As a firm proprietor for over a years, I depend on software and automation to enhance operations and provide outcomes. So when GoHighLevel emerged on the scene couple of years back, it absolutely caught my focus How Does GoHighLevel Pay You.
The idea was appealing– an all-in-one client monitoring system with marketing, sales, and service devices incorporated with each other. As an entrepreneur always aiming to streamline and scale my service, it looked like a desire happened on paper. Who wouldn’t want a solitary remedy that does it all?
But in this thorough GoHighLevel testimonial, I’ll take you inside my dreadful journey of trying (and falling short) to switch over to this prominent new software application. You’ll find out:
If you’re considering whether GoHighLevel is right for your very own organization needs, hopefully you can pick up from my agonizing errors and inflated expectations.
Spoiler: I do NOT suggest GoHighLevel. If you need a CRM, start with this checklist of finest CRMs rather. I use Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re trying to find a sales, marketing, and job monitoring alternative to GoHighLevel, after that right here are a couple of we suggest.
Backstory: Why I Considered Switching from Keap
To recognize what attracted me to GoHighLevel to begin with, you require context concerning my previous setup. For over 5 years I had been happily counting on Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) to fulfill all my customer monitoring and automation requirements.
I located Keap intuitive to utilize and it handled everything I required– CRM, e-mail marketing, sales funnels, membership sites, and customer support.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are made to help small businesses keep their clients while adding new ones effortlessly. Automate follow-ups with emails and texts, making sure leads and customers obtain the best messages at the correct time. Use site and social media sites forms to streamline lead follow-up, and handle your growth with very easy appointment organizing and lead monitoring. Boost sales with automated pricing estimate, invoicing, and repayment handling, freeing up your time. With Keap, small companies can conserve 10 hours each week and increase revenue by 39%. Begin with a 14-day free trial, no charge card called for.
Why we like Keap
Keap provides a detailed consumer connection monitoring (CRM) and marketing automation option customized for small companies and business owners. We value Keap’s focus on simplifying sales procedures and supporting consumer relationships with effective automation devices. The system’s all-in-one technique integrates CRM, email marketing, invoicing, and job management, making it especially appealing for organizations looking to consolidate their tech pile.
Essentially, it simply functioned reliably with minimal hassle or maintenance needed. My open and click-through rates were wonderful (like 35% fantastic). Automations ran efficiently without issues.
So why on earth was I attracted to uproot my whole functional structure from a system that functioned to attempt something unproven and untested?
In knowledge I can confess I obtained attracted by the alarm phone call of “shiny things syndrome”. You understand the feeling: when everybody’s discussing a new device that will transform your business … The turf commonly looks greener beyond, and I asked yourself whether GoHighLevel could decrease friction factors that I ‘d learned to endure for many years with Keap.
I resisted initially, but a few more frustrations led me to think perhaps 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 substantially greater than the $97/month starter expense.
This wasn’t a choice I took lightly. I knew changing platforms was going to require migrating all my Keap information and basically reconstructing my entire technology facilities from the ground up utilizing all of the GoHighLevel integrations available.
Here’s an overview of just several of the initiative needed:
- By hand exporting 20,000+ email subscriber records
- Recreating dozens of automations and workflows
- Moving client profiles, notes, and project data to the new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe payment integration
- Setting up landing pages, discounts, and sales funnels around once more
- Learning an entirely foreign UX and interface layout
Done in, I invested around 30-40 tedious hours of configuration job transitioning whatever over– as well as taking care of shed productivity throughout the button.
But inevitably, it was a calculated financial investment I was willing to make. I figured some temporary pain would certainly pay off with GoHighLevel offering a much better lasting option for my organization, Dripify. Oh just how incorrect I was …
It only took me about a month of hands-on use to recognize I had actually made a large mistake. The issues started piling up swiftly, till it reached a point I needed to cut my losses and switch over back to Keap completely.
Let’s go through the horrible troubles I came across.
Security Issues & Numerous Vermin
Given GoHighLevel positioned itself as an all-in-one automation system, I took care to meticulously recreate every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These consisted of series for onboarding new e-mail customers, onboarding new customers, automating follow-ups for webinar enrollments, sending out occasion suggestions, taking care of subscription expiries and a lot more.
Whatever appeared to be operating fine … till suddenly it had not been. One morning, I woke up to locate 171 totally irrelevant e-mails had actually been sent out to individuals who should NOT have actually gotten them. This happened 3 days straight, with a different set of 160 people every day.
I frantically attempted troubleshooting and rebuilding the automation from the ground up. But the trouble persisted.
When I seriously reached out to their support team, they slightly claimed “web server concerns” were responsible. Yet this description didn’t make any kind of feeling, considering that the errors continued taking place each morning like clockwork unconnected to any downtime.
In my mind, this large failing was completely inappropriate and just didn’t work for my company. I have thousands of get in touches with relying upon my automated campaigns running smoothly.
So if GoHighLevel was going to be absolutely undependable, exactly how could I entrust mission-critical workflows and sensitive client information to their modern technology?
The unintuitive user interface only intensified these problems …
Irritating UX
Originating from Keap where everything was seamless and user-friendly, GoHighLevel’s learning contour really felt steep and difficult.
Straightforward tasks like editing and enhancing workflows entailed excavating with menu systems that were all over the place. Key settings were unexplainably spread in completely different sections. Relocating in between features felt disjointed or complicated.
I’ll inform you what I imply by discussing their funnel builder as an instance. There were 3 separate setups panels to manage general, specific, and product arrangements. Yet for some insane factor, the links to access each of these core setups were spread out on contrary sides of the screen. What!?
As a person who values clean, thoughtful style, this seriously irritated me.
It strengthened that GoHighLevel still felt like a work-in-progress as opposed to a sleek item ready for prime-time usage. Their top priorities seemed focused on cramming in every feature under the sun, with bad usability as a second thought.
And speaking of features, I soon understood the low cost tag included pricey concessions …
Misleading Pricing How Does GoHighLevel Pay You
Among GoHighLevel’s largest marketing points is the cost effective price for access to many features. However I promptly learned this cheap base price was misleading.
They nickle-and-dimed individuals with occasional fees for core performance. Suddenly my credit card declarations had vague $10 charges from GoHighLevel occasionally.
As it turned out, you get billed every single time you send an email through their servers. So for high quantity individuals, this added up to hundreds of dollars in unforeseen prices.
In between these per-email fees and paying additional for deliverability add-ons like Mailgun, my “cost effective” GoHighLevel subscription ended up costing dramatically MORE than my Keap plan.
The reduced sticker price was alluring, yet just not sensible in practice. This bait-and-switch left a bad taste in my mouth.
Email Rates Suffered
The last dealbreaker was seeing my thoroughly nurtured email open prices plummet nearly overnight after switching over to GoHighLevel.
Formerly, my audience involvement constantly struck 35-40% open prices in Keap month after month. But once I migrated their records over to GoHighLevel, performance tanked instantly to a worthless 9% open rate.
Despite just how much I optimized my sending techniques or tried every fixing technique, I could barely push open prices back into the teenagers– still a 50%+ decrease from my previous standards How Does GoHighLevel Pay You.
Let me repeat: my exact same audience and emails all of a sudden had awful involvement. The only point I can assume that would be creating this was whatever was occurring behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a company so depending on email marketing, this was a big deal.
In between the crippling deliverability problems, concealed charges, damaged features, and dreadful interface, I had actually finally reached my limit …
Why I Quit GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Just 45 days after migrating my agency to GoHighLevel, I understood I had made a big mistake. The disadvantages drastically exceeded any type of benefits.
No software program is excellent, yet the large volume of problems was past appropriate.
At the end of the day, software program comes down to trust. If I can’t trust it to handle vital features competently or believe a vendor has my best interests in mind, then it’s time to leave– even after investing significant time, money, and initiative migrating.
So I made the hard phone call to turn around program and return back to Keap entirely simply weeks after going done in on GoHighLevel. Allow’s explore what I gained from this debacle.
Secret Takeaways: What I Gained from My GoHighLevel Blunder
My time with HighLevel can be summed up as a costly accident. However in knowledge, it showed me a couple of key lessons:
- Stick to what works. Don’t upset what’s functioning unless something is definitively far better across the board. Adjustment brings risk.
- Vet asserts extensively. Marketing buzz around brand-new software program often obscures bigger underlying imperfections. Deep due persistance is vital.
- Choose simplicity over features. Properly designed tools should make your work life less complicated, not more complex and unpleasant.
- Transparency develops count on. Nontransparent pricing, questionable reseller terms, and finger-pointing to escape issues damages trust.
- Look for honest testimonials. Satisfied support assesses suggest less if too much concerns suggest bad overall usability.
- Perfection is difficult. No solitary service can flawlessly meet every unique organization need. Discover the least-bad fit.
- Advancement over revolution. Step-by-step renovations commonly exceed risky wholesale reinvention of what currently works penalty.
Simply put, I learned to be a lot more doubtful of “too excellent to be true” marketing cases and less attracted by the attraction of shiny new objects. The tools you utilize daily should gain depend on with transparency and performance, not slick advertising.