As a firm proprietor for over a decade, I rely upon software and automation to enhance operations and deliver results. So when GoHighLevel arised on the scene few years back, it most definitely captured my interest GoHighLevel Vs Constant Contact.
The idea was attractive– an all-in-one client administration platform with marketing, sales, and solution tools integrated together. As an entrepreneur always seeking to streamline and scale my business, it seemed like a dream come to life on paper. That would not want a single solution that does it all?
Yet in this in-depth GoHighLevel evaluation, I’ll take you inside my disastrous trip of trying (and falling short) to change to this popular new software application. You’ll discover:
If you’re thinking about whether GoHighLevel is right for your own business requirements, ideally you can gain from my unpleasant errors and inflated assumptions.
Looter: I do NOT recommend GoHighLevel. If you require a CRM, begin with this listing of ideal CRMs rather. I use Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re trying to find a sales, marketing, and task management choice to GoHighLevel, after that below are a couple of we recommend.
Backstory: Why I Took Into Consideration Switching from Keap
To comprehend what attracted me to GoHighLevel to begin with, you need context about my previous arrangement. For over 5 years I had actually been happily depending on Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) to satisfy all my customer management and automation requirements.
I located Keap user-friendly to make use of and it managed everything I required– CRM, e-mail marketing, sales funnels, membership sites, and customer assistance.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are created to assist small businesses maintain their customers while including new ones effortlessly. Automate follow-ups with emails and messages, ensuring leads and clients get the best messages at the right time. Usage web site and social networks types to enhance lead follow-up, and manage your growth with very easy consultation scheduling and lead monitoring. Boost sales with automated estimating, invoicing, and repayment handling, maximizing your time. With Keap, small businesses can save 10 hours weekly and boost profits by 39%. Start with a 14-day free trial, no bank card called for.
Why we like Keap
Keap provides a comprehensive customer connection administration (CRM) and marketing automation remedy customized for small businesses and business owners. We appreciate Keap’s focus on simplifying sales procedures and nurturing customer partnerships via effective automation devices. The platform’s all-in-one technique integrates CRM, e-mail marketing, invoicing, and task management, making it specifically attractive for organizations looking to consolidate their tech pile.
For the most part, it simply functioned accurately with minimal fuss or maintenance called for. My open and click-through prices were terrific (like 35% great). Automations ran smoothly with no problems.
So why in the world was I lured to uproot my whole operational structure from a system that worked to try something unverified and untested?
In hindsight I can confess I got seduced by the alarm phone call of “glossy things disorder”. You know the feeling: when everybody’s discussing a new device that will certainly transform your company … The grass usually looks greener on the other side, and I wondered whether GoHighLevel may decrease rubbing points that I would certainly discovered to tolerate over the years with Keap.
I stood up to initially, yet a few even more irritations led me to assume perhaps it was time for a change.
The Financial investment: Moving My Company to GoHighLevel
Earlier this year I decided to start. I signed up for HighLevel’s Agency plan at $297/month, investing substantially more than the $97/month starter price.
This wasn’t a choice I took lightly. I recognized switching over platforms was mosting likely to need migrating all my Keap information and essentially restoring my entire tech infrastructure from scratch making use of every one of the GoHighLevel integrations available.
Here’s an introduction of just several of the effort needed:
- By hand exporting 20,000+ e-mail customer records
- Recreating loads of automations and workflows
- Relocating customer profiles, notes, and project information to the brand-new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe payment integration
- Establishing landing pages, promos, and sales funnels throughout again
- Learning a completely international UX and user interface style
Done in, I invested around 30-40 tiresome hours of setup work transitioning everything over– as well as taking care of shed productivity during the switch.
Yet eventually, it was a calculated financial investment I was willing to make. I figured some short-term discomfort would certainly settle with GoHighLevel providing a much better lasting service for my organization, Dripify. Oh just how wrong I was …
It just took me about a month of hands-on use to realize I had made a huge error. The issues started accumulating swiftly, till it reached a point I needed to reduce my losses and change back to Keap totally.
Let’s walk through the nightmarish issues I encountered.
Safety Issues & Several Bugs
Provided GoHighLevel placed itself as an all-in-one automation platform, I took care to thoroughly recreate every workflow from my old Keap account.
These included sequences for onboarding new e-mail subscribers, onboarding new customers, automating follow-ups for webinar enrollments, sending event tips, taking care of membership expirations and far more.
Every little thing seemed to be functioning penalty … till unexpectedly it had not been. One morning, I woke up to find 171 completely irrelevant emails had been sent out to customers who should NOT have obtained them. This happened 3 days straight, with a different batch of 160 people daily.
I hysterically attempted fixing and reconstructing the automation from scratch. Yet the problem lingered.
When I desperately reached out to their support team, they slightly asserted “server problems” were responsible. But this explanation really did not make any kind of sense, since the errors proceeded taking place each early morning like clockwork unassociated to any type of downtime.
In my mind, this substantial failure was entirely undesirable and simply didn’t benefit my business. I have hundreds of get in touches with relying upon my automated campaigns running efficiently.
So if GoHighLevel was mosting likely to be completely unstable, exactly how could I entrust mission-critical workflows and sensitive client information to their modern technology?
The unintuitive user interface only intensified these problems …
Frustrating UX
Originating from Keap where everything was smooth and intuitive, GoHighLevel’s learning contour really felt high and difficult.
Straightforward tasks like modifying workflows included digging via menu systems that were all over the place. Trick setups were unexplainably scattered in entirely various sections. Moving in between features really felt disjointed or complex.
I’ll tell you what I indicate by discussing their funnel builder as an example. There were 3 separate settings panels to manage total, specific, and product arrangements. Yet for some crazy factor, the web links to accessibility each of these core setups were expanded on contrary sides of the display. What!?
As someone that values tidy, thoughtful style, this seriously annoyed me.
It strengthened that GoHighLevel still seemed like a work-in-progress as opposed to a refined product ready for prime-time use. Their top priorities appeared concentrated on packing in every feature under the sun, with inadequate functionality as a second thought.
And talking features, I soon recognized the low cost tag featured costly concessions …
Misleading Pricing GoHighLevel Vs Constant Contact
One of GoHighLevel’s greatest marketing factors is the cost effective price for accessibility to numerous features. However I promptly learned this affordable base cost was misleading.
They nickle-and-dimed users with occasional costs for core performance. Unexpectedly my charge card declarations had vague $10 costs from GoHighLevel here and there.
As it ended up, you obtain charged each time you send an email via their web servers. So for high quantity customers, this added up to numerous dollars in unexpected expenses.
In between these per-email fees and paying additional for deliverability attachments like Mailgun, my “budget friendly” GoHighLevel membership ended up costing substantially greater than my Keap plan.
The low sticker price was alluring, but just not realistic in practice. This bait-and-switch left a bad taste in my mouth.
Email Rates Suffered
The last dealbreaker was seeing my carefully supported e-mail open prices plummet almost over night after changing to GoHighLevel.
Formerly, my target market involvement continually hit 35-40% open prices in Keap month after month. Once I migrated their documents over to GoHighLevel, efficiency tanked immediately to a pitiful 9% open price.
No matter how much I maximized my sending out methods or attempted every fixing technique, I could barely nudge open rates back right into the teens– still a 50%+ decline from my previous standards GoHighLevel Vs Constant Contact.
Let me repeat: my exact same audience and e-mails all of a sudden had dreadful involvement. The only point I could believe that would certainly be triggering this was whatever was occurring behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For an agency so depending on email marketing, this was a big deal.
In between the crippling deliverability problems, hidden charges, busted features, and terrible interface, I had finally reached my restriction …
Why I Stop GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Just 45 days after migrating my agency to GoHighLevel, I knew I had made a big blunder. The cons drastically outweighed any kind of benefits.
No software is perfect, yet the large volume of problems was beyond appropriate.
At the end of the day, software program boils down to depend on. If I can not trust it to deal with important functions effectively or believe a vendor has my benefits in mind, after that it’s time to walk away– also after investing substantial time, money, and initiative migrating.
So I made the tough call to turn around training course and return back to Keap totally just weeks after going done in on GoHighLevel. Allow’s discover what I gained from this debacle.
Key Takeaways: What I Picked up from My GoHighLevel Mistake
My time with HighLevel can be summarized as a pricey accident. But in hindsight, it taught me a couple of vital lessons:
- Adhere to what jobs. Don’t upset what’s working unless something is definitively much better across the board. Change brings danger.
- Vet claims extensively. Marketing buzz around new software program often covers bigger underlying flaws. Deep due persistance is essential.
- Pick simplicity over features. Well-designed devices must make your job life much easier, not more difficult and messy.
- Transparency builds depend on. Nontransparent pricing, unethical reseller terms, and finger-pointing to avert troubles ruins trust.
- Seek impartial evaluations. Pleased assistance reviews mean less if extreme concerns suggest inadequate overall functionality.
- Excellence is impossible. No solitary service can completely meet every distinct business requirement. Locate the least-bad fit.
- Development over transformation. Step-by-step enhancements usually exceed dangerous wholesale reinvention of what currently functions fine.
Basically, I found out to be more unconvinced of “as well great to be true” marketing claims and less attracted by the attraction of glossy new items. The tools you utilize daily should earn depend on through openness and performance, not glossy advertising.