As a firm proprietor for over a years, I depend on software application and automation to improve operations and deliver results. So when GoHighLevel arised on the scene few years back, it absolutely captured my focus GoHighLevel Web Designer Playbook.
The idea was attractive– an all-in-one customer monitoring platform with marketing, sales, and service tools integrated together. As an entrepreneur always seeking to simplify and scale my organization, it looked like a desire come true on paper. That wouldn’t desire a single option that does it all?
But in this thorough GoHighLevel testimonial, I’ll take you inside my devastating journey of trying (and falling short) to switch over to this preferred brand-new software program. You’ll learn:
If you’re taking into consideration whether GoHighLevel is right for your very own organization demands, hopefully you can gain from my uncomfortable blunders and inflated expectations.
Looter: I do NOT suggest GoHighLevel. If you need a CRM, start with this list of best CRMs instead. I make use of Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re looking for a sales, marketing, and job management alternative to GoHighLevel, then here are a couple of we suggest.
Backstory: Why I Considered Switching from Keap
To comprehend what attracted me to GoHighLevel in the first place, you need context regarding my previous arrangement. For over 5 years I had been gladly depending on Keap (previously Infusionsoft) to satisfy all my client management and automation needs.
I found Keap instinctive to make use of and it handled everything I required– CRM, email marketing, sales funnels, subscription sites, and client assistance.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are created to help local business maintain their clients while including new ones effortlessly. Automate follow-ups with emails and texts, ensuring leads and clients obtain the right messages at the correct time. Use website and social media sites forms to improve lead follow-up, and handle your growth with very easy appointment organizing and lead monitoring. Boost sales with automated estimating, invoicing, and payment handling, freeing up your time. With Keap, local business can save 10 hours per week and boost profits by 39%. Beginning with a 14-day free trial, no charge card called for.
Why we like Keap
Keap provides an extensive customer relationship management (CRM) and marketing automation service tailored for small businesses and business owners. We appreciate Keap’s focus on streamlining sales processes and supporting client partnerships via powerful automation tools. The system’s all-in-one approach combines CRM, email marketing, invoicing, and task management, making it specifically eye-catching for services wanting to combine their tech pile.
Generally, it just worked accurately with very little fuss or maintenance needed. My open and click-through prices were fantastic (like 35% excellent). Automations ran smoothly without issues.
So why in the world was I attracted to uproot my whole functional foundation from a system that worked to attempt something unproven and untested?
In knowledge I can confess I got seduced by the siren call of “shiny things syndrome”. You understand the feeling: when everyone’s discussing a new device that will reinvent your company … The lawn typically looks greener on the other side, and I questioned whether GoHighLevel could reduce rubbing points that I ‘d found out to tolerate throughout the years with Keap.
I resisted initially, yet a couple of more disappointments led me to believe maybe it was time for a change.
The Financial investment: Moving My Company to GoHighLevel
Previously this year I determined to start. I signed up for HighLevel’s Agency plan at $297/month, spending significantly more than the $97/month starter price.
This wasn’t a decision I ignored. I knew changing platforms was mosting likely to need moving all my Keap information and basically rebuilding my whole technology framework from the ground up using all of the GoHighLevel integrations offered.
Here’s an overview of simply a few of the effort needed:
- By hand exporting 20,000+ e-mail subscriber records
- Recreating dozens of automations and workflows
- Relocating client profiles, notes, and job data to the brand-new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe payment integration
- Establishing landing pages, coupons, and sales funnels all over once more
- Learning a completely foreign UX and user interface layout
Done in, I invested around 30-40 tedious hours of arrangement work transitioning whatever over– in addition to managing shed performance during the button.
But inevitably, it was a computed investment I agreed to make. I figured some temporary pain would certainly settle with GoHighLevel giving 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 usage to understand I had made a huge blunder. The problems started piling up swiftly, until it got to a factor I had to reduce my losses and change back to Keap completely.
Let’s walk through the horrible issues I ran into.
Safety Issues & Numerous Vermin
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 e-mail clients, onboarding brand-new customers, automating follow-ups for webinar registrations, sending event reminders, handling membership expiries and much more.
Every little thing appeared to be working penalty … until suddenly it had not been. One morning, I woke up to discover 171 entirely pointless emails had been sent out to customers that need to NOT have actually gotten them. This happened three days straight, with a various batch of 160 people daily.
I desperately tried repairing and restoring the automation from square one. But the issue persisted.
When I seriously connected to their support team, they vaguely asserted “web server issues” were responsible. Yet this explanation really did not make any sense, considering that the errors proceeded happening each morning like clockwork unrelated to any type of downtime.
In my mind, this massive failure was entirely inappropriate and just really did not benefit my business. I have thousands of contacts depending on my automated campaigns running efficiently.
So if GoHighLevel was mosting likely to be totally undependable, how could I entrust mission-critical workflows and sensitive customer information to their modern technology?
The unintuitive interface only compounded these issues …
Frustrating UX
Originating from Keap where every little thing was seamless and intuitive, GoHighLevel’s learning contour felt steep and complex.
Simple jobs like editing and enhancing workflows entailed digging via food selection systems that were all over the place. Key settings were unexplainably scattered in totally different sections. Moving in between features felt disjointed or confusing.
I’ll inform you what I mean by speaking about their funnel builder as an instance. There were 3 separate setups panels to take care of overall, individual, and product arrangements. Yet for some crazy factor, the links to accessibility each of these core setups were spread out on contrary sides of the screen. What!?
As someone who values clean, thoughtful style, this seriously annoyed me.
It strengthened that GoHighLevel still felt like a work-in-progress as opposed to a sleek product ready for prime-time usage. Their top priorities appeared concentrated on cramming in every feature under the sun, with inadequate usability as a second thought.
And speaking of features, I quickly understood the small cost tag featured expensive compromises …
Misleading Pricing GoHighLevel Web Designer Playbook
Among GoHighLevel’s largest marketing points is the economical price for access to many features. Yet I quickly discovered this cheap base expense was deceptive.
They nickle-and-dimed individuals with sporadic charges for core functionality. Instantly my credit card declarations had vague $10 charges from GoHighLevel occasionally.
As it ended up, you obtain charged each time you send out an e-mail via their web servers. So for high volume individuals, this amounted to hundreds of dollars in unanticipated expenses.
In between these per-email costs and paying additional for deliverability attachments like Mailgun, my “budget friendly” GoHighLevel membership wound up costing significantly greater than my Keap plan.
The low sticker price was alluring, but simply not sensible in practice. This bait-and-switch left a negative preference in my mouth.
Email Rates Suffered
The final dealbreaker was seeing my very carefully nurtured e-mail open prices plunge almost overnight after changing to GoHighLevel.
Formerly, my target market involvement regularly hit 35-40% open rates in Keap month after month. Once I migrated their documents over to GoHighLevel, performance tanked quickly to a pitiful 9% open price.
No matter how much I maximized my sending techniques or tried every repairing trick, I can barely nudge open rates back right into the teens– still a 50%+ decline from my previous standards GoHighLevel Web Designer Playbook.
Let me repeat: my exact same audience and emails instantly had horrible engagement. The only point I could think that would certainly be triggering this was whatever was occurring behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a firm so based on email marketing, this was a big deal.
Between the crippling deliverability problems, concealed fees, damaged features, and horrible interface, I had lastly reached my limitation …
Why I Give up GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Simply 45 days after moving my firm to GoHighLevel, I recognized I had actually made a significant blunder. The disadvantages substantially outweighed any type of advantages.
No software is excellent, but the sheer volume of issues was past appropriate.
At the end of the day, software program comes down to depend on. If I can’t trust it to take care of important features competently or believe a vendor has my benefits in mind, after that it’s time to leave– also after investing substantial time, money, and initiative migrating.
So I made the hard contact us to reverse course and return back to Keap entirely just weeks after going done in on GoHighLevel. Allow’s discover what I learned from this ordeal.
Secret Takeaways: What I Gained from My GoHighLevel Mistake
My time with HighLevel can be summed up as a costly misadventure. Yet in hindsight, it showed me a few essential lessons:
- Stick to what works. Don’t disturb what’s working unless something is definitively far better across the board. Modification brings risk.
- Vet asserts extensively. Marketing hype around brand-new software program frequently covers bigger underlying problems. Deep due diligence is crucial.
- Choose simplicity over features. Well-designed tools need to make your work life less complicated, not a lot more difficult and unpleasant.
- Openness constructs trust. Opaque pricing, questionable reseller terms, and finger-pointing to evade troubles ruins count on.
- Look for unbiased reviews. Happy assistance assesses suggest less if excessive concerns indicate bad overall usability.
- Perfection is difficult. No solitary service can flawlessly fulfill every unique service demand. Discover the least-bad fit.
- Advancement over transformation. Incremental improvements commonly exceed high-risk wholesale reinvention of what already works fine.
In other words, I found out to be extra hesitant of “also good to be true” marketing cases and much less attracted by the allure of glossy new objects. The tools you utilize daily should make count on with transparency and efficiency, not glossy advertising.