As a firm owner for over a decade, I rely on software program and automation to improve procedures and supply outcomes. So when GoHighLevel emerged on the scene couple of years back, it definitely caught my attention GoHighLevel For Affiliate Marketing.
The idea was appealing– an all-in-one client management platform with marketing, sales, and solution tools incorporated with each other. As an entrepreneur constantly aiming to simplify and scale my business, it appeared like a dream become a reality on paper. That wouldn’t want a solitary solution that does it all?
Yet in this thorough GoHighLevel evaluation, I’ll take you inside my devastating trip of trying (and stopping working) to switch to this preferred brand-new software. You’ll learn:
If you’re considering whether GoHighLevel is right for your own company requirements, hopefully you can gain from my excruciating errors and blew up assumptions.
Spoiler: I do NOT recommend GoHighLevel. If you need a CRM, begin with this list of finest CRMs rather. I use Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re seeking a sales, marketing, and task management alternative to GoHighLevel, after that right here are a couple of we advise.
Backstory: Why I Took Into Consideration Switching Over from Keap
To understand what attracted me to GoHighLevel in the first place, you need context about my previous configuration. For over 5 years I had been gladly relying upon Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) to meet all my client monitoring and automation requirements.
I found Keap user-friendly to make use of and it dealt with everything I needed– CRM, e-mail marketing, sales funnels, membership websites, and client support.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are designed to help small companies maintain their customers while adding brand-new ones effortlessly. Automate follow-ups with emails and messages, guaranteeing leads and clients obtain the best messages at the correct time. Usage website and social media sites types to simplify lead follow-up, and manage your development with easy appointment organizing and lead monitoring. Boost sales with automated pricing quote, invoicing, and payment processing, liberating your time. With Keap, small businesses can save 10 hours each week and boost revenue by 39%. Beginning with a 14-day free trial, no charge card called for.
Why we like Keap
Keap supplies an extensive consumer partnership administration (CRM) and marketing automation remedy tailored for small businesses and business owners. We value Keap’s concentrate on simplifying sales procedures and nurturing customer partnerships with effective automation devices. The system’s all-in-one method combines CRM, email marketing, invoicing, and task monitoring, making it specifically appealing for businesses seeking to settle their tech stack.
For the most part, it just functioned reliably with minimal difficulty or upkeep needed. My open and click-through prices were great (like 35% terrific). Automations ran smoothly with no concerns.
So why on earth was I tempted to uproot my entire operational foundation from a system that worked to attempt something unverified and untried?
In knowledge I can confess I obtained seduced by the siren telephone call of “glossy object syndrome”. You recognize the sensation: when everyone’s talking about a brand-new device that will certainly reinvent your business … The yard typically looks greener on the other side, and I asked yourself whether GoHighLevel may reduce friction points that I would certainly found out to endure for many years with Keap.
I stood up to at first, but a couple of even more irritations led me to think possibly it was time for a change.
The Financial investment: Moving My Firm to GoHighLevel
Earlier this year I made a decision to start. I signed up for HighLevel’s Company plan at $297/month, investing significantly more than the $97/month starter expense.
This had not been a decision I took lightly. I understood switching over systems was going to need migrating all my Keap data and essentially restoring my whole technology facilities from the ground up making use of all of the GoHighLevel integrations readily available.
Here’s a summary of simply some of the initiative needed:
- By hand exporting 20,000+ e-mail client records
- Recreating dozens of automations and workflows
- Moving client accounts, notes, and project information to the brand-new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe invoicing integration
- Setting up landing pages, coupons, and sales funnels throughout again
- Learning a completely foreign UX and interface design
All in, I invested around 30-40 tiresome hours of setup work transitioning whatever over– as well as dealing with shed efficiency throughout the switch.
But ultimately, it was a computed financial investment I agreed to make. I figured some short-term pain would certainly pay off with GoHighLevel supplying a much better long-term service for my company, Dripify. Oh just how incorrect I was …
It just took me regarding a month of hands-on usage to recognize I had made a big error. The problems started piling up swiftly, till it got to a point I had to cut my losses and change back to Keap completely.
Allow’s walk through the horrible problems I came across.
Protection Issues & Numerous Bugs
Given GoHighLevel positioned itself as an all-in-one automation platform, I made sure to meticulously recreate every workflow from my old Keap account.
These consisted of series for onboarding new email subscribers, onboarding new clients, automating follow-ups for webinar registrations, sending out event suggestions, managing subscription expiries and a lot more.
Everything seemed to be functioning penalty … until instantly it had not been. One early morning, I woke up to find 171 entirely pointless emails had been sent out to users that need to NOT have gotten them. This happened 3 days straight, with a various set of 160 individuals every day.
I frantically tried fixing and rebuilding the automation from scratch. But the problem continued.
When I seriously connected to their assistance group, they vaguely declared “web server problems” were at fault. But this explanation didn’t make any kind of sense, given that the errors proceeded happening each early morning like clockwork unassociated to any kind of downtime.
In my mind, this enormous failing was completely inappropriate and simply didn’t work for my company. I have hundreds of calls depending on my automated campaigns running smoothly.
So if GoHighLevel was going to be totally undependable, how could I leave mission-critical workflows and sensitive customer data to their innovation?
The unintuitive interface only worsened these problems …
Aggravating UX
Originating from Keap where whatever was seamless and instinctive, GoHighLevel’s learning curve felt high and complicated.
Basic tasks like editing workflows included excavating through food selection systems that were all over the place. Key setups were unexplainably spread in absolutely various sections. Moving in between functions really felt disjointed or confusing.
I’ll tell you what I mean by talking about their funnel builder as an instance. There were 3 different setups panels to take care of total, specific, and product arrangements. Yet for some crazy reason, the links to accessibility each of these core setups were spread out on opposite sides of the display. What!?
As a person that values tidy, thoughtful style, this seriously upset me.
It enhanced that GoHighLevel still felt like a work-in-progress instead of a sleek product ready for prime-time use. Their top priorities seemed concentrated on cramming in every feature under the sun, with bad use as an afterthought.
And talking features, I quickly realized the affordable price tag came with expensive compromises …
Misleading Pricing GoHighLevel For Affiliate Marketing
Among GoHighLevel’s greatest marketing factors is the inexpensive rate for access to numerous features. Yet I rapidly learned this affordable base expense was deceptive.
They nickle-and-dimed individuals with occasional charges for core capability. Suddenly my charge card statements had unclear $10 costs from GoHighLevel here and there.
As it ended up, you get charged each time you send out an email through their servers. So for high volume users, this added up to hundreds of bucks in unexpected expenses.
Between these per-email charges and paying additional for deliverability add-ons like Mailgun, my “budget friendly” GoHighLevel subscription wound up costing considerably greater than my Keap plan.
The low price tag was appealing, yet just not sensible in practice. This bait-and-switch left a bad taste in my mouth.
Email Rates Suffered
The final dealbreaker was seeing my meticulously nurtured email open rates plummet nearly overnight after switching over to GoHighLevel.
Formerly, my audience interaction consistently struck 35-40% open rates in Keap month after month. Once I migrated their documents over to GoHighLevel, efficiency tanked promptly to a pitiful 9% open rate.
Regardless of just how much I optimized my sending methods or attempted every repairing method, I can barely nudge open prices back right into the teens– still a 50%+ decline from my previous benchmarks GoHighLevel For Affiliate Marketing.
Let me repeat: my exact same audience and e-mails suddenly had dreadful interaction. The only thing I might believe that would be triggering this was whatever was occurring behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a firm so depending on e-mail marketing, this was a big deal.
In between the crippling deliverability concerns, concealed charges, broken features, and awful interface, I had actually finally reached my limit …
Why I Quit GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Just 45 days after migrating my company to GoHighLevel, I knew I had actually made a substantial blunder. The disadvantages dramatically exceeded any advantages.
No software application is excellent, however the sheer volume of troubles was past acceptable.
At the end of the day, software application boils down to depend on. If I can not trust it to take care of critical functions properly or believe a vendor has my benefits in mind, after that it’s time to walk away– even after investing substantial time, money, and effort moving.
So I made the difficult call to reverse training course and return back to Keap entirely simply weeks after going all in on GoHighLevel. Let’s discover what I learned from this debacle.
Secret Takeaways: What I Learned From My GoHighLevel Error
My time with HighLevel can be summarized as a pricey misadventure. But in knowledge, it taught me a couple of essential lessons:
- Stick to what jobs. Do not upset what’s working unless something is definitively much better across the board. Modification brings danger.
- Vet asserts completely. Marketing hype around new software usually covers bigger underlying problems. Deep due diligence is vital.
- Choose simplicity over features. Properly designed tools should make your job life easier, not a lot more complicated and messy.
- Openness constructs depend on. Nontransparent pricing, shady reseller terms, and finger-pointing to escape issues damages trust fund.
- Seek impartial testimonials. Happy support reviews indicate less if too much issues indicate poor total usability.
- Excellence is difficult. No single remedy can completely meet every one-of-a-kind organization requirement. Find the least-bad fit.
- Development over transformation. Step-by-step improvements normally exceed dangerous wholesale reinvention of what already works penalty.
Basically, I discovered to be much more hesitant of “too great to be real” marketing insurance claims and much less lured by the appeal of shiny new things. The tools you utilize daily must gain depend on through openness and performance, not slick advertising.