As a company proprietor for over a decade, I rely on software and automation to improve procedures and provide outcomes. So when GoHighLevel emerged on the scene couple of years back, it certainly caught my interest How Does GoHighLevel Work.
The concept was attractive– an all-in-one customer administration platform with marketing, sales, and solution devices integrated together. As an entrepreneur always aiming to simplify and scale my service, it felt like a dream come true theoretically. That wouldn’t want a single service that does it all?
Yet in this thorough GoHighLevel review, I’ll take you inside my dreadful trip of attempting (and falling short) to switch over to this preferred brand-new software program. You’ll find out:
If you’re considering whether GoHighLevel is right for your own business demands, ideally you can learn from my painful mistakes and blew up assumptions.
Looter: I do NOT suggest GoHighLevel. If you require a CRM, begin with this listing of ideal CRMs rather. I utilize Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re searching for a sales, marketing, and project management choice to GoHighLevel, after that right here are a couple of we recommend.
Backstory: Why I Took Into Consideration Switching Over from Keap
To comprehend what attracted me to GoHighLevel to begin with, you need context about my previous setup. For over 5 years I had actually been happily relying upon Keap (previously Infusionsoft) to fulfill all my client monitoring and automation needs.
I found Keap user-friendly to utilize and it dealt with whatever I required– CRM, email marketing, sales funnels, subscription websites, and client assistance.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are made to assist small businesses keep their clients while adding brand-new ones easily. Automate follow-ups with e-mails and texts, guaranteeing leads and clients obtain the right messages at the correct time. Use website and social media kinds to enhance lead follow-up, and handle your development with very easy appointment scheduling and lead tracking. Boost sales with automated pricing estimate, invoicing, and settlement handling, freeing up your time. With Keap, local business can conserve 10 hours per week and increase revenue by 39%. Beginning with a 14-day free trial, no charge card required.
Why we like Keap
Keap uses a detailed consumer relationship management (CRM) and marketing automation remedy tailored for small businesses and business owners. We appreciate Keap’s concentrate on improving sales procedures and nurturing client connections via effective automation devices. The system’s all-in-one technique incorporates CRM, email marketing, invoicing, and task monitoring, making it particularly attractive for services wanting to combine their technology pile.
For the most part, it simply functioned accurately with minimal fuss or maintenance called for. My open and click-through rates were great (like 35% excellent). Automations ran smoothly without any problems.
So why in the world was I lured to uproot my whole operational structure from a system that worked to attempt something unverified and untested?
In hindsight I can confess I got attracted by the siren telephone call of “shiny object syndrome”. You understand the sensation: when every person’s talking about a new tool that will revolutionize your business … The turf typically looks greener beyond, and I wondered whether GoHighLevel may reduce rubbing points that I would certainly found out to endure throughout the years with Keap.
I resisted in the beginning, however a couple of even more stress led me to believe possibly it was time for an adjustment.
The Investment: Moving My Company to GoHighLevel
Earlier this year I determined to take the plunge. I registered for HighLevel’s Firm plan at $297/month, spending considerably greater than the $97/month starter expense.
This wasn’t a decision I took lightly. I understood changing platforms was mosting likely to require migrating all my Keap data and basically reconstructing my entire tech facilities from scratch making use of all of the GoHighLevel integrations available.
Right here’s an introduction of just some of the effort required:
- Manually exporting 20,000+ e-mail customer documents
- Recreating lots of automations and workflows
- Moving client accounts, notes, and task information to the brand-new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe invoicing integration
- Setting up landing pages, promos, and sales funnels all over again
- Learning an entirely international UX and interface layout
Done in, I spent around 30-40 laborious hours of arrangement work transitioning every little thing over– and also handling shed productivity throughout the button.
However eventually, it was a calculated financial investment I was willing to make. I figured some short-term discomfort would repay with GoHighLevel providing a far better lasting option for my business, Dripify. Oh how wrong I was …
It just took me concerning a month of hands-on usage to realize I had actually made a big blunder. The issues started piling up promptly, till it reached a factor I had to reduce my losses and switch back to Keap completely.
Allow’s go through the nightmarish troubles I came across.
Safety And Security Issues & Numerous Bugs
Offered GoHighLevel positioned itself as an all-in-one automation system, I made sure to diligently recreate every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These included sequences for onboarding brand-new e-mail subscribers, onboarding new clients, automating follow-ups for webinar enrollments, sending event tips, handling membership expirations and a lot more.
Whatever seemed to be functioning fine … until instantly it wasn’t. One morning, I awoke to find 171 totally pointless e-mails had actually been sent out to users that should NOT have actually obtained them. This occurred 3 days in a row, with a different batch of 160 individuals daily.
I hysterically attempted fixing and restoring the automation from scratch. However the trouble continued.
When I desperately connected to their assistance team, they vaguely claimed “web server concerns” were responsible. However this explanation really did not make any type of sense, considering that the errors continued occurring each morning like clockwork unrelated to any kind of downtime.
In my mind, this large failure was entirely inappropriate and just really did not work for my organization. I have hundreds of contacts relying on my automated campaigns running efficiently.
So if GoHighLevel was going to be completely unstable, exactly how could I entrust mission-critical workflows and sensitive customer information to their modern technology?
The unintuitive user interface only compounded these concerns …
Irritating UX
Coming from Keap where whatever was smooth and user-friendly, GoHighLevel’s learning curve really felt steep and difficult.
Simple tasks like modifying workflows entailed digging through menu systems that were all over the place. Secret setups were unexplainably spread in absolutely different sections. Relocating in between functions really felt disjointed or confusing.
I’ll inform you what I indicate by speaking about their funnel builder as an instance. There were 3 different settings panels to handle overall, individual, and product setups. Yet for some crazy reason, the web links to accessibility each of these core setups were spread out on contrary sides of the display. What!?
As somebody that values tidy, thoughtful style, this seriously irritated me.
It enhanced that GoHighLevel still seemed like a work-in-progress rather than a polished item prepared for prime-time use. Their top priorities seemed concentrated on stuffing in every feature imaginable, with poor functionality as a second thought.
And talking features, I soon understood the low cost tag featured pricey concessions …
Misleading Pricing How Does GoHighLevel Work
Among GoHighLevel’s biggest marketing points is the cost effective rate for accessibility to a lot of features. However I quickly learned this cheap base price was misleading.
They nickle-and-dimed individuals with sporadic costs for core performance. Instantly my charge card statements had vague $10 fees from GoHighLevel occasionally.
As it ended up, you obtain charged each time you send out an email through their web servers. So for high quantity users, this added up to hundreds of dollars in unforeseen costs.
In between these per-email costs and paying extra for deliverability attachments like Mailgun, my “budget friendly” GoHighLevel registration ended up setting you back considerably MORE than my Keap plan.
The reduced price tag was tempting, yet just not realistic in practice. This bait-and-switch left a bad preference in my mouth.
Email Rates Suffered
The last dealbreaker was seeing my thoroughly nurtured email open prices plunge virtually overnight after changing to GoHighLevel.
Previously, my audience interaction regularly hit 35-40% open prices in Keap month after month. But once I migrated their records over to GoHighLevel, efficiency tanked promptly to a pathetic 9% open rate.
Regardless of how much I maximized my sending techniques or attempted every troubleshooting trick, I could hardly push open rates back right into the teenagers– still a 50%+ decline from my previous standards How Does GoHighLevel Work.
Let me repeat: my exact same audience and emails instantly had horrible involvement. The only thing I can assume that would certainly be creating this was whatever was taking place behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a firm so based on e-mail marketing, this was a big deal.
Between the debilitating deliverability issues, hidden fees, broken features, and awful interface, I had actually ultimately reached my limitation …
Why I Give up GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Simply 45 days after moving my agency to GoHighLevel, I knew I had actually made a huge error. The disadvantages dramatically outweighed any type of benefits.
No software program is perfect, however the large volume of troubles was past acceptable.
At the end of the day, software program boils down to depend on. If I can’t trust it to handle essential functions capably or think a vendor has my best interests in mind, then it’s time to walk away– even after spending significant time, money, and initiative migrating.
So I made the difficult contact us to turn around training course and return back to Keap entirely simply weeks after going done in on GoHighLevel. Let’s explore what I learned from this fiasco.
Secret Takeaways: What I Picked up from My GoHighLevel Blunder
My time with HighLevel can be summarized as a pricey misadventure. But in hindsight, it instructed me a couple of essential lessons:
- Stay with what works. Do not upset what’s working unless something is definitively much better across the board. Adjustment brings threat.
- Vet claims thoroughly. Marketing hype around brand-new software application usually covers bigger underlying flaws. Deep due persistance is essential.
- Pick simpleness over features. Well-designed devices should make your work life less complicated, not much more challenging and unpleasant.
- Transparency constructs count on. Opaque pricing, unethical reseller terms, and finger-pointing to avert issues destroys trust fund.
- Seek objective testimonials. Delighted assistance examines mean less if too much issues imply inadequate overall usability.
- Excellence is impossible. No solitary option can perfectly satisfy every distinct business need. Discover the least-bad fit.
- Evolution over revolution. Step-by-step improvements typically exceed high-risk wholesale reinvention of what already functions fine.
In short, I found out to be extra doubtful of “as well great to be true” marketing insurance claims and much less attracted by the allure of glossy brand-new things. The tools you utilize daily must make count on via transparency and efficiency, not slick advertising.