As a firm owner for over a years, I rely upon software program and automation to enhance procedures and provide results. So when GoHighLevel arised on the scene couple of years back, it definitely caught my interest GoHighLevel Website Templates.
The idea was appealing– an all-in-one customer management platform with marketing, sales, and service devices incorporated together. As a business owner always seeking to streamline and scale my organization, it looked like a dream happened theoretically. Who wouldn’t desire a single service that does it all?
But in this extensive GoHighLevel review, I’ll take you inside my devastating trip of attempting (and stopping working) to switch over to this prominent new software. You’ll learn:
If you’re taking into consideration whether GoHighLevel is right for your very own company demands, ideally you can gain from my unpleasant blunders and blew up assumptions.
Spoiler: I do NOT suggest GoHighLevel. If you require a CRM, begin with this list of finest CRMs instead. I use Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re seeking a sales, marketing, and project monitoring option to GoHighLevel, then below are a few we advise.
Backstory: Why I Considered Switching Over from Keap
To understand what attracted me to GoHighLevel in the first place, you require context about my previous configuration. For over 5 years I had actually been gladly relying upon Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) to meet all my customer monitoring and automation requirements.
I located Keap intuitive to use and it dealt with every little thing I required– CRM, e-mail marketing, sales funnels, membership websites, and customer assistance.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are designed to aid small companies keep their clients while including brand-new ones easily. Automate follow-ups with emails and messages, ensuring leads and clients get the best messages at the right time. Usage site and social media forms to improve lead follow-up, and handle your development with easy consultation scheduling and lead monitoring. Boost sales with automated estimating, invoicing, and repayment processing, liberating your time. With Keap, local business can conserve 10 hours each week and rise earnings by 39%. Start with a 14-day free trial, no credit card needed.
Why we like Keap
Keap provides an extensive consumer relationship administration (CRM) and marketing automation service customized for local business and entrepreneurs. We value Keap’s focus on streamlining sales procedures and nurturing client connections via effective automation devices. The platform’s all-in-one technique integrates CRM, email marketing, invoicing, and task management, making it specifically appealing for services looking to settle their technology stack.
For the most part, it just functioned reliably with minimal difficulty or upkeep called for. My open and click-through prices were wonderful (like 35% terrific). Automations ran smoothly without any issues.
So why in the world was I lured to uproot my whole functional structure from a system that functioned to attempt something unproven and untested?
In hindsight I can admit I got seduced by the alarm phone call of “shiny object syndrome”. You recognize the sensation: when everybody’s discussing a brand-new tool that will certainly revolutionize your service … The yard often looks greener beyond, and I asked yourself whether GoHighLevel could decrease friction factors that I would certainly discovered to endure over the years with Keap.
I stood up to initially, but a couple of more frustrations led me to assume maybe it was time for a modification.
The Investment: Migrating My Agency to GoHighLevel
Previously this year I determined to take the plunge. I enrolled in HighLevel’s Firm plan at $297/month, spending dramatically more than the $97/month starter price.
This had not been a decision I ignored. I understood changing platforms was going to call for migrating all my Keap data and basically restoring my whole tech facilities from square one making use of every one of the GoHighLevel integrations readily available.
Here’s an introduction of just several of the effort needed:
- Manually exporting 20,000+ e-mail customer documents
- Recreating dozens of automations and workflows
- Moving client accounts, notes, and task data to the brand-new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe invoicing integration
- Setting up landing pages, promotions, and sales funnels all over once more
- Learning a totally foreign UX and interface layout
All in, I spent around 30-40 tiresome hours of configuration job transitioning every little thing over– not to mention handling lost productivity during the switch.
However inevitably, it was a computed financial investment I agreed to make. I figured some short-term pain would repay with GoHighLevel providing a far better long-term solution for my business, Dripify. Oh exactly how incorrect I was …
It just took me concerning a month of hands-on usage to recognize I had made a big mistake. The problems began accumulating rapidly, till it reached a factor I had to reduce my losses and switch back to Keap totally.
Let’s walk through the horrible issues I experienced.
Protection Issues & Several Vermin
Offered GoHighLevel positioned itself as an all-in-one automation platform, I took care to diligently recreate each and every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These included sequences for onboarding brand-new email customers, onboarding brand-new customers, automating follow-ups for webinar registrations, sending event tips, taking care of membership expiries and far more.
Whatever appeared to be functioning penalty … up until instantly it wasn’t. One early morning, I woke up to locate 171 totally unimportant emails had actually been sent out to users that need to NOT have obtained them. This occurred 3 days straight, with a various set of 160 individuals each day.
I anxiously tried repairing and reconstructing the automation from the ground up. Yet the trouble lingered.
When I frantically connected to their support team, they slightly declared “web server problems” were at fault. Yet this description really did not make any type of sense, considering that the mistakes proceeded taking place each early morning like clockwork unconnected to any downtime.
In my mind, this huge failing was entirely undesirable and just really did not help my service. I have countless calls depending on my automated campaigns running efficiently.
So if GoHighLevel was going to be entirely unstable, exactly how could I leave mission-critical workflows and delicate client data to their modern technology?
The unintuitive user interface only worsened these problems …
Irritating UX
Originating from Keap where whatever was smooth and instinctive, GoHighLevel’s learning curve really felt high and complicated.
Easy jobs like editing workflows entailed excavating with food selection systems that were all over the place. Key settings were unexplainably spread in completely different sections. Relocating between features felt disjointed or complex.
I’ll tell you what I imply by discussing their funnel builder as an example. There were 3 different settings panels to handle total, individual, and item setups. Yet for some crazy reason, the web links to access each of these core setups were spread out on opposite sides of the screen. What!?
As a person who values tidy, thoughtful style, this seriously irritated me.
It enhanced that GoHighLevel still felt like a work-in-progress rather than a refined product all set for prime-time usage. Their priorities appeared concentrated on stuffing in every feature under the sun, with bad usability as an afterthought.
And speaking of features, I quickly understood the small cost tag included costly compromises …
Misleading Pricing GoHighLevel Website Templates
One of GoHighLevel’s most significant marketing points is the cost effective price for accessibility to so many features. But I rapidly learned this cheap base cost was deceptive.
They nickle-and-dimed individuals with erratic fees for core functionality. Suddenly my credit card declarations had vague $10 costs from GoHighLevel here and there.
As it ended up, you get charged whenever you send an e-mail through their servers. So for high quantity users, this amounted to numerous bucks in unanticipated prices.
Between these per-email fees and paying additional for deliverability add-ons like Mailgun, my “economical” GoHighLevel registration wound up costing considerably greater than my Keap plan.
The low price tag was alluring, but simply not practical in practice. This bait-and-switch left a poor preference in my mouth.
Email Fees Suffered
The final dealbreaker was seeing my thoroughly supported email open prices plunge nearly overnight after switching over to GoHighLevel.
Previously, my audience interaction constantly hit 35-40% open prices in Keap month after month. Once I moved their records over to GoHighLevel, performance tanked quickly to a useless 9% open rate.
Despite just how much I enhanced my sending out practices or tried every repairing trick, I can hardly nudge open rates back right into the teenagers– still a 50%+ decrease from my previous benchmarks GoHighLevel Website Templates.
Let me repeat: my exact same audience and e-mails suddenly had dreadful interaction. The only thing I might assume that would be triggering this was whatever was happening behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For an agency so dependent on e-mail marketing, this was a big deal.
In between the debilitating deliverability issues, concealed fees, busted features, and horrible interface, I had lastly reached my limitation …
Why I Give up GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Just 45 days after migrating my company to GoHighLevel, I knew I had actually made a substantial mistake. The disadvantages dramatically exceeded any benefits.
No software is excellent, yet the large volume of troubles was beyond acceptable.
At the end of the day, software program boils down to depend on. If I can not trust it to manage critical features capably or believe a supplier has my benefits in mind, then it’s time to leave– also after spending substantial time, money, and effort migrating.
So I made the difficult phone call to turn around course and return back to Keap totally just weeks after going all in on GoHighLevel. Let’s explore what I gained from this debacle.
Trick Takeaways: What I Picked up from My GoHighLevel Blunder
My time with HighLevel can be summed up as a pricey misadventure. However in knowledge, it educated me a few crucial lessons:
- Adhere to what works. Don’t distress what’s working unless something is definitively better across the board. Modification brings danger.
- Veterinarian asserts extensively. Marketing buzz around brand-new software typically obscures larger underlying flaws. Deep due diligence is necessary.
- Select simplicity over features. Well-designed tools need to make your work life much easier, not a lot more complicated and untidy.
- Openness builds trust fund. Nontransparent pricing, questionable reseller terms, and finger-pointing to evade problems destroys depend on.
- Seek objective reviews. Pleased assistance assesses mean less if too much problems suggest poor general functionality.
- Perfection is difficult. No solitary remedy can completely meet every one-of-a-kind organization requirement. Discover the least-bad fit.
- Advancement over revolution. Step-by-step improvements commonly surpass high-risk wholesale reinvention of what currently works fine.
Basically, I discovered to be more doubtful of “as well excellent to be true” marketing cases and less lured by the allure of glossy brand-new items. The devices you utilize daily ought to gain trust fund via transparency and efficiency, not glossy advertising.