As an agency owner for over a years, I rely on software and automation to enhance procedures and deliver outcomes. So when GoHighLevel arised on the scene couple of years back, it certainly caught my focus What Does GoHighLevel Offer.
The idea was enticing– an all-in-one client administration platform with marketing, sales, and solution tools incorporated together. As a business owner always aiming to simplify and scale my organization, it appeared like a dream happened on paper. That wouldn’t want a solitary option that does it all?
However in this extensive GoHighLevel testimonial, I’ll take you inside my disastrous journey of attempting (and falling short) to switch over to this preferred brand-new software application. You’ll find out:
If you’re taking into consideration whether GoHighLevel is right for your very own business requirements, ideally you can pick up from my unpleasant blunders and blew up assumptions.
Spoiler: I do NOT suggest GoHighLevel. If you require a CRM, start with this listing of ideal CRMs instead. I make use of Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re searching for a sales, marketing, and job management alternative to GoHighLevel, then right here are a few we suggest.
Backstory: Why I Considered Changing from Keap
To recognize what attracted me to GoHighLevel in the first place, you require context about my previous configuration. For over 5 years I had been happily depending on Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) to meet all my customer monitoring and automation requirements.
I discovered Keap instinctive to use and it took care of everything I needed– CRM, email marketing, sales funnels, subscription websites, and customer support.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are designed to aid local business maintain their clients while including brand-new ones effortlessly. Automate follow-ups with e-mails and texts, making certain leads and customers receive the right messages at the right time. Usage web site and social media kinds to simplify lead follow-up, and handle your growth with very easy visit scheduling and lead monitoring. Boost sales with automated estimating, invoicing, and settlement handling, liberating your time. With Keap, local business can save 10 hours per week and boost earnings by 39%. Start with a 14-day free trial, no bank card called for.
Why we like Keap
Keap provides a comprehensive client relationship administration (CRM) and marketing automation service customized for small companies and business owners. We value Keap’s focus on enhancing sales processes and supporting customer relationships with powerful automation devices. The platform’s all-in-one strategy incorporates CRM, e-mail marketing, invoicing, and task monitoring, making it especially eye-catching for services seeking to consolidate their tech pile.
For the most part, it simply functioned dependably with marginal difficulty or maintenance required. My open and click-through rates were great (like 35% terrific). Automations ran efficiently with no issues.
So why on earth was I lured to uproot my whole operational foundation from a system that worked to try something unproven and untested?
In knowledge I can admit I obtained seduced by the siren phone call of “shiny things disorder”. You understand the feeling: when everyone’s discussing a new tool that will change your company … The yard commonly looks greener beyond, and I wondered whether GoHighLevel could reduce friction points that I ‘d discovered to endure over the years with Keap.
I resisted initially, but a few even more aggravations led me to believe possibly it was time for an adjustment.
The Investment: Moving My Agency to GoHighLevel
Previously this year I made a decision to take the plunge. I enrolled in HighLevel’s Firm plan at $297/month, spending considerably more than the $97/month starter cost.
This wasn’t a decision I ignored. I knew switching over platforms was going to require migrating all my Keap information and essentially rebuilding my entire tech facilities from square one utilizing every one of the GoHighLevel integrations offered.
Right here’s an overview of just several of the effort called for:
- Manually exporting 20,000+ email customer records
- Recreating lots of automations and workflows
- Moving customer accounts, notes, and project information to the new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe billing integration
- Establishing landing pages, coupons, and sales funnels throughout once more
- Learning an entirely foreign UX and user interface style
All in, I spent around 30-40 tiresome hours of configuration work transitioning whatever over– not to mention handling lost efficiency throughout the switch.
But ultimately, it was a computed financial investment I agreed to make. I figured some temporary discomfort would certainly settle with GoHighLevel providing a far better long-lasting remedy for my business, Dripify. Oh just how incorrect I was …
It just took me concerning a month of hands-on use to recognize I had made a huge blunder. The problems started piling up promptly, till it reached a point I needed to cut my losses and switch back to Keap entirely.
Allow’s walk through the horrible troubles I ran into.
Security Issues & Lots of Vermin
Offered GoHighLevel positioned itself as an all-in-one automation system, I took care to carefully recreate each and every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These included sequences for onboarding new email clients, onboarding brand-new customers, automating follow-ups for webinar enrollments, sending occasion tips, managing subscription expiries and much more.
Everything appeared to be functioning fine … till all of a sudden it had not been. One morning, I woke up to locate 171 entirely pointless emails had actually been sent out to users that need to NOT have actually received them. This took place three days in a row, with a various batch of 160 people daily.
I anxiously attempted fixing and restoring the automation from square one. However the trouble continued.
When I seriously reached out to their support team, they vaguely declared “web server concerns” were at fault. Yet this explanation didn’t make any sense, considering that the mistakes continued happening each morning like clockwork unrelated to any type of downtime.
In my mind, this huge failure was entirely inappropriate and simply really did not work for my organization. I have countless contacts counting on my automated campaigns running smoothly.
So if GoHighLevel was mosting likely to be absolutely unstable, how could I delegate mission-critical workflows and delicate customer data to their innovation?
The unintuitive interface just compounded these issues …
Discouraging UX
Originating from Keap where every little thing was smooth and intuitive, GoHighLevel’s learning curve felt steep and difficult.
Straightforward jobs like editing and enhancing workflows entailed digging through menu systems that were all over the place. Key settings were unexplainably spread in completely various areas. Relocating in between functions really felt disjointed or complicated.
I’ll inform you what I mean by discussing their funnel builder as an example. There were 3 different setups panels to handle general, specific, and item setups. Yet for some insane reason, the links to accessibility each of these core setups were expanded on contrary sides of the display. What!?
As a person that values tidy, thoughtful style, this seriously irritated me.
It enhanced that GoHighLevel still felt like a work-in-progress rather than a refined item all set for prime-time use. Their concerns seemed focused on packing in every feature imaginable, with bad functionality as an afterthought.
And talking features, I soon realized the low cost tag featured costly concessions …
Deceptive Pricing What Does GoHighLevel Offer
Among GoHighLevel’s biggest selling factors is the budget friendly cost for access to numerous features. Yet I rapidly discovered this economical base expense was deceitful.
They nickle-and-dimed customers with sporadic costs for core performance. Suddenly my charge card statements had unclear $10 charges from GoHighLevel occasionally.
As it turned out, you obtain billed whenever you send an email with their web servers. So for high volume individuals, this amounted to thousands of dollars in unforeseen prices.
In between these per-email fees and paying added for deliverability attachments like Mailgun, my “economical” GoHighLevel registration ended up setting you back considerably greater than my Keap plan.
The reduced price tag was appealing, yet simply not practical in practice. This bait-and-switch left a bad preference in my mouth.
Email Fees Suffered
The last dealbreaker was seeing my carefully nurtured email open rates plunge nearly over night after switching over to GoHighLevel.
Previously, my audience interaction consistently struck 35-40% open prices in Keap month after month. But once I moved their records over to GoHighLevel, efficiency tanked promptly to a useless 9% open rate.
No matter how much I enhanced my sending out practices or attempted every troubleshooting technique, I can hardly push open prices back right into the teens– still a 50%+ decrease from my previous standards What Does GoHighLevel Offer.
Let me repeat: my exact same audience and emails unexpectedly had terrible interaction. The only point I might think that would certainly be creating this was whatever was occurring behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For an agency so depending on email marketing, this was a big deal.
Between the debilitating deliverability issues, concealed fees, broken features, and horrible user interface, I had lastly reached my restriction …
Why I Stop GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Just 45 days after migrating my company to GoHighLevel, I recognized I had actually made a significant mistake. The cons considerably outweighed any kind of benefits.
No software application is perfect, but the large quantity of troubles was beyond appropriate.
At the end of the day, software comes down to count on. If I can’t trust it to handle essential functions competently or believe a vendor has my benefits in mind, then it’s time to walk away– even after spending significant time, cash, and initiative migrating.
So I made the challenging call to reverse training course and return back to Keap totally simply weeks after going done in on GoHighLevel. Allow’s explore what I learned from this ordeal.
Secret Takeaways: What I Picked up from My GoHighLevel Error
My time with HighLevel can be summarized as a costly accident. But in hindsight, it taught me a couple of key lessons:
- Adhere to what works. Do not disturb what’s working unless something is definitively better across the board. Change brings risk.
- Veterinarian asserts completely. Marketing hype around new software program typically obscures larger underlying problems. Deep due persistance is important.
- Pick simplicity over features. Well-designed tools should make your work life much easier, not more complex and messy.
- Transparency builds trust. Nontransparent pricing, dubious reseller terms, and finger-pointing to avert issues ruins depend on.
- Seek impartial reviews. Pleased support evaluates indicate less if too much concerns imply inadequate overall functionality.
- Excellence is difficult. No single solution can flawlessly fulfill every special organization requirement. Discover the least-bad fit.
- Evolution over transformation. Step-by-step improvements commonly surpass high-risk wholesale reinvention of what already functions fine.
In other words, I found out to be extra doubtful of “as well great to be true” marketing cases and less tempted by the appeal of shiny new things. The devices you use daily need to earn depend on through transparency and performance, not slick advertising.