As a firm proprietor for over a decade, I depend on software program and automation to enhance procedures and deliver results. So when GoHighLevel arised on the scene few years back, it definitely captured my interest GoHighLevel Voiceflow.
The concept was appealing– an all-in-one customer management platform with marketing, sales, and service tools incorporated with each other. As an entrepreneur constantly wanting to simplify and scale my company, it felt like a dream happened on paper. Who wouldn’t desire a single service that does it all?
Yet in this comprehensive GoHighLevel testimonial, I’ll take you inside my disastrous journey of trying (and failing) to switch over to this popular brand-new software program. You’ll learn:
If you’re taking into consideration whether GoHighLevel is right for your very own service needs, hopefully you can pick up from my excruciating errors and blew up assumptions.
Looter: I do NOT recommend GoHighLevel. If you require a CRM, begin with this listing of best CRMs instead. I utilize Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re trying to find a sales, marketing, and task management choice to GoHighLevel, then right here are a few we suggest.
Backstory: Why I Took Into Consideration Changing from Keap
To comprehend what attracted me to GoHighLevel to begin with, you need context regarding my previous arrangement. For over 5 years I had been happily relying upon Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) to satisfy all my customer monitoring and automation demands.
I discovered Keap intuitive to use and it dealt with everything I required– CRM, e-mail marketing, sales funnels, membership sites, and client assistance.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are designed to help local business maintain their clients while adding new ones effortlessly. Automate follow-ups with e-mails and texts, guaranteeing leads and customers get the appropriate messages at the right time. Usage website and social media types to enhance lead follow-up, and manage your development with easy appointment scheduling and lead monitoring. Boost sales with automated estimating, invoicing, and repayment handling, liberating your time. With Keap, local business can conserve 10 hours per week and increase earnings by 39%. Begin with a 14-day free trial, no bank card required.
Why we like Keap
Keap uses a detailed client relationship monitoring (CRM) and marketing automation solution tailored for local business and entrepreneurs. We value Keap’s concentrate on improving sales procedures and supporting consumer relationships with effective automation devices. The platform’s all-in-one technique integrates CRM, email marketing, invoicing, and task monitoring, making it especially appealing for organizations aiming to combine their technology stack.
Essentially, it simply functioned reliably with marginal difficulty or upkeep called for. My open and click-through rates were excellent (like 35% terrific). Automations ran smoothly without issues.
So why on earth was I lured to uproot my whole operational foundation from a system that functioned to attempt something unverified and untested?
In hindsight I can admit I got seduced by the alarm phone call of “shiny object disorder”. You recognize the sensation: when every person’s talking about a new device that will certainly reinvent your service … The grass commonly looks greener beyond, and I wondered whether GoHighLevel might minimize friction factors that I would certainly learned to endure for many years with Keap.
I resisted at first, however a couple of more aggravations led me to think perhaps it was time for a modification.
The Investment: Moving My Firm to GoHighLevel
Previously this year I chose to start. I registered for HighLevel’s Firm plan at $297/month, spending significantly greater than the $97/month starter cost.
This wasn’t a decision I ignored. I knew switching systems was mosting likely to require moving all my Keap data and basically rebuilding my entire technology facilities from square one utilizing all of the GoHighLevel integrations offered.
Right here’s an introduction of simply a few of the initiative needed:
- By hand exporting 20,000+ e-mail subscriber records
- Recreating dozens of automations and workflows
- Moving customer accounts, notes, and project information to the new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe payment integration
- Setting up landing pages, promotions, and sales funnels throughout again
- Learning a completely international UX and user interface layout
All in, I spent around 30-40 laborious hours of configuration work transitioning whatever over– as well as handling shed performance during the button.
Yet inevitably, it was a computed investment I was willing to make. I figured some short-term pain would repay with GoHighLevel providing a better long-lasting remedy for my service, Dripify. Oh just how incorrect I was …
It just took me concerning a month of hands-on use to recognize I had actually made a large error. The problems began accumulating rapidly, until it reached a point I needed to reduce my losses and switch over back to Keap totally.
Let’s walk through the nightmarish issues I ran into.
Protection Issues & Several Bugs
Provided GoHighLevel positioned itself as an all-in-one automation platform, I took care to thoroughly recreate every workflow from my old Keap account.
These consisted of sequences for onboarding new email clients, onboarding brand-new customers, automating follow-ups for webinar enrollments, sending out event reminders, taking care of subscription expiries and much more.
Whatever seemed to be functioning penalty … till unexpectedly it had not been. One early morning, I awoke to locate 171 totally unimportant emails had actually been sent out to individuals who ought to NOT have obtained them. This happened 3 days in a row, with a various set of 160 people every day.
I desperately attempted troubleshooting and rebuilding the automation from scratch. Yet the problem continued.
When I desperately reached out to their assistance group, they slightly asserted “web server problems” were responsible. But this explanation really did not make any sense, since the mistakes proceeded happening each early morning like clockwork unrelated to any kind of downtime.
In my mind, this substantial failing was completely undesirable and simply really did not help my organization. I have thousands of get in touches with counting on my automated campaigns running smoothly.
So if GoHighLevel was going to be absolutely unstable, exactly how could I leave mission-critical workflows and sensitive customer information to their innovation?
The unintuitive user interface just worsened these concerns …
Frustrating UX
Coming from Keap where every little thing was seamless and intuitive, GoHighLevel’s learning curve really felt high and complex.
Easy tasks like editing workflows involved digging through food selection systems that were all over the place. Trick setups were unexplainably spread in completely various areas. Moving between functions felt disjointed or complicated.
I’ll tell you what I mean by discussing their funnel builder as an instance. There were 3 separate settings panels to manage overall, individual, and item configurations. Yet for some insane factor, the web links to accessibility each of these core settings were expanded on opposite sides of the screen. What!?
As somebody who values tidy, thoughtful style, this seriously frustrated me.
It enhanced that GoHighLevel still felt like a work-in-progress rather than a polished item ready for prime-time usage. Their concerns seemed focused on stuffing in every feature under the sun, with poor functionality as an afterthought.
And speaking of features, I quickly understood the small cost tag featured pricey concessions …
Misleading Pricing GoHighLevel Voiceflow
Among GoHighLevel’s biggest selling factors is the inexpensive cost for accessibility to numerous features. Yet I swiftly discovered this inexpensive base price was deceptive.
They nickle-and-dimed users with occasional costs for core capability. Unexpectedly my charge card declarations had unclear $10 costs from GoHighLevel occasionally.
As it turned out, you obtain charged each time you send out an e-mail with their web servers. So for high quantity customers, this amounted to numerous bucks in unanticipated expenses.
In between these per-email costs and paying extra for deliverability attachments like Mailgun, my “budget friendly” GoHighLevel registration wound up costing substantially MORE than my Keap plan.
The low sticker price was tempting, but just not realistic in practice. This bait-and-switch left a poor taste in my mouth.
Email Fees Suffered
The last dealbreaker was seeing my thoroughly nurtured email open rates drop almost over night after switching to GoHighLevel.
Formerly, my audience engagement consistently struck 35-40% open prices in Keap month after month. Once I moved their records over to GoHighLevel, efficiency tanked immediately to a pathetic 9% open rate.
No matter how much I enhanced my sending out techniques or attempted every repairing technique, I might barely push open prices back right into the teenagers– still a 50%+ decrease from my previous benchmarks GoHighLevel Voiceflow.
Let me repeat: my exact same target market and emails suddenly had awful engagement. The only thing I can believe that would certainly be triggering this was whatever was happening behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a company so based on e-mail marketing, this was a big deal.
In between the crippling deliverability issues, hidden costs, busted features, and horrible user interface, I had lastly reached my restriction …
Why I Stop GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Simply 45 days after migrating my agency to GoHighLevel, I knew I had actually made a significant blunder. The disadvantages significantly surpassed any type of advantages.
No software is perfect, but the large quantity of issues was past acceptable.
At the end of the day, software application comes down to count on. If I can’t trust it to deal with essential functions competently or believe a supplier has my benefits in mind, after that it’s time to walk away– also after investing considerable time, money, and initiative moving.
So I made the hard call to reverse training course and return back to Keap completely just weeks after going all in on GoHighLevel. Let’s explore what I gained from this debacle.
Key Takeaways: What I Picked up from My GoHighLevel Mistake
My time with HighLevel can be summed up as a pricey misadventure. However in hindsight, it taught me a couple of key lessons:
- Stick to what works. Do not upset what’s functioning unless something is definitively far better across the board. Modification brings risk.
- Vet claims completely. Marketing buzz around brand-new software application often obscures larger underlying defects. Deep due diligence is crucial.
- Select simpleness over features. Properly designed devices should make your work life simpler, not a lot more challenging and messy.
- Transparency constructs trust fund. Nontransparent pricing, questionable reseller terms, and finger-pointing to evade troubles ruins trust fund.
- Look for objective reviews. Delighted assistance examines indicate much less if too much concerns suggest inadequate general use.
- Perfection is difficult. No solitary option can completely meet every one-of-a-kind organization demand. Locate the least-bad fit.
- Evolution over transformation. Incremental improvements usually outweigh dangerous wholesale reinvention of what currently functions fine.
In short, I learned to be much more unconvinced of “also good to be true” marketing cases and much less attracted by the allure of shiny new items. The devices you make use of daily ought to gain depend on with transparency and performance, not slick advertising.