the place. Trick setups were unexplainably scattered in totally various areas. Moving in between features really felt disjointed or complex.
I’ll inform you what I suggest by speaking about their funnel builder as an example. There were 3 separate settings panels to manage overall, individual, and product setups. Yet for some insane reason, the links to accessibility each of these core settings were spread out on contrary sides of the display. What!?
As a person who values clean, thoughtful style, this seriously annoyed me.
It enhanced that GoHighLevel still seemed like a work-in-progress instead of a polished item prepared for prime-time usage. Their concerns seemed concentrated on packing in every feature under the sun, with bad usability as a second thought.
And speaking of features, I quickly realized the low cost tag came with expensive concessions …
Deceptive Pricing GoHighLevel Udemy
One of GoHighLevel’s largest marketing factors is the cost effective price for access to so many features. But I swiftly discovered this affordable base price was deceptive.
They nickle-and-dimed individuals with occasional fees for core performance. Instantly my bank card declarations had unclear $10 fees from GoHighLevel occasionally.
As it turned out, you get billed every time you send out an email with their web servers. So for high quantity individuals, this amounted to hundreds of dollars in unexpected expenses.
Between these per-email charges and paying extra for deliverability add-ons like Mailgun, my “budget-friendly” GoHighLevel registration wound up costing significantly greater than my Keap plan.
The low sticker price was tempting, however simply not practical in practice. This bait-and-switch left a bad preference in my mouth.
Email Rates Suffered
The final dealbreaker was seeing my thoroughly nurtured email open prices plummet nearly overnight after changing to GoHighLevel.
Formerly, my target market involvement constantly hit 35-40% open rates in Keap month after month. But once I moved their documents over to GoHighLevel, efficiency tanked instantly to a useless 9% open price.
Despite how much I enhanced my sending methods or attempted every repairing technique, I can hardly nudge open prices back into the teenagers– still a 50%+ decline from my previous standards GoHighLevel Udemy.
Let me repeat: my exact same audience and e-mails suddenly had awful involvement. The only point I might assume that would certainly be creating this was whatever was happening behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a firm so depending on e-mail marketing, this was a big deal.
In between the crippling deliverability issues, hidden fees, broken features, and dreadful interface, I had finally reached my restriction …
Why I Quit GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Just 45 days after migrating my firm to GoHighLevel, I understood I had actually made a substantial mistake. The cons considerably outweighed any kind of benefits.
No software program is perfect, but the large quantity of troubles was past appropriate.
At the end of the day, software application boils down to count on. If I can’t trust it to take care of important functions capably or believe a vendor has my benefits in mind, then it’s time to walk away– even after investing significant time, money, and initiative moving.
So I made the difficult phone call to reverse course and return back to Keap totally just weeks after going done in on GoHighLevel. Let’s discover what I learned from this fiasco.
Key Takeaways: What I Learned From My GoHighLevel Blunder
My time with HighLevel can be summed up as an expensive ill fortune. Yet in hindsight, it showed me a couple of essential lessons:
- Stick to what works. Do not upset what’s functioning unless something is definitively better across the board. Change brings danger.
- Vet declares completely. Marketing hype around new software program commonly covers larger underlying problems. Deep due diligence is important.
- Choose simpleness over features. Well-designed tools should make your work life simpler, not a lot more challenging and unpleasant.
- Transparency constructs count on. Nontransparent pricing, unethical reseller terms, and finger-pointing to evade troubles damages trust fund.
- Look for impartial reviews. Pleased support evaluates imply much less if too much problems indicate inadequate total use.
- Excellence is impossible. No single solution can flawlessly meet every one-of-a-kind organization requirement. Locate the least-bad fit.
- Advancement over change. Step-by-step improvements usually outweigh high-risk wholesale reinvention of what currently functions penalty.
Basically, I learned to be much more unconvinced of “as well great to be true” marketing claims and much less tempted by the appeal of shiny brand-new things. The tools you utilize daily ought to make depend on with transparency and performance, not slick advertising.