As an agency proprietor for over a decade, I rely upon software application and automation to simplify procedures and deliver results. So when GoHighLevel emerged on the scene few years back, it definitely captured my attention Where To Purchase GoHighLevel.
The idea was attractive– an all-in-one customer management system with marketing, sales, and solution tools incorporated together. As a business owner constantly looking to streamline and scale my company, it seemed like a dream come to life on paper. That wouldn’t want a single remedy that does it all?
Yet in this comprehensive GoHighLevel testimonial, I’ll take you inside my disastrous trip of attempting (and stopping working) to switch over to this prominent brand-new software program. You’ll find out:
If you’re taking into consideration whether GoHighLevel is right for your own service needs, ideally you can pick up from my unpleasant mistakes and inflated assumptions.
Spoiler: I do NOT suggest GoHighLevel. If you need a CRM, begin with this checklist of best CRMs rather. I utilize Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re seeking a sales, marketing, and task management option to GoHighLevel, after that right here are a few we suggest.
Backstory: Why I Considered Switching from Keap
To understand what attracted me to GoHighLevel in the first place, you need context regarding my previous arrangement. For over 5 years I had actually been gladly relying upon Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) to meet all my client monitoring and automation requirements.
I found Keap user-friendly to utilize and it dealt with everything I needed– CRM, email marketing, sales funnels, membership sites, and customer support.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are created to aid local business keep their clients while including brand-new ones effortlessly. Automate follow-ups with emails and texts, ensuring leads and customers obtain the ideal messages at the correct time. Usage website and social networks forms to streamline lead follow-up, and handle your growth with easy appointment scheduling and lead tracking. Boost sales with automated pricing estimate, invoicing, and payment processing, liberating your time. With Keap, small businesses can conserve 10 hours each week and boost income by 39%. Beginning with a 14-day free trial, no bank card required.
Why we like Keap
Keap uses a comprehensive customer relationship management (CRM) and marketing automation remedy tailored for small companies and business owners. We value Keap’s concentrate on simplifying sales processes and nurturing customer connections with effective automation devices. The system’s all-in-one strategy integrates CRM, e-mail marketing, invoicing, and task management, making it particularly eye-catching for services seeking to combine their technology pile.
For the most part, it just functioned accurately with minimal fuss or upkeep required. My open and click-through rates were great (like 35% great). Automations ran smoothly without concerns.
So why in the world was I lured to uproot my entire functional foundation from a system that functioned to attempt something unverified and untested?
In knowledge I can confess I got seduced by the siren phone call of “glossy object syndrome”. You recognize the feeling: when everyone’s talking about a brand-new device that will certainly revolutionize your business … The lawn usually looks greener on the other side, and I asked yourself whether GoHighLevel might decrease rubbing points that I ‘d discovered to tolerate for many years with Keap.
I withstood in the beginning, but a few even more irritations led me to think maybe it was time for a change.
The Financial investment: Moving My Firm to GoHighLevel
Earlier this year I chose to take the plunge. I enrolled in HighLevel’s Agency plan at $297/month, spending considerably more than the $97/month starter expense.
This had not been a decision I ignored. I knew changing platforms was mosting likely to require migrating all my Keap data and basically restoring my whole technology infrastructure from the ground up making use of all of the GoHighLevel integrations offered.
Here’s a review of simply a few of the effort required:
- Manually exporting 20,000+ e-mail customer documents
- Recreating loads of automations and workflows
- Moving customer accounts, notes, and job information to the new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe invoicing integration
- Setting up landing pages, discounts, and sales funnels around once again
- Learning an entirely foreign UX and user interface layout
All in, I invested around 30-40 tiresome hours of setup job transitioning whatever over– not to mention handling lost performance during the button.
But ultimately, it was a computed investment I wanted to make. I figured some temporary pain would certainly pay off with GoHighLevel giving a much better long-term option for my business, Dripify. Oh how incorrect I was …
It just took me about a month of hands-on usage to recognize I had actually made a big error. The issues started accumulating rapidly, up until it reached a point I had to cut my losses and switch over back to Keap totally.
Allow’s go through the nightmarish problems I came across.
Security Issues & Many Bugs
Given 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 new email clients, onboarding brand-new customers, automating follow-ups for webinar enrollments, sending event pointers, taking care of subscription expirations and much more.
Every little thing seemed to be functioning fine … up until unexpectedly it had not been. One early morning, I woke up to discover 171 completely unimportant e-mails had actually been sent out to customers that ought to NOT have actually gotten them. This occurred 3 days in a row, with a different batch of 160 individuals daily.
I desperately tried fixing and rebuilding the automation from the ground up. But the trouble continued.
When I desperately connected to their support group, they slightly asserted “server issues” were at fault. Yet this explanation didn’t make any kind of feeling, considering that the mistakes proceeded occurring each early morning like clockwork unconnected to any downtime.
In my mind, this massive failing was completely undesirable and simply didn’t help my company. I have thousands of calls counting on my automated campaigns running efficiently.
So if GoHighLevel was mosting likely to be entirely undependable, just how could I delegate mission-critical workflows and sensitive client data to their modern technology?
The unintuitive user interface only intensified these problems …
Aggravating UX
Coming from Keap where whatever was smooth and user-friendly, GoHighLevel’s learning contour felt steep and complicated.
Simple tasks like editing workflows included digging through food selection systems that were all over the place. Trick setups were unexplainably spread in entirely different areas. Moving between functions really felt disjointed or complex.
I’ll inform you what I imply by speaking about their funnel builder as an instance. There were 3 different settings panels to take care of total, private, and item setups. Yet for some crazy factor, the web links to accessibility each of these core settings were expanded on opposite sides of the display. What!?
As a person who values clean, thoughtful style, this seriously annoyed me.
It enhanced that GoHighLevel still seemed like a work-in-progress instead of a sleek product prepared for prime-time use. Their top priorities appeared focused on packing in every feature imaginable, with inadequate usability as a second thought.
And speaking of features, I quickly realized the affordable price tag came with pricey compromises …
Misleading Pricing Where To Purchase GoHighLevel
One of GoHighLevel’s biggest selling factors is the inexpensive price for access to many features. But I rapidly learned this cheap base price was deceptive.
They nickle-and-dimed individuals with erratic fees for core functionality. Instantly my charge card statements had obscure $10 fees from GoHighLevel occasionally.
As it ended up, you obtain billed every single time you send an email with their web servers. So for high quantity individuals, this added up to hundreds of bucks in unexpected prices.
Between these per-email fees and paying additional for deliverability attachments like Mailgun, my “economical” GoHighLevel subscription wound up costing dramatically MORE than my Keap plan.
The low price tag was alluring, however just not reasonable in practice. This bait-and-switch left a bad taste in my mouth.
Email Fees Suffered
The last dealbreaker was seeing my very carefully nurtured email open rates plunge virtually over night after switching to GoHighLevel.
Previously, my audience engagement continually struck 35-40% open prices in Keap month after month. Once I migrated their documents over to GoHighLevel, performance tanked quickly to a useless 9% open price.
Despite how much I enhanced my sending out practices or tried every troubleshooting technique, I can hardly push open rates back right into the teens– still a 50%+ decline from my previous criteria Where To Purchase GoHighLevel.
Let me repeat: my exact same target market and emails suddenly had terrible interaction. The only thing I might assume that would certainly be creating this was whatever was occurring behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a firm so based on e-mail marketing, this was a big deal.
Between the crippling deliverability problems, hidden costs, broken features, and horrible user interface, I had actually lastly reached my restriction …
Why I Stop GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Simply 45 days after moving my firm to GoHighLevel, I knew I had made a massive mistake. The disadvantages drastically exceeded any type of benefits.
No software program is ideal, however the sheer quantity of troubles was beyond acceptable.
At the end of the day, software comes down to depend on. If I can’t trust it to handle critical features effectively or think a vendor has my benefits in mind, then it’s time to leave– also after investing significant time, cash, and effort migrating.
So I made the tough phone call to reverse program and return back to Keap entirely simply weeks after going done in on GoHighLevel. Allow’s explore what I gained from this ordeal.
Secret Takeaways: What I Picked up from My GoHighLevel Mistake
My time with HighLevel can be summarized as a costly accident. But in knowledge, it showed me a few essential lessons:
- Stick to what works. Don’t distress what’s working unless something is definitively much better across the board. Modification brings risk.
- Veterinarian claims thoroughly. Marketing hype around brand-new software typically obscures larger underlying imperfections. Deep due persistance is necessary.
- Pick simplicity over features. Well-designed tools need to make your job life less complicated, not much more complicated and untidy.
- Transparency builds trust fund. Nontransparent pricing, questionable reseller terms, and finger-pointing to escape issues damages depend on.
- Seek honest testimonials. Satisfied assistance examines indicate much less if too much issues suggest poor total use.
- Perfection is impossible. No solitary solution can completely meet every distinct organization demand. Locate the least-bad fit.
- Evolution over change. Step-by-step renovations usually exceed dangerous wholesale reinvention of what already functions fine.
In short, I discovered to be more unconvinced of “as well excellent to be real” marketing insurance claims and less lured by the appeal of shiny brand-new objects. The tools you utilize daily need to make count on through openness and performance, not glossy advertising.