As a firm proprietor for over a years, I rely on software and automation to improve operations and deliver outcomes. So when GoHighLevel emerged on the scene few years back, it absolutely captured my attention GoHighLevel Affiliate Ads.
The idea was enticing– an all-in-one customer administration system with marketing, sales, and service tools incorporated with each other. As an entrepreneur always looking to streamline and scale my business, it looked like a dream happened theoretically. That wouldn’t desire a single option that does it all?
But in this extensive GoHighLevel testimonial, I’ll take you inside my dreadful journey of trying (and falling short) to switch to this prominent new software program. You’ll discover:
If you’re thinking about whether GoHighLevel is right for your very own service needs, hopefully you can pick up from my unpleasant errors and blew up assumptions.
Looter: I do NOT recommend GoHighLevel. If you require a CRM, start with this list of ideal CRMs rather. I utilize Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re seeking a sales, marketing, and task administration alternative to GoHighLevel, after that here are a few we recommend.
Backstory: Why I Thought About Switching Over from Keap
To comprehend what attracted me to GoHighLevel in the first place, you need context concerning my previous arrangement. For over 5 years I had been gladly depending on Keap (previously Infusionsoft) to fulfill all my client monitoring and automation requirements.
I found Keap user-friendly to make use of and it handled every little thing I required– CRM, e-mail marketing, sales funnels, subscription websites, and customer assistance.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are developed to assist small businesses maintain their customers while including new ones effortlessly. Automate follow-ups with e-mails and texts, making sure leads and customers get the right messages at the right time. Usage internet site and social networks types to enhance lead follow-up, and manage your development with simple visit scheduling and lead tracking. Boost sales with automated quoting, invoicing, and repayment handling, freeing up your time. With Keap, local business can conserve 10 hours weekly and rise revenue by 39%. Start with a 14-day free trial, no bank card required.
Why we like Keap
Keap offers a thorough client connection monitoring (CRM) and marketing automation solution tailored for small businesses and entrepreneurs. We appreciate Keap’s focus on streamlining sales procedures and nurturing client partnerships with effective automation devices. The system’s all-in-one approach incorporates CRM, email marketing, invoicing, and task administration, making it especially attractive for organizations wanting to settle their tech stack.
Generally, it just worked accurately with marginal hassle or maintenance needed. My open and click-through rates were great (like 35% fantastic). Automations ran efficiently with no problems.
So why on earth was I attracted to uproot my entire functional foundation from a system that worked to attempt something unverified and untried?
In knowledge I can confess I obtained attracted by the siren telephone call of “shiny item syndrome”. You understand the feeling: when everyone’s talking about a brand-new tool that will revolutionize your company … The grass commonly looks greener beyond, and I wondered whether GoHighLevel might decrease rubbing factors that I ‘d discovered to tolerate for many years with Keap.
I resisted at first, however a few more frustrations led me to think maybe it was time for a change.
The Investment: Moving My Agency to GoHighLevel
Earlier this year I made a decision to take the plunge. I registered for HighLevel’s Company plan at $297/month, investing dramatically greater than the $97/month starter price.
This had not been a choice I ignored. I recognized switching platforms was mosting likely to call for moving all my Keap data and basically restoring my whole technology facilities from square one using every one of the GoHighLevel integrations available.
Below’s an introduction of simply several of the initiative needed:
- Manually exporting 20,000+ email customer records
- Recreating lots of automations and workflows
- Relocating customer accounts, notes, and project data to the new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe billing integration
- Establishing landing pages, discounts, and sales funnels all over once more
- Learning a totally foreign UX and interface design
All in, I spent around 30-40 tiresome hours of configuration work transitioning whatever over– not to mention dealing with shed efficiency throughout the switch.
However ultimately, it was a calculated financial investment I was willing to make. I figured some short-term pain would repay with GoHighLevel providing a much better lasting solution for my organization, Dripify. Oh how incorrect I was …
It only took me regarding a month of hands-on usage to realize I had made a large blunder. The problems started accumulating swiftly, up until it got to a factor I had to reduce my losses and change back to Keap totally.
Let’s go through the horrible troubles I experienced.
Safety And Security Issues & Numerous Bugs
Given GoHighLevel placed 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 series for onboarding brand-new email customers, onboarding brand-new clients, automating follow-ups for webinar enrollments, sending event suggestions, handling subscription expirations and much more.
Whatever seemed to be operating penalty … up until suddenly it had not been. One morning, I awoke to find 171 totally pointless e-mails had actually been sent out to customers who ought to NOT have received them. This occurred three days in a row, with a different set of 160 individuals every day.
I frantically tried repairing and reconstructing the automation from scratch. However the problem persisted.
When I desperately connected to their support group, they vaguely declared “web server problems” were responsible. Yet this explanation didn’t make any feeling, considering that the errors continued taking place each early morning like clockwork unrelated to any kind of downtime.
In my mind, this enormous failure was entirely undesirable and just really did not benefit my business. I have countless contacts relying upon my automated campaigns running efficiently.
So if GoHighLevel was mosting likely to be totally undependable, exactly how could I hand over mission-critical workflows and delicate customer information to their technology?
The unintuitive interface only worsened these issues …
Discouraging UX
Coming from Keap where everything was seamless and intuitive, GoHighLevel’s learning contour really felt steep and complex.
Basic jobs like editing workflows included digging through menu systems that were all over the place. Trick settings were unexplainably scattered in absolutely different areas. Relocating in between features felt disjointed or complicated.
I’ll inform you what I imply by talking about their funnel builder as an example. There were 3 separate settings panels to handle general, individual, and item configurations. Yet for some insane factor, the links to accessibility each of these core settings were expanded on contrary sides of the screen. What!?
As someone that values clean, thoughtful style, this seriously annoyed me.
It enhanced that GoHighLevel still seemed like a work-in-progress as opposed to a sleek product prepared for prime-time usage. Their top priorities seemed concentrated on packing in every feature under the sun, with bad functionality as a second thought.
And speaking of features, I soon understood the low price tag came with costly compromises …
Deceptive Pricing GoHighLevel Affiliate Ads
One of GoHighLevel’s greatest marketing factors is the budget friendly price for access to numerous features. However I quickly discovered this inexpensive base expense was deceitful.
They nickle-and-dimed users with sporadic fees for core functionality. Instantly my bank card declarations had unclear $10 fees from GoHighLevel occasionally.
As it ended up, you obtain billed every time you send an email through their servers. So for high volume individuals, this added up to hundreds of bucks in unforeseen costs.
Between these per-email fees and paying added for deliverability add-ons like Mailgun, my “budget friendly” GoHighLevel registration wound up costing significantly greater than my Keap plan.
The reduced price tag was alluring, however simply not practical in practice. This bait-and-switch left a negative taste in my mouth.
Email Fees Suffered
The last dealbreaker was seeing my carefully supported e-mail open prices plummet almost overnight after changing to GoHighLevel.
Previously, my target market involvement continually struck 35-40% open rates in Keap month after month. Once I migrated their records over to GoHighLevel, performance tanked immediately to a worthless 9% open rate.
No matter how much I optimized my sending methods or attempted every fixing technique, I could hardly push open prices back into the teens– still a 50%+ decline from my previous criteria GoHighLevel Affiliate Ads.
Let me repeat: my exact same audience and emails all of a sudden had dreadful interaction. The only point I might believe that would certainly be triggering this was whatever was happening behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a company so dependent on e-mail marketing, this was a big deal.
Between the crippling deliverability problems, hidden costs, broken features, and horrible interface, I had ultimately reached my restriction …
Why I Stop GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Simply 45 days after moving my company to GoHighLevel, I knew I had actually made a big mistake. The disadvantages considerably outweighed any type of benefits.
No software program is perfect, but the sheer quantity of problems was beyond acceptable.
At the end of the day, software program comes down to trust fund. If I can’t trust it to manage critical functions properly or believe a supplier has my benefits in mind, after that it’s time to walk away– even after spending significant time, money, and effort moving.
So I made the difficult call to turn around training course and return back to Keap totally simply weeks after going done in on GoHighLevel. Let’s explore what I gained from this debacle.
Trick Takeaways: What I Picked up from My GoHighLevel Blunder
My time with HighLevel can be summed up as a pricey accident. Yet in knowledge, it educated me a few essential lessons:
- Stay with what works. Don’t distress what’s working unless something is definitively better across the board. Adjustment brings danger.
- Vet claims extensively. Marketing hype around new software commonly obscures bigger underlying flaws. Deep due diligence is essential.
- Select simpleness over features. Well-designed devices ought to make your job life less complicated, not more complicated and messy.
- Openness builds depend on. Nontransparent pricing, questionable reseller terms, and finger-pointing to evade problems ruins trust.
- Look for objective evaluations. Happy assistance reviews mean much less if too much issues indicate poor general functionality.
- Excellence is difficult. No single solution can flawlessly satisfy every distinct business need. Find the least-bad fit.
- Development over revolution. Incremental renovations normally exceed high-risk wholesale reinvention of what currently functions fine.
Basically, I discovered to be extra doubtful of “too great to be real” marketing cases and much less attracted by the appeal of glossy new things. The devices you use daily need to gain count on via openness and performance, not slick advertising.