As a company owner for over a decade, I depend on software and automation to enhance operations and provide outcomes. So when GoHighLevel emerged on the scene couple of years back, it absolutely captured my interest GoHighLevel Yearly Plan.
The idea was attractive– an all-in-one customer administration system with marketing, sales, and service devices integrated with each other. As a business owner constantly seeking to simplify and scale my business, it appeared like a dream come true on paper. Who would not desire a single service that does it all?
However in this in-depth GoHighLevel testimonial, I’ll take you inside my disastrous journey of trying (and stopping working) to change to this prominent new software application. You’ll discover:
If you’re considering whether GoHighLevel is right for your very own service demands, with any luck you can pick up from my excruciating errors and blew up expectations.
Looter: I do NOT advise GoHighLevel. If you require a CRM, begin with this listing of ideal CRMs instead. I make use of Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re searching for a sales, marketing, and task management option to GoHighLevel, then here are a couple of we recommend.
Backstory: Why I Thought About Switching Over from Keap
To understand what attracted me to GoHighLevel to begin with, you require context concerning my previous configuration. For over 5 years I had actually been happily relying upon Keap (previously Infusionsoft) to meet all my customer monitoring and automation requirements.
I located Keap intuitive to make use of and it took care of every little thing I required– CRM, e-mail marketing, sales funnels, membership websites, and customer support.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are made to help local business maintain their clients while adding brand-new ones easily. Automate follow-ups with emails and texts, ensuring leads and clients obtain the appropriate messages at the correct time. Use web site and social media kinds to improve lead follow-up, and manage your growth with very easy visit organizing and lead tracking. Boost sales with automated quoting, invoicing, and repayment handling, maximizing your time. With Keap, small businesses can save 10 hours per week and rise revenue by 39%. Begin with a 14-day free trial, no credit card called for.
Why we like Keap
Keap supplies an extensive client partnership monitoring (CRM) and marketing automation solution tailored for small businesses and entrepreneurs. We value Keap’s focus on simplifying sales procedures and nurturing customer relationships through powerful automation tools. The platform’s all-in-one approach combines CRM, e-mail marketing, invoicing, and job monitoring, making it especially eye-catching for services looking to settle their technology stack.
For the most part, it simply worked accurately with marginal hassle or upkeep called for. My open and click-through rates were excellent (like 35% great). Automations ran efficiently without any issues.
So why on earth was I attracted to uproot my entire functional structure from a system that functioned to attempt something unproven and untried?
In knowledge I can admit I obtained seduced by the siren phone call of “glossy things syndrome”. You recognize the sensation: when everyone’s speaking about a brand-new device that will reinvent your organization … The lawn commonly looks greener on the other side, and I wondered whether GoHighLevel may minimize friction factors that I would certainly found out to tolerate over the years with Keap.
I withstood at first, however a few even more frustrations led me to believe perhaps it was time for an adjustment.
The Investment: Migrating My Firm to GoHighLevel
Earlier this year I determined to start. I signed up for HighLevel’s Agency plan at $297/month, spending considerably more than the $97/month starter price.
This wasn’t a decision I ignored. I recognized switching platforms was mosting likely to require migrating all my Keap information and basically reconstructing my whole tech infrastructure from scratch utilizing every one 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 client documents
- Recreating loads of automations and workflows
- Relocating customer profiles, notes, and project data to the new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe payment integration
- Setting up landing pages, promos, and sales funnels throughout once again
- Learning a totally international UX and user interface style
All in, I invested around 30-40 tiresome hours of configuration work transitioning every little thing over– as well as handling shed efficiency during the switch.
However inevitably, it was a calculated investment I wanted to make. I figured some temporary discomfort would settle with GoHighLevel supplying a far better long-lasting solution for my organization, Dripify. Oh how incorrect I was …
It only took me regarding a month of hands-on usage to recognize I had actually made a large blunder. The problems started piling up swiftly, till it reached a point I needed to cut my losses and switch over back to Keap entirely.
Allow’s go through the horrible troubles I encountered.
Security Issues & Several Vermin
Provided GoHighLevel placed itself as an all-in-one automation platform, I made sure to carefully recreate every workflow from my old Keap account.
These included series for onboarding new email clients, onboarding brand-new customers, automating follow-ups for webinar enrollments, sending event tips, handling membership expiries and far more.
Everything appeared to be working fine … up until suddenly it wasn’t. One early morning, I woke up to find 171 completely pointless emails had been sent to users that need to NOT have gotten them. This occurred three days straight, with a different set of 160 individuals each day.
I desperately attempted troubleshooting and rebuilding the automation from the ground up. Yet the trouble lingered.
When I desperately connected to their assistance team, they vaguely declared “web server concerns” were responsible. Yet this description didn’t make any kind of sense, since the mistakes proceeded taking place each morning like clockwork unrelated to any downtime.
In my mind, this enormous failure was completely undesirable and simply really did not benefit my organization. I have countless contacts relying upon my automated campaigns running smoothly.
So if GoHighLevel was mosting likely to be totally unstable, exactly how could I entrust mission-critical workflows and delicate customer information to their modern technology?
The unintuitive interface only worsened these concerns …
Frustrating UX
Coming from Keap where whatever was seamless and user-friendly, GoHighLevel’s learning contour felt steep and difficult.
Basic jobs like editing workflows involved digging with food selection systems that were all over the place. Key setups were unexplainably spread in absolutely different areas. Relocating between functions felt disjointed or complex.
I’ll inform you what I suggest by speaking about their funnel builder as an example. There were 3 separate settings panels to take care of general, individual, and item arrangements. Yet for some insane factor, the links to accessibility each of these core settings were expanded on contrary sides of the display. What!?
As somebody who values tidy, thoughtful style, this seriously upset me.
It reinforced that GoHighLevel still felt like a work-in-progress rather than a refined product ready for prime-time use. Their concerns appeared concentrated on stuffing in every feature under the sun, with bad usability as a second thought.
And talking features, I quickly understood the small cost tag came with expensive concessions …
Deceptive Pricing GoHighLevel Yearly Plan
Among GoHighLevel’s largest selling points is the budget-friendly price for accessibility to numerous features. Yet I quickly discovered this economical base expense was misleading.
They nickle-and-dimed customers with sporadic fees for core functionality. Instantly my bank card statements had obscure $10 charges from GoHighLevel occasionally.
As it turned out, you obtain charged whenever you send an e-mail via their web servers. So for high quantity customers, this added up to thousands of dollars in unanticipated prices.
Between these per-email charges and paying extra for deliverability add-ons like Mailgun, my “economical” GoHighLevel subscription ended up costing substantially greater than my Keap plan.
The reduced price tag was appealing, however simply not practical in practice. This bait-and-switch left a negative taste in my mouth.
Email Fees Suffered
The last dealbreaker was seeing my meticulously nurtured email open rates plummet practically overnight after changing to GoHighLevel.
Formerly, my target market involvement constantly struck 35-40% open rates in Keap month after month. But once I migrated their records over to GoHighLevel, performance tanked immediately to a worthless 9% open price.
Regardless of just how much I enhanced my sending out practices or attempted every troubleshooting method, I can barely push open rates back into the teens– still a 50%+ decline from my previous criteria GoHighLevel Yearly Plan.
Let me repeat: my exact same audience and e-mails unexpectedly had horrible involvement. The only thing I can assume that would certainly be causing this was whatever was occurring behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For an agency so based on e-mail marketing, this was a big deal.
Between the crippling deliverability problems, hidden costs, broken features, and horrible user interface, I had actually ultimately reached my limitation …
Why I Stop GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Simply 45 days after moving my company to GoHighLevel, I understood I had made a significant error. The disadvantages significantly surpassed any type of benefits.
No software is excellent, yet the sheer volume of issues was past acceptable.
At the end of the day, software comes down to trust. If I can’t trust it to deal with important features properly or believe a vendor has my best interests in mind, then it’s time to walk away– even after investing considerable time, money, and initiative migrating.
So I made the difficult contact us to turn around course and return back to Keap completely just weeks after going done in on GoHighLevel. Let’s discover what I learned from this fiasco.
Secret Takeaways: What I Learned From My GoHighLevel Blunder
My time with HighLevel can be summed up as an expensive misadventure. Yet in knowledge, it educated me a few essential lessons:
- Stay with what jobs. Don’t upset what’s functioning unless something is definitively far better across the board. Adjustment brings risk.
- Veterinarian declares thoroughly. Marketing buzz around new software program often obscures bigger underlying imperfections. Deep due diligence is necessary.
- Choose simplicity over features. Well-designed tools should make your job life simpler, not extra difficult and messy.
- Transparency builds trust. Nontransparent pricing, dubious reseller terms, and finger-pointing to avert issues damages trust.
- Seek unbiased testimonials. Happy assistance examines imply much less if excessive issues imply poor overall usability.
- Excellence is difficult. No solitary option can completely fulfill every unique service demand. Locate the least-bad fit.
- Advancement over transformation. Incremental renovations usually exceed risky wholesale reinvention of what already functions penalty.
In other words, I learned to be more unconvinced of “too good to be real” marketing cases and much less lured by the attraction of shiny new things. The devices you make use of daily ought to make trust via openness and efficiency, not slick advertising.