As a company owner for over a years, I rely on software and automation to enhance procedures and deliver outcomes. So when GoHighLevel emerged on the scene couple of years back, it most definitely caught my attention Is GoHighLevel Real.
The idea was appealing– an all-in-one customer administration system with marketing, sales, and service devices integrated together. As a business owner always wanting to streamline and scale my organization, it seemed like a desire become a reality theoretically. Who would not desire a solitary option that does it all?
But in this comprehensive GoHighLevel testimonial, I’ll take you inside my tragic trip of attempting (and falling short) to change to this preferred new software. You’ll learn:
If you’re thinking about whether GoHighLevel is right for your own organization demands, with any luck you can gain from my uncomfortable blunders and blew up expectations.
Spoiler: I do NOT advise GoHighLevel. If you need a CRM, begin with this checklist of finest CRMs instead. I utilize Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re trying to find a sales, marketing, and job administration choice to GoHighLevel, then right here are a couple of we advise.
Backstory: Why I Thought About Switching Over from Keap
To recognize what attracted me to GoHighLevel to begin with, you require context about my previous arrangement. For over 5 years I had been gladly relying on Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) to fulfill all my customer monitoring and automation demands.
I discovered Keap user-friendly to make use of and it dealt with everything I needed– CRM, email marketing, sales funnels, membership sites, and customer assistance.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are created to help local business maintain their clients while adding new ones effortlessly. Automate follow-ups with emails and messages, guaranteeing leads and clients receive the ideal messages at the right time. Use internet site and social media kinds to improve lead follow-up, and handle your development with very easy appointment scheduling and lead monitoring. Boost sales with automated estimating, invoicing, and settlement processing, liberating 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 bank card called for.
Why we like Keap
Keap supplies a thorough client connection monitoring (CRM) and marketing automation option customized for small businesses and business owners. We appreciate Keap’s concentrate on improving sales processes and nurturing consumer connections with powerful automation tools. The system’s all-in-one technique combines CRM, e-mail marketing, invoicing, and task administration, making it particularly appealing for organizations looking to consolidate their tech stack.
For the most part, it just functioned accurately with minimal hassle or upkeep needed. My open and click-through rates were wonderful (like 35% wonderful). Automations ran efficiently without issues.
So why on earth was I lured to uproot my whole functional foundation from a system that functioned to try something unproven and untried?
In hindsight I can admit I got attracted by the siren phone call of “shiny item syndrome”. You understand the feeling: when everyone’s speaking about a new tool that will revolutionize your service … The lawn typically looks greener beyond, and I wondered whether GoHighLevel could minimize friction factors that I would certainly discovered to endure throughout the years with Keap.
I stood up to in the beginning, but a couple of even more frustrations led me to think perhaps it was time for a change.
The Financial investment: Moving My Agency to GoHighLevel
Earlier this year I determined to start. I signed up for HighLevel’s Company plan at $297/month, spending significantly more than the $97/month starter cost.
This had not been a choice I ignored. I recognized switching over systems was mosting likely to call for moving all my Keap data and essentially rebuilding my entire technology framework from scratch making use of all of the GoHighLevel integrations readily available.
Right here’s an introduction of just several of the initiative required:
- By hand exporting 20,000+ e-mail client records
- Recreating dozens of automations and workflows
- Relocating client profiles, notes, and project information to the new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe invoicing integration
- Establishing landing pages, promotions, and sales funnels throughout again
- Learning an entirely international UX and user interface layout
Done in, I invested around 30-40 tiresome hours of setup job transitioning everything over– and also handling shed performance throughout the switch.
However eventually, it was a computed financial investment I was willing to make. I figured some short-term pain would pay off with GoHighLevel offering a far better lasting option for my company, Dripify. Oh just how wrong I was …
It only took me concerning a month of hands-on use to recognize I had made a big blunder. The concerns started accumulating rapidly, till it reached a factor I had to cut my losses and switch back to Keap completely.
Allow’s go through the nightmarish troubles I came across.
Protection Issues & Lots of Bugs
Offered GoHighLevel placed itself as an all-in-one automation platform, I took care to diligently recreate every workflow from my old Keap account.
These consisted of series for onboarding brand-new e-mail subscribers, onboarding new clients, automating follow-ups for webinar enrollments, sending event suggestions, taking care of membership expirations and much more.
Everything seemed to be working fine … up until suddenly it wasn’t. One morning, I awoke to find 171 entirely unnecessary emails had been sent out to customers who must NOT have actually received them. This took place three days in a row, with a different set of 160 individuals each day.
I hysterically tried repairing and restoring the automation from the ground up. However the problem persisted.
When I frantically connected to their support group, they vaguely claimed “web server concerns” were to blame. However this description really did not make any feeling, since the errors proceeded taking place each early morning like clockwork unassociated to any kind of downtime.
In my mind, this massive failure was completely inappropriate and just didn’t help my service. I have hundreds of calls relying on my automated campaigns running smoothly.
So if GoHighLevel was mosting likely to be absolutely unstable, how could I turn over mission-critical workflows and delicate customer data to their innovation?
The unintuitive user interface just compounded these concerns …
Frustrating UX
Coming from Keap where whatever was seamless and user-friendly, GoHighLevel’s learning curve really felt steep and challenging.
Simple jobs like editing and enhancing workflows involved excavating with food selection systems that were all over the place. Secret settings were unexplainably spread in completely various areas. Relocating in between features felt disjointed or confusing.
I’ll inform you what I mean by discussing their funnel builder as an example. There were 3 separate settings panels to take care of general, specific, and item arrangements. Yet for some insane reason, the web links to gain access to each of these core settings were spread out on contrary sides of the display. What!?
As somebody that values clean, thoughtful design, this seriously irritated me.
It enhanced that GoHighLevel still felt like a work-in-progress as opposed to a refined product prepared for prime-time usage. Their priorities seemed concentrated on stuffing in every feature under the sun, with inadequate usability as an afterthought.
And talking features, I soon recognized the low cost tag came with pricey concessions …
Deceptive Pricing Is GoHighLevel Real
Among GoHighLevel’s greatest marketing points is the cost effective price for accessibility to many features. However I promptly discovered this economical base price was misleading.
They nickle-and-dimed users with occasional costs for core performance. All of a sudden my charge card declarations had vague $10 charges from GoHighLevel here and there.
As it turned out, you obtain billed every single time you send an e-mail through their servers. So for high quantity individuals, this added up to numerous dollars in unanticipated prices.
In between these per-email charges and paying added for deliverability attachments like Mailgun, my “budget-friendly” GoHighLevel membership wound up costing significantly greater than my Keap plan.
The low price tag was alluring, however simply not realistic in practice. This bait-and-switch left a negative taste in my mouth.
Email Rates Suffered
The last dealbreaker was seeing my carefully nurtured e-mail open prices plunge almost over night after changing to GoHighLevel.
Previously, my audience involvement constantly struck 35-40% open rates in Keap month after month. But once I migrated their documents over to GoHighLevel, efficiency tanked promptly to a pitiful 9% open price.
Despite how much I optimized my sending methods or attempted every repairing trick, I might barely nudge open prices back into the teenagers– still a 50%+ decrease from my previous standards Is GoHighLevel Real.
Let me repeat: my exact same target market and emails unexpectedly had horrible engagement. The only thing I could believe that would be creating this was whatever was occurring behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For an agency so depending on e-mail marketing, this was a big deal.
Between the crippling deliverability problems, hidden fees, damaged features, and horrible user interface, I had finally reached my limitation …
Why I Stop GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Just 45 days after migrating my agency to GoHighLevel, I recognized I had actually made a massive mistake. The cons considerably exceeded any type of advantages.
No software is best, yet the sheer volume of problems was beyond acceptable.
At the end of the day, software application comes down to depend on. If I can not trust it to deal with essential functions effectively or believe a vendor has my best interests in mind, then it’s time to leave– also after investing significant time, cash, and effort migrating.
So I made the hard call to reverse training course and return back to Keap completely just weeks after going all in on GoHighLevel. Allow’s explore what I learned from this debacle.
Secret Takeaways: What I Picked up from My GoHighLevel Mistake
My time with HighLevel can be summed up as a costly ill fortune. However in knowledge, it showed me a few crucial lessons:
- Stay with what works. Do not distress what’s functioning unless something is definitively better across the board. Change brings threat.
- Veterinarian declares extensively. Marketing hype around new software application typically obscures larger underlying defects. Deep due diligence is necessary.
- Choose simpleness over features. Well-designed devices need to make your job life much easier, not a lot more difficult and messy.
- Openness constructs depend on. Nontransparent pricing, unethical reseller terms, and finger-pointing to avert issues destroys depend on.
- Look for objective reviews. Satisfied assistance reviews suggest much less if excessive concerns indicate bad overall use.
- Perfection is impossible. No single remedy can completely fulfill every one-of-a-kind service demand. Discover the least-bad fit.
- Advancement over change. Step-by-step renovations normally surpass risky wholesale reinvention of what already works fine.
Simply put, I learned to be a lot more hesitant of “also good to be real” marketing cases and much less lured by the allure of shiny new things. The devices you make use of daily ought to gain trust fund with transparency and performance, not slick advertising.