As a company proprietor for over a years, I count on software and automation to enhance operations and provide results. So when GoHighLevel arised on the scene few years back, it most definitely captured my focus GoHighLevel Affiliate Summer Camp.
The idea was attractive– an all-in-one customer monitoring system with marketing, sales, and service tools integrated with each other. As a business owner always seeking to streamline and scale my company, it felt like a dream happened theoretically. That wouldn’t want a solitary solution that does it all?
However in this in-depth GoHighLevel evaluation, I’ll take you inside my dreadful trip of trying (and failing) to switch over to this preferred new software program. You’ll discover:
If you’re taking into consideration whether GoHighLevel is right for your very own organization demands, with any luck you can pick up from my agonizing blunders and blew up expectations.
Spoiler: I do NOT recommend GoHighLevel. If you need a CRM, begin with this list of best CRMs rather. I use Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re searching for a sales, marketing, and project management alternative to GoHighLevel, then right here are a few we recommend.
Backstory: Why I Considered Switching Over from Keap
To understand what attracted me to GoHighLevel in the first place, you need context about my previous arrangement. For over 5 years I had been happily relying on Keap (previously Infusionsoft) to meet all my client management and automation demands.
I located Keap instinctive to use and it dealt with whatever I required– CRM, e-mail marketing, sales funnels, membership websites, and client support.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are created to help small businesses maintain their customers while including new ones effortlessly. Automate follow-ups with emails and messages, guaranteeing leads and clients get the appropriate messages at the right time. Use web site and social networks forms to improve lead follow-up, and manage your growth with easy consultation organizing and lead monitoring. Boost sales with automated quoting, invoicing, and payment processing, freeing up your time. With Keap, local business can conserve 10 hours per week and rise profits by 39%. Begin with a 14-day free trial, no bank card required.
Why we like Keap
Keap provides a detailed client relationship management (CRM) and marketing automation option customized for small businesses and entrepreneurs. We appreciate Keap’s focus on streamlining sales processes and nurturing client partnerships with powerful automation tools. The system’s all-in-one approach combines CRM, e-mail marketing, invoicing, and job monitoring, making it particularly attractive for companies looking to settle their tech pile.
For the most part, it simply functioned reliably with marginal difficulty or maintenance needed. My open and click-through prices were fantastic (like 35% fantastic). Automations ran efficiently with no problems.
So why on earth was I tempted to uproot my entire operational foundation from a system that functioned to attempt something unproven and untried?
In hindsight I can admit I obtained seduced by the alarm call of “glossy item disorder”. You know the sensation: when everybody’s speaking about a brand-new tool that will certainly reinvent your organization … The lawn commonly looks greener on the other side, and I wondered whether GoHighLevel could minimize rubbing points that I would certainly learned to endure for many years with Keap.
I stood up to initially, yet a few more irritations led me to think perhaps it was time for a modification.
The Investment: Migrating My Company to GoHighLevel
Previously this year I chose to start. I signed up for HighLevel’s Agency plan at $297/month, spending substantially more than the $97/month starter cost.
This wasn’t a decision I ignored. I recognized switching systems was going to call for moving all my Keap information and essentially restoring my entire tech facilities from the ground up using every one of the GoHighLevel integrations offered.
Below’s a summary of just some of the initiative needed:
- Manually exporting 20,000+ e-mail client documents
- Recreating dozens of automations and workflows
- Relocating customer profiles, notes, and project information to the new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe payment integration
- Setting up landing pages, promotions, and sales funnels throughout again
- Learning a completely international UX and user interface style
All in, I spent around 30-40 laborious hours of configuration work transitioning everything over– in addition to managing shed performance throughout the button.
But ultimately, it was a computed financial investment I was willing to make. I figured some temporary discomfort would settle with GoHighLevel giving a better long-lasting solution for my organization, Dripify. Oh just how wrong I was …
It only took me about a month of hands-on usage to recognize I had made a big mistake. The problems started piling up promptly, up until it reached a point I had to reduce my losses and change back to Keap entirely.
Let’s go through the horrible troubles I ran into.
Safety Issues & Numerous Bugs
Given GoHighLevel placed itself as an all-in-one automation platform, I took care to carefully recreate every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These included series for onboarding brand-new email clients, onboarding brand-new clients, automating follow-ups for webinar registrations, sending out occasion reminders, handling subscription expirations and much more.
Whatever appeared to be operating penalty … till instantly it wasn’t. One early morning, I woke up to locate 171 entirely unnecessary e-mails had actually been sent to users that must NOT have gotten them. This took place 3 days in a row, with a various set of 160 individuals each day.
I hysterically attempted repairing and rebuilding the automation from scratch. However the issue lingered.
When I seriously reached out to their support team, they slightly declared “web server problems” were to blame. Yet this description really did not make any kind of sense, because the errors continued occurring each morning like clockwork unrelated to any downtime.
In my mind, this substantial failing was entirely inappropriate and just didn’t work for my service. I have thousands of get in touches with counting on my automated campaigns running smoothly.
So if GoHighLevel was going to be entirely unstable, how could I hand over mission-critical workflows and delicate customer information to their innovation?
The unintuitive user interface only intensified these concerns …
Irritating UX
Coming from Keap where every little thing was seamless and instinctive, GoHighLevel’s learning curve really felt steep and complicated.
Straightforward tasks like editing workflows involved excavating via food selection systems that were all over the place. Trick setups were unexplainably spread in absolutely different sections. Relocating between features felt disjointed or confusing.
I’ll tell you what I imply by speaking about their funnel builder as an example. There were 3 different setups panels to manage total, individual, and item setups. Yet for some insane reason, the links to access each of these core settings were spread out on contrary sides of the screen. What!?
As somebody that values tidy, thoughtful design, this seriously annoyed me.
It strengthened that GoHighLevel still seemed like a work-in-progress instead of a refined product all set for prime-time usage. Their top priorities appeared concentrated on packing in every feature under the sun, with poor functionality as an afterthought.
And speaking of features, I quickly understood the small cost tag came with costly compromises …
Misleading Pricing GoHighLevel Affiliate Summer Camp
One of GoHighLevel’s greatest marketing points is the affordable price for access to many features. However I quickly discovered this cheap base expense was deceitful.
They nickle-and-dimed individuals with erratic fees for core capability. Instantly my charge card statements had vague $10 fees from GoHighLevel here and there.
As it turned out, you get billed each time you send an email via their web servers. So for high quantity customers, this amounted to numerous dollars in unforeseen prices.
In between these per-email charges and paying extra for deliverability attachments like Mailgun, my “cost effective” GoHighLevel subscription ended up costing substantially MORE than my Keap plan.
The reduced price tag was tempting, however simply not practical in practice. This bait-and-switch left a bad taste in my mouth.
Email Fees Suffered
The last dealbreaker was seeing my carefully supported e-mail open rates plummet nearly overnight after switching over to GoHighLevel.
Previously, my audience involvement continually hit 35-40% open prices in Keap month after month. Once I moved their documents over to GoHighLevel, efficiency tanked quickly to a pathetic 9% open price.
Despite how much I maximized my sending out practices or attempted every repairing method, I can barely nudge open prices back right into the teens– still a 50%+ decrease from my previous criteria GoHighLevel Affiliate Summer Camp.
Let me repeat: my exact same target market and e-mails unexpectedly had dreadful interaction. The only thing I might think that would certainly be triggering this was whatever was occurring behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a firm so dependent on email marketing, this was a big deal.
In between the crippling deliverability issues, hidden charges, damaged features, and awful 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 understood I had actually made a big error. The disadvantages considerably outweighed any advantages.
No software is perfect, but the sheer volume of issues was past appropriate.
At the end of the day, software application comes down to trust fund. If I can’t trust it to handle important features capably or believe a vendor has my benefits in mind, then it’s time to walk away– even after spending substantial time, money, and initiative moving.
So I made the hard contact us to turn around program and return back to Keap totally simply weeks after going done in on GoHighLevel. Let’s explore what I picked up from this ordeal.
Key Takeaways: What I Picked up from My GoHighLevel Error
My time with HighLevel can be summarized as a costly misadventure. However in hindsight, it instructed me a few key lessons:
- Stay with what works. Do not disturb what’s working unless something is definitively better across the board. Change brings danger.
- Veterinarian asserts extensively. Marketing buzz around brand-new software program usually covers bigger underlying defects. Deep due diligence is important.
- Pick simpleness over features. Well-designed devices ought to make your job life easier, not a lot more complicated and unpleasant.
- Openness builds depend on. Opaque pricing, questionable reseller terms, and finger-pointing to escape troubles ruins depend on.
- Seek objective reviews. Satisfied assistance reviews mean less if excessive issues imply poor general functionality.
- Excellence is difficult. No solitary service can perfectly meet every special service requirement. Discover the least-bad fit.
- Development over transformation. Step-by-step enhancements commonly surpass dangerous wholesale reinvention of what already works fine.
In short, I learned to be a lot more doubtful of “also excellent to be real” marketing cases and much less lured by the appeal of shiny new items. The devices you make use of daily ought to gain trust fund via openness and performance, not glossy advertising.