As a company proprietor for over a decade, I depend on software and automation to enhance procedures and provide results. So when GoHighLevel arised on the scene couple of years back, it certainly captured my focus How To Sign Up For GoHighLevel.
The concept was appealing– an all-in-one client administration system with marketing, sales, and solution devices incorporated together. As a business owner constantly aiming to streamline and scale my business, it seemed like a desire come true on paper. That wouldn’t want a single solution that does it all?
But in this thorough GoHighLevel evaluation, I’ll take you inside my devastating trip of trying (and falling short) to change to this preferred new software program. You’ll discover:
If you’re thinking about whether GoHighLevel is right for your own company requirements, ideally you can pick up from my agonizing errors and blew up assumptions.
Looter: I do NOT recommend GoHighLevel. If you require a CRM, start with this listing of ideal CRMs rather. 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 few we advise.
Backstory: Why I Thought About Switching Over from Keap
To recognize what attracted me to GoHighLevel in the first place, you require context regarding my previous setup. For over 5 years I had been happily depending on Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) to satisfy all my customer administration and automation needs.
I discovered Keap intuitive to utilize and it managed every little thing I needed– CRM, e-mail marketing, sales funnels, membership websites, and customer assistance.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are designed to assist small companies maintain their customers while adding brand-new ones easily. Automate follow-ups with e-mails and texts, ensuring leads and customers get the appropriate messages at the correct time. Use internet site and social networks forms to enhance lead follow-up, and manage your growth with easy appointment scheduling and lead monitoring. Boost sales with automated estimating, invoicing, and payment handling, liberating your time. With Keap, small businesses can save 10 hours each week and boost revenue by 39%. Start with a 14-day free trial, no charge card required.
Why we like Keap
Keap supplies an extensive consumer relationship administration (CRM) and marketing automation service tailored for small companies and business owners. We appreciate Keap’s focus on streamlining sales procedures and nurturing client connections with powerful automation tools. The platform’s all-in-one method combines CRM, e-mail marketing, invoicing, and task monitoring, making it particularly eye-catching for companies wanting to settle their technology pile.
Generally, it just worked dependably with marginal fuss or upkeep called for. My open and click-through prices were terrific (like 35% fantastic). Automations ran efficiently without problems.
So why in the world was I tempted to uproot my entire functional foundation from a system that functioned to try something unverified and untested?
In knowledge I can admit I got attracted by the alarm phone call of “glossy object syndrome”. You recognize the feeling: when every person’s speaking about a new device that will transform your organization … The lawn typically looks greener on the other side, and I asked yourself whether GoHighLevel may lower rubbing points that I ‘d learned to endure over the years with Keap.
I resisted initially, however a couple of even more disappointments led me to think perhaps it was time for a modification.
The Financial investment: Migrating My Firm to GoHighLevel
Previously this year I determined to take the plunge. I signed up for HighLevel’s Firm plan at $297/month, spending dramatically greater than the $97/month starter expense.
This had not been a choice I took lightly. I knew switching over systems was going to call for moving all my Keap information and essentially rebuilding my entire technology framework from the ground up using every one of the GoHighLevel integrations readily available.
Below’s a review of simply a few of the effort required:
- Manually exporting 20,000+ e-mail subscriber documents
- Recreating dozens of automations and workflows
- Moving client accounts, notes, and job data to the new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe payment integration
- Establishing landing pages, discounts, and sales funnels around again
- Learning an entirely foreign UX and user interface style
Done in, I invested around 30-40 laborious hours of arrangement work transitioning whatever over– as well as dealing with lost productivity throughout the switch.
Yet inevitably, it was a calculated financial investment I was willing to make. I figured some temporary discomfort would pay off with GoHighLevel offering a better long-term remedy for my company, Dripify. Oh exactly how incorrect I was …
It just took me about a month of hands-on usage to understand I had actually made a big blunder. The concerns began accumulating promptly, till it reached a factor I had to reduce my losses and switch back to Keap totally.
Let’s go through the horrible troubles I ran into.
Protection Issues & Numerous Vermin
Given GoHighLevel placed itself as an all-in-one automation platform, I made sure to carefully recreate every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These consisted of sequences for onboarding new e-mail clients, onboarding brand-new clients, automating follow-ups for webinar registrations, sending event reminders, managing membership expirations and much more.
Everything seemed to be working fine … up until suddenly it wasn’t. One morning, I awoke to discover 171 completely pointless e-mails had actually been sent out to individuals who must NOT have gotten them. This took place three days in a row, with a different set of 160 people each day.
I hysterically tried fixing and rebuilding the automation from the ground up. However the issue lingered.
When I desperately reached out to their support group, they vaguely asserted “web server concerns” were at fault. Yet this explanation really did not make any feeling, considering that the errors proceeded happening each morning like clockwork unassociated to any kind of downtime.
In my mind, this enormous failure was totally unacceptable and just really did not benefit my business. I have thousands of contacts depending on my automated campaigns running efficiently.
So if GoHighLevel was going to be absolutely undependable, just how could I delegate mission-critical workflows and sensitive client information to their technology?
The unintuitive interface just intensified these concerns …
Irritating UX
Coming from Keap where everything was smooth and instinctive, GoHighLevel’s learning contour felt high and complicated.
Straightforward tasks like editing and enhancing workflows involved excavating with food selection systems that were all over the place. Key settings were unexplainably spread in absolutely different sections. Moving in between functions really felt disjointed or confusing.
I’ll inform you what I imply by speaking about their funnel builder as an example. There were 3 separate settings panels to manage total, individual, and product configurations. Yet for some insane factor, the links to accessibility each of these core setups were expanded on contrary sides of the display. What!?
As somebody that values clean, thoughtful design, this seriously upset me.
It enhanced that GoHighLevel still felt like a work-in-progress instead of a refined item ready for prime-time usage. Their priorities seemed concentrated on stuffing in every feature imaginable, with poor functionality as a second thought.
And speaking of features, I soon understood the affordable price tag came with expensive compromises …
Deceptive Pricing How To Sign Up For GoHighLevel
Among GoHighLevel’s largest selling factors is the cost effective cost for access to numerous features. But I quickly learned this economical base expense was misleading.
They nickle-and-dimed users with sporadic costs for core performance. Instantly my charge card statements had obscure $10 charges from GoHighLevel here and there.
As it turned out, you get billed each time you send an email via their servers. So for high volume individuals, this amounted to hundreds of bucks in unforeseen expenses.
In between these per-email charges and paying additional for deliverability attachments like Mailgun, my “cost effective” GoHighLevel membership wound up setting you back significantly greater than my Keap plan.
The low sticker price was tempting, however just 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 rates plummet virtually overnight after switching to GoHighLevel.
Formerly, my audience interaction continually struck 35-40% open prices in Keap month after month. But once I migrated their records over to GoHighLevel, performance tanked instantaneously to a worthless 9% open price.
Despite how much I maximized my sending out techniques or tried every troubleshooting trick, I can hardly nudge open prices back into the teenagers– still a 50%+ decrease from my previous standards How To Sign Up For GoHighLevel.
Let me repeat: my exact same audience and emails all of a sudden had terrible interaction. The only point I could assume that would certainly be creating this was whatever was occurring behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a company so based on email marketing, this was a big deal.
Between the crippling deliverability problems, hidden charges, broken features, and dreadful user interface, I had ultimately reached my limit …
Why I Quit GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Simply 45 days after moving my firm to GoHighLevel, I understood I had actually made a huge error. The cons significantly surpassed any advantages.
No software application is perfect, however the large quantity of problems was beyond appropriate.
At the end of the day, software program comes down to count on. If I can’t trust it to take care of important features competently or think a supplier has my best interests in mind, after that it’s time to walk away– also after spending significant time, cash, and effort moving.
So I made the difficult phone call to reverse training course and return back to Keap entirely just weeks after going all in on GoHighLevel. Allow’s explore what I learned from this fiasco.
Secret Takeaways: What I Picked up from My GoHighLevel Mistake
My time with HighLevel can be summed up as a pricey accident. However in hindsight, it educated me a few crucial lessons:
- Stay with what jobs. Don’t upset what’s working unless something is definitively far better across the board. Change brings danger.
- Veterinarian declares completely. Marketing hype around brand-new software program usually obscures bigger underlying problems. Deep due persistance is necessary.
- Pick simpleness over features. Properly designed devices must make your job life less complicated, not more challenging and untidy.
- Transparency constructs depend on. Opaque pricing, shady reseller terms, and finger-pointing to evade problems ruins trust fund.
- Look for unbiased reviews. Happy assistance reviews indicate much less if extreme problems indicate poor overall functionality.
- Excellence is difficult. No single solution can flawlessly fulfill every one-of-a-kind business demand. Find the least-bad fit.
- Advancement over change. Step-by-step improvements usually exceed risky wholesale reinvention of what already works fine.
Simply put, I found out to be more hesitant of “too great to be real” marketing cases and much less attracted by the attraction of glossy brand-new objects. The devices you use daily ought to gain trust fund via transparency and efficiency, not slick advertising.