As a company owner for over a decade, I rely on software application and automation to streamline procedures and supply outcomes. So when GoHighLevel arised on the scene few years back, it most definitely captured my interest Import ClickFunnels To GoHighLevel.
The concept was appealing– an all-in-one customer management platform with marketing, sales, and service devices incorporated with each other. As a business owner always seeking to simplify and scale my company, it seemed like a desire come true on paper. That would not desire a solitary service that does it all?
Yet in this comprehensive GoHighLevel testimonial, I’ll take you inside my disastrous trip of trying (and failing) to switch to this popular brand-new software application. You’ll discover:
If you’re taking into consideration whether GoHighLevel is right for your own service demands, with any luck you can pick up from my painful errors and inflated expectations.
Looter: I do NOT suggest GoHighLevel. If you need a CRM, start with this listing of finest CRMs instead. I make use of Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re looking for a sales, marketing, and project management choice to GoHighLevel, after that below 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 require context regarding my previous arrangement. For over 5 years I had actually been gladly counting on Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) to meet all my client management and automation requirements.
I located Keap user-friendly to utilize and it dealt with everything I required– CRM, e-mail marketing, sales funnels, subscription websites, and client support.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are created to aid small businesses keep their clients while adding brand-new ones easily. Automate follow-ups with e-mails and texts, making certain leads and customers get the appropriate messages at the correct time. Usage internet site and social networks kinds to improve lead follow-up, and handle your growth with simple appointment scheduling and lead tracking. Boost sales with automated estimating, invoicing, and repayment processing, freeing up your time. With Keap, local business can conserve 10 hours per week and increase revenue by 39%. Start with a 14-day free trial, no charge card required.
Why we like Keap
Keap supplies a thorough consumer partnership management (CRM) and marketing automation remedy tailored for small companies and entrepreneurs. We appreciate Keap’s concentrate on simplifying sales processes and supporting consumer relationships through effective automation devices. The platform’s all-in-one technique combines CRM, email marketing, invoicing, and task monitoring, making it specifically appealing for organizations looking to combine their tech stack.
Generally, it just functioned dependably with very little fuss or upkeep needed. My open and click-through rates were terrific (like 35% excellent). Automations ran efficiently with no problems.
So why in the world was I attracted to uproot my entire functional structure from a system that functioned to attempt something unproven and untried?
In hindsight I can admit I got attracted by the alarm telephone call of “glossy object syndrome”. You understand the feeling: when every person’s speaking about a new tool that will transform your company … The turf commonly looks greener on the other side, and I wondered whether GoHighLevel might minimize friction factors that I would certainly learned to tolerate for many years with Keap.
I stood up to in the beginning, yet a couple of more aggravations led me to think possibly it was time for an adjustment.
The Financial investment: Migrating My Agency to GoHighLevel
Earlier this year I chose to take the plunge. I signed up for HighLevel’s Company plan at $297/month, investing significantly greater than the $97/month starter expense.
This had not been a choice I took lightly. I knew switching systems was going to require migrating all my Keap data and essentially reconstructing my whole technology framework from the ground up using all of the GoHighLevel integrations readily available.
Below’s a summary of simply some of the effort called for:
- By hand exporting 20,000+ e-mail customer records
- Recreating dozens of automations and workflows
- Moving customer accounts, notes, and job data to the new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe payment integration
- Setting up landing pages, coupons, and sales funnels throughout again
- Learning a completely foreign UX and user interface layout
Done in, I invested around 30-40 laborious hours of configuration job transitioning everything over– as well as dealing with shed productivity during the button.
However ultimately, it was a calculated financial investment I was willing to make. I figured some temporary pain would certainly pay off with GoHighLevel supplying a much better long-lasting option for my company, Dripify. Oh just how incorrect I was …
It just took me about a month of hands-on usage to realize I had actually made a huge mistake. The problems began piling up promptly, up until it reached a factor I had to cut my losses and switch back to Keap totally.
Allow’s go through the nightmarish problems I encountered.
Protection Issues & Lots of Bugs
Given GoHighLevel placed itself as an all-in-one automation system, I took care to carefully recreate every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These consisted of sequences for onboarding brand-new email clients, onboarding new customers, automating follow-ups for webinar enrollments, sending occasion suggestions, managing membership expirations and a lot more.
Whatever seemed to be functioning penalty … till unexpectedly it had not been. One early morning, I woke up to find 171 totally pointless e-mails had actually been sent to customers that should NOT have actually received them. This occurred 3 days in a row, with a various batch of 160 people daily.
I desperately tried repairing and rebuilding the automation from the ground up. Yet the trouble continued.
When I frantically reached out to their assistance team, they vaguely claimed “server problems” were responsible. Yet this description really did not make any kind of feeling, because the mistakes continued happening each morning like clockwork unassociated to any downtime.
In my mind, this large failing was totally undesirable and just didn’t benefit my business. I have thousands of get in touches with relying on my automated campaigns running efficiently.
So if GoHighLevel was mosting likely to be completely unreliable, just how could I entrust mission-critical workflows and sensitive client data to their innovation?
The unintuitive interface only worsened these issues …
Aggravating UX
Coming from Keap where everything was smooth and user-friendly, GoHighLevel’s learning curve really felt high and complicated.
Straightforward tasks like modifying workflows included excavating via menu systems that were all over the place. Trick settings were unexplainably scattered in entirely various sections. Relocating between functions felt disjointed or complicated.
I’ll inform you what I mean by talking about their funnel builder as an instance. There were 3 different setups panels to manage general, private, and product arrangements. Yet for some insane factor, the web links to access each of these core setups were spread out on contrary sides of the screen. What!?
As somebody who values clean, thoughtful design, this seriously annoyed me.
It reinforced that GoHighLevel still seemed like a work-in-progress as opposed to a polished item prepared for prime-time use. Their concerns seemed concentrated on cramming in every feature imaginable, with bad functionality as a second thought.
And talking features, I quickly recognized the low price tag came with expensive concessions …
Misleading Pricing Import ClickFunnels To GoHighLevel
Among GoHighLevel’s biggest selling points is the budget friendly cost for access to many features. Yet I swiftly learned this affordable base cost was deceptive.
They nickle-and-dimed customers with occasional fees for core performance. Unexpectedly my credit card declarations had obscure $10 costs from GoHighLevel here and there.
As it ended up, you get charged whenever you send an email with their web servers. So for high volume users, this amounted to hundreds of dollars in unanticipated prices.
Between these per-email fees and paying additional for deliverability attachments like Mailgun, my “affordable” GoHighLevel subscription wound up setting you back considerably greater than my Keap plan.
The low sticker price was alluring, yet simply not realistic in practice. This bait-and-switch left a poor taste in my mouth.
Email Fees Suffered
The last dealbreaker was seeing my carefully supported e-mail open prices plummet almost overnight after changing to GoHighLevel.
Previously, my target market engagement consistently struck 35-40% open rates in Keap month after month. Once I migrated their documents over to GoHighLevel, efficiency tanked quickly to a pitiful 9% open rate.
Regardless of how much I maximized my sending out techniques or tried every repairing trick, I can barely nudge open rates back right into the teenagers– still a 50%+ decline from my previous benchmarks Import ClickFunnels To GoHighLevel.
Let me repeat: my exact same target market and e-mails unexpectedly had horrible interaction. The only thing I can assume that would be causing this was whatever was happening behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For an agency so depending on e-mail marketing, this was a big deal.
In between the crippling deliverability concerns, concealed costs, damaged features, and horrible user interface, I had actually ultimately reached my limitation …
Why I Quit GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Simply 45 days after migrating my agency to GoHighLevel, I understood I had made a substantial error. The cons considerably outweighed any advantages.
No software program is perfect, yet the sheer quantity of issues was beyond acceptable.
At the end of the day, software program comes down to trust fund. If I can not trust it to take care of critical functions capably or believe a vendor has my best interests in mind, after that it’s time to leave– also after investing considerable time, money, and effort moving.
So I made the challenging phone call to turn around training course and return back to Keap completely simply weeks after going all in on GoHighLevel. Allow’s discover what I learned from this debacle.
Trick Takeaways: What I Learned From My GoHighLevel Error
My time with HighLevel can be summed up as an expensive misadventure. But in knowledge, it educated me a few key lessons:
- Stay with what jobs. Do not upset what’s working unless something is definitively better across the board. Modification brings risk.
- Veterinarian claims extensively. Marketing hype around brand-new software program typically obscures bigger underlying problems. Deep due persistance is important.
- Select simpleness over features. Well-designed tools should make your work life less complicated, not much more difficult and unpleasant.
- Openness constructs trust fund. Nontransparent pricing, questionable reseller terms, and finger-pointing to evade issues destroys trust.
- Seek objective evaluations. Satisfied assistance examines suggest less if extreme issues indicate bad overall use.
- Excellence is impossible. No single solution can flawlessly satisfy every unique service demand. Locate the least-bad fit.
- Evolution over transformation. Step-by-step enhancements normally outweigh risky wholesale reinvention of what already functions fine.
Simply put, I learned to be extra cynical of “also good to be real” marketing insurance claims and much less attracted by the appeal of shiny new things. The tools you use daily must make trust through openness and performance, not slick advertising.