As an agency owner for over a years, I rely upon software program and automation to streamline procedures and supply outcomes. So when GoHighLevel arised on the scene couple of years back, it definitely captured my focus GoHighLevel Unlimited Sub Accounts.
The idea was attractive– an all-in-one client management system with marketing, sales, and solution devices integrated together. As an entrepreneur always looking to simplify and scale my service, it felt like a dream become a reality on paper. That would not desire a single option that does it all?
Yet in this thorough GoHighLevel review, I’ll take you inside my disastrous journey of trying (and failing) to switch to this preferred brand-new software application. You’ll learn:
If you’re considering whether GoHighLevel is right for your very own service requirements, with any luck you can gain from my uncomfortable blunders and blew up expectations.
Spoiler: I do NOT advise GoHighLevel. If you require a CRM, begin with this checklist of finest CRMs instead. I utilize Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re searching for a sales, marketing, and project administration choice to GoHighLevel, after that right here are a few we advise.
Backstory: Why I Considered Switching Over from Keap
To comprehend what attracted me to GoHighLevel to begin with, you require context about my previous arrangement. For over 5 years I had been gladly counting on Keap (previously Infusionsoft) to meet all my customer monitoring and automation requirements.
I discovered Keap instinctive to utilize and it took care of everything I required– CRM, e-mail marketing, sales funnels, subscription sites, and customer assistance.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are developed to assist small businesses keep their customers while including brand-new ones effortlessly. Automate follow-ups with emails and messages, making sure leads and clients receive the appropriate messages at the right time. Usage website and social networks forms to enhance lead follow-up, and handle your development with easy appointment organizing and lead tracking. Boost sales with automated pricing estimate, invoicing, and settlement handling, freeing up your time. With Keap, small companies can save 10 hours weekly and increase revenue by 39%. Begin with a 14-day free trial, no charge card needed.
Why we like Keap
Keap provides an extensive client partnership management (CRM) and marketing automation remedy tailored for local business and business owners. We appreciate Keap’s focus on enhancing sales processes and supporting customer connections via powerful automation tools. The platform’s all-in-one strategy incorporates CRM, e-mail marketing, invoicing, and task administration, making it specifically eye-catching for services seeking to combine their tech pile.
Essentially, it just worked dependably with marginal hassle or maintenance required. My open and click-through prices were great (like 35% terrific). Automations ran efficiently without any concerns.
So why on earth was I tempted to uproot my whole operational structure from a system that worked to try something unproven and untested?
In knowledge I can confess I obtained seduced by the siren call of “glossy object syndrome”. You recognize the sensation: when everyone’s speaking about a brand-new device that will certainly revolutionize your company … The yard often looks greener on the other side, and I asked yourself whether GoHighLevel could minimize rubbing factors that I would certainly learned to tolerate for many years with Keap.
I resisted initially, however a few more frustrations led me to believe maybe it was time for a modification.
The Investment: Migrating My Company to GoHighLevel
Previously this year I made a decision to start. I signed up for HighLevel’s Agency plan at $297/month, investing considerably more than the $97/month starter price.
This wasn’t a choice I took lightly. I understood switching systems was going to call for migrating all my Keap information and essentially reconstructing my entire tech facilities from square one making use of every one of the GoHighLevel integrations readily available.
Right here’s an overview of just several of the initiative needed:
- Manually exporting 20,000+ email subscriber documents
- Recreating dozens of automations and workflows
- Relocating customer accounts, notes, and project information to the brand-new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe payment integration
- Setting up landing pages, promotions, and sales funnels all over once again
- Learning an entirely international UX and user interface layout
All in, I spent around 30-40 tiresome hours of configuration work transitioning whatever over– in addition to managing lost performance during the switch.
Yet inevitably, it was a calculated investment I was willing to make. I figured some temporary discomfort would certainly repay with GoHighLevel offering a much better long-term service for my business, Dripify. Oh just how wrong I was …
It just took me regarding a month of hands-on use to recognize I had actually made a huge mistake. The problems began accumulating rapidly, up until it reached a factor I needed to cut my losses and change back to Keap completely.
Let’s go through the horrible troubles I experienced.
Safety And Security Issues & Several Bugs
Provided GoHighLevel positioned itself as an all-in-one automation system, I took care to diligently recreate every workflow from my old Keap account.
These consisted of series for onboarding brand-new email clients, onboarding new clients, automating follow-ups for webinar enrollments, sending occasion suggestions, managing subscription expiries and far more.
Everything seemed to be working fine … up until suddenly it wasn’t. One early morning, I woke up to find 171 entirely pointless e-mails had been sent to users that ought to NOT have gotten them. This happened 3 days in a row, with a various batch of 160 people each day.
I frantically attempted repairing and rebuilding the automation from the ground up. Yet the trouble lingered.
When I seriously reached out to their support team, they vaguely claimed “web server concerns” were responsible. But this description didn’t make any sense, since the mistakes continued happening each early morning like clockwork unrelated to any kind of downtime.
In my mind, this huge failing was entirely inappropriate and just didn’t help my service. I have countless calls relying upon my automated campaigns running smoothly.
So if GoHighLevel was going to be entirely undependable, just how could I entrust mission-critical workflows and delicate customer information to their technology?
The unintuitive interface only compounded these issues …
Aggravating UX
Originating from Keap where every little thing was seamless and instinctive, GoHighLevel’s learning curve felt steep and complicated.
Simple tasks like editing and enhancing workflows entailed excavating via food selection systems that were all over the place. Trick settings were unexplainably spread in absolutely various sections. Moving in between features really felt disjointed or confusing.
I’ll inform you what I mean by talking about their funnel builder as an example. There were 3 different setups panels to take care of total, individual, and item configurations. Yet for some crazy reason, the links to access each of these core setups were expanded on opposite sides of the display. What!?
As somebody that values clean, thoughtful design, this seriously upset me.
It reinforced that GoHighLevel still felt like a work-in-progress rather than a sleek item all set for prime-time use. Their top priorities appeared concentrated on cramming in every feature under the sun, with bad functionality as a second thought.
And speaking of features, I soon realized the low cost tag featured costly concessions …
Deceptive Pricing GoHighLevel Unlimited Sub Accounts
One of GoHighLevel’s largest selling factors is the affordable rate for accessibility to numerous features. However I rapidly learned this economical base cost was deceitful.
They nickle-and-dimed users with sporadic fees for core performance. All of a sudden my bank card statements had obscure $10 costs from GoHighLevel occasionally.
As it ended up, you get charged every time you send an e-mail through their web servers. So for high quantity users, this amounted to hundreds of dollars in unforeseen expenses.
In between these per-email costs and paying extra for deliverability add-ons like Mailgun, my “economical” GoHighLevel subscription wound up setting you back dramatically greater than my Keap plan.
The low price tag was tempting, yet just not practical in practice. This bait-and-switch left a bad taste in my mouth.
Email Rates Suffered
The final dealbreaker was seeing my meticulously nurtured email open rates plummet practically overnight after switching over to GoHighLevel.
Previously, my target market interaction consistently struck 35-40% open prices in Keap month after month. Once I migrated their documents over to GoHighLevel, efficiency tanked promptly to a pitiful 9% open rate.
No matter just how much I enhanced my sending practices or tried every fixing technique, I can hardly push open rates back right into the teenagers– still a 50%+ decline from my previous benchmarks GoHighLevel Unlimited Sub Accounts.
Let me repeat: my exact same target market and emails unexpectedly had dreadful interaction. The only thing I might think that would certainly be creating this was whatever was happening behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a company so depending on email marketing, this was a big deal.
In between the debilitating deliverability issues, concealed fees, broken features, and awful interface, I had actually finally reached my restriction …
Why I Quit GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Simply 45 days after moving my agency to GoHighLevel, I knew I had actually made a substantial mistake. The disadvantages substantially surpassed any benefits.
No software program is excellent, yet the large quantity of problems was past appropriate.
At the end of the day, software comes down to count on. If I can not trust it to take care of critical features competently or think a vendor has my best interests in mind, then it’s time to walk away– even after investing considerable time, money, and initiative moving.
So I made the tough call to reverse training course and return back to Keap completely simply weeks after going all in on GoHighLevel. Allow’s explore what I learned from this debacle.
Trick Takeaways: What I Learned From My GoHighLevel Blunder
My time with HighLevel can be summed up as a pricey misadventure. Yet in hindsight, it instructed me a couple of vital lessons:
- Adhere to what jobs. Don’t upset what’s functioning unless something is definitively better across the board. Adjustment brings danger.
- Vet declares thoroughly. Marketing hype around brand-new software program commonly obscures bigger underlying problems. Deep due persistance is necessary.
- Pick simplicity over features. Properly designed tools must make your job life less complicated, not more complicated and untidy.
- Transparency constructs depend on. Nontransparent pricing, unethical reseller terms, and finger-pointing to evade problems destroys depend on.
- Look for honest evaluations. Happy support evaluates suggest less if too much concerns suggest bad total use.
- Perfection is impossible. No solitary remedy can flawlessly fulfill every unique organization demand. Discover the least-bad fit.
- Advancement over transformation. Incremental improvements usually surpass high-risk wholesale reinvention of what already works penalty.
In other words, I found out to be a lot more unconvinced of “also great to be real” marketing insurance claims and less attracted by the allure of shiny brand-new things. The tools you make use of daily need to make count on via transparency and performance, not glossy advertising.