As a firm proprietor for over a years, I rely upon software and automation to improve procedures and deliver outcomes. So when GoHighLevel emerged on the scene couple of years back, it most definitely captured my focus What Does GoHighLevel Do.
The concept was attractive– an all-in-one client monitoring system with marketing, sales, and solution tools integrated with each other. As a business owner always wanting to streamline and scale my business, it felt like a desire become a reality on paper. That would not want a solitary solution that does it all?
But in this comprehensive GoHighLevel review, I’ll take you inside my tragic trip of attempting (and falling short) to switch to this preferred new software. You’ll find out:
If you’re thinking about whether GoHighLevel is right for your own organization demands, with any luck you can learn from my unpleasant mistakes and blew up expectations.
Looter: I do NOT advise GoHighLevel. If you need a CRM, begin with this checklist of ideal CRMs rather. I use Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re searching for a sales, marketing, and project administration option to GoHighLevel, after that below are a couple of we advise.
Backstory: Why I Considered Changing from Keap
To comprehend what attracted me to GoHighLevel to begin with, you require context regarding my previous configuration. For over 5 years I had been happily relying on Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) to satisfy all my client management and automation requirements.
I located Keap instinctive to utilize and it managed whatever I needed– CRM, e-mail marketing, sales funnels, subscription sites, and customer assistance.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are designed to assist small businesses maintain their clients while adding new ones effortlessly. Automate follow-ups with e-mails and messages, ensuring leads and clients get the appropriate messages at the right time. Use web site and social media forms to simplify lead follow-up, and manage your development with very easy visit organizing and lead tracking. Boost sales with automated quoting, invoicing, and repayment handling, maximizing your time. With Keap, local business can save 10 hours weekly and increase profits by 39%. Begin with a 14-day free trial, no charge card called for.
Why we like Keap
Keap supplies a thorough client partnership administration (CRM) and marketing automation option tailored for small companies and business owners. We appreciate Keap’s focus on improving sales processes and nurturing consumer relationships with effective automation devices. The system’s all-in-one strategy combines CRM, e-mail marketing, invoicing, and task monitoring, making it especially appealing for organizations wanting to combine their technology pile.
For the most part, it simply worked dependably with marginal fuss or upkeep required. My open and click-through prices were great (like 35% terrific). Automations ran efficiently without issues.
So why in the world was I attracted to uproot my entire functional foundation from a system that worked to try something unverified and untried?
In knowledge I can confess I obtained seduced by the alarm telephone call of “glossy item disorder”. You understand the feeling: when everyone’s discussing a brand-new device that will certainly change your service … The grass frequently looks greener beyond, and I wondered whether GoHighLevel might lower rubbing factors that I ‘d discovered to endure over the years with Keap.
I withstood in the beginning, but a few more aggravations led me to think perhaps it was time for a modification.
The Financial investment: Migrating My Firm to GoHighLevel
Previously this year I decided to take the plunge. I enrolled in 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 changing systems was mosting likely to need moving all my Keap information and basically reconstructing my whole technology infrastructure from the ground up utilizing every one of the GoHighLevel integrations available.
Right here’s an introduction of just several of the initiative needed:
- By hand exporting 20,000+ e-mail subscriber records
- Recreating loads of automations and workflows
- Relocating customer accounts, notes, and job data to the new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe payment integration
- Establishing landing pages, promotions, and sales funnels throughout again
- Learning a completely international UX and interface layout
Done in, I invested around 30-40 tiresome hours of arrangement work transitioning every little thing over– and also managing shed productivity during the switch.
But ultimately, it was a calculated financial investment I agreed to make. I figured some short-term pain would certainly settle with GoHighLevel providing a far better lasting remedy for my service, Dripify. Oh exactly how incorrect I was …
It just took me regarding a month of hands-on usage to recognize I had made a large error. The problems began accumulating rapidly, till it got to a factor I needed to reduce my losses and change back to Keap entirely.
Allow’s walk through the nightmarish problems I ran into.
Protection Issues & Many Bugs
Provided GoHighLevel positioned itself as an all-in-one automation system, I made sure to thoroughly recreate each and every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These included series for onboarding brand-new e-mail customers, onboarding brand-new clients, automating follow-ups for webinar enrollments, sending out event suggestions, taking care of membership expiries and a lot more.
Whatever appeared to be working penalty … up until unexpectedly it had not been. One early morning, I woke up to discover 171 totally pointless e-mails had actually been sent to individuals that should NOT have actually gotten them. This happened 3 days in a row, with a various batch of 160 individuals daily.
I desperately attempted repairing and rebuilding the automation from square one. However the trouble lingered.
When I frantically connected to their support team, they vaguely asserted “server issues” were to blame. However this explanation really did not make any kind of sense, since the errors continued occurring each early morning like clockwork unassociated to any type of downtime.
In my mind, this enormous failing was totally unacceptable and simply really did not help my company. I have thousands of contacts relying on my automated campaigns running efficiently.
So if GoHighLevel was mosting likely to be totally unreliable, how could I entrust mission-critical workflows and delicate customer information to their modern technology?
The unintuitive user interface only compounded these problems …
Aggravating UX
Coming from Keap where whatever was smooth and user-friendly, GoHighLevel’s learning contour really felt high and complicated.
Straightforward jobs like editing workflows involved digging via food selection systems that were all over the place. Trick setups were unexplainably scattered in absolutely various sections. Relocating in between functions really felt disjointed or confusing.
I’ll inform you what I suggest by discussing their funnel builder as an instance. There were 3 different settings panels to manage general, individual, and product arrangements. Yet for some insane reason, the links to access each of these core setups were spread out on contrary sides of the screen. What!?
As someone who values clean, thoughtful style, this seriously upset me.
It enhanced that GoHighLevel still felt like a work-in-progress as opposed to a polished item all set for prime-time use. Their top priorities appeared focused on packing in every feature under the sun, with bad usability as a second thought.
And talking features, I soon realized the small cost tag included pricey compromises …
Deceptive Pricing What Does GoHighLevel Do
Among GoHighLevel’s greatest marketing points is the economical rate for accessibility to so many features. But I quickly discovered this economical base expense was deceitful.
They nickle-and-dimed customers with sporadic costs for core capability. Suddenly my credit card declarations had obscure $10 fees from GoHighLevel here and there.
As it ended up, you get charged every time you send an email via their web servers. So for high volume customers, this amounted to hundreds of bucks in unanticipated costs.
In between these per-email costs and paying extra for deliverability attachments like Mailgun, my “affordable” GoHighLevel subscription ended up setting you back dramatically greater than my Keap plan.
The low price tag was tempting, yet just not realistic in practice. This bait-and-switch left a poor taste in my mouth.
Email Fees Suffered
The final dealbreaker was seeing my carefully supported email open prices plummet almost over night after switching over to GoHighLevel.
Formerly, my audience interaction regularly struck 35-40% open prices in Keap month after month. But once I migrated their records over to GoHighLevel, efficiency tanked instantly to a useless 9% open rate.
Despite how much I optimized my sending techniques or attempted every fixing method, I can barely push open prices back right into the teens– still a 50%+ decline from my previous standards What Does GoHighLevel Do.
Let me repeat: my exact same target market and emails instantly had dreadful involvement. The only point I could believe that would certainly be causing this was whatever was taking place behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a firm so depending on email marketing, this was a big deal.
In between the crippling deliverability issues, concealed charges, broken features, and dreadful user interface, I had actually lastly reached my restriction …
Why I Quit GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Just 45 days after migrating my agency to GoHighLevel, I understood I had made a massive blunder. The cons substantially exceeded any kind of benefits.
No software program is ideal, however the sheer quantity of problems was past appropriate.
At the end of the day, software program comes down to count on. If I can not trust it to manage vital features properly or think a vendor has my benefits in mind, then it’s time to leave– also after investing substantial time, cash, and initiative moving.
So I made the tough contact us to turn around training course and return back to Keap completely simply weeks after going done in on GoHighLevel. Allow’s discover what I picked up from this ordeal.
Trick Takeaways: What I Gained from My GoHighLevel Error
My time with HighLevel can be summed up as an expensive misadventure. Yet in hindsight, it showed me a few essential lessons:
- Adhere to what works. Do not distress what’s functioning unless something is definitively much better across the board. Adjustment brings danger.
- Vet asserts completely. Marketing hype around new software program often covers bigger underlying problems. Deep due persistance is crucial.
- Choose simplicity over features. Properly designed tools ought to make your job life simpler, not extra complicated and unpleasant.
- Openness builds depend on. Nontransparent pricing, shady reseller terms, and finger-pointing to evade problems damages depend on.
- Look for unbiased evaluations. Happy assistance evaluates indicate much less if too much problems suggest poor general functionality.
- Excellence is difficult. No single service can flawlessly satisfy every special business need. Discover the least-bad fit.
- Development over revolution. Step-by-step enhancements usually surpass dangerous wholesale reinvention of what already works fine.
Basically, I learned to be much more unconvinced of “too excellent to be true” marketing claims and much less lured by the allure of shiny brand-new things. The devices you utilize daily ought to make trust fund through openness and performance, not glossy advertising.