As a company owner for over a years, I depend on software program and automation to improve procedures and deliver results. So when GoHighLevel emerged on the scene few years back, it definitely caught my attention GoHighLevel Auto Payouts Via PayPal.
The concept was appealing– an all-in-one customer management platform with marketing, sales, and service devices incorporated together. As a business owner always looking to streamline and scale my organization, it appeared like a dream happened theoretically. That wouldn’t desire a single service that does it all?
However in this extensive GoHighLevel testimonial, I’ll take you inside my dreadful journey of attempting (and falling short) to switch to this prominent new software. You’ll discover:
If you’re considering whether GoHighLevel is right for your very own business demands, hopefully you can pick up from my painful blunders and pumped up expectations.
Looter: I do NOT recommend GoHighLevel. If you require a CRM, start with this checklist of best CRMs rather. I use Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re looking for a sales, marketing, and project monitoring alternative to GoHighLevel, then right here are a couple of we suggest.
Backstory: Why I Considered Changing from Keap
To comprehend what attracted me to GoHighLevel in the first place, you require context concerning my previous setup. For over 5 years I had actually been happily relying on Keap (previously Infusionsoft) to meet all my customer monitoring and automation needs.
I located Keap user-friendly to utilize and it dealt with everything I needed– CRM, email marketing, sales funnels, membership websites, and client assistance.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are created to aid small businesses keep their customers while including new ones effortlessly. Automate follow-ups with e-mails and messages, making sure leads and clients receive the best messages at the correct time. Usage site and social networks types to improve lead follow-up, and handle your growth with easy consultation organizing and lead tracking. Boost sales with automated estimating, invoicing, and settlement handling, maximizing your time. With Keap, small businesses can conserve 10 hours weekly and rise revenue by 39%. Beginning with a 14-day free trial, no bank card called for.
Why we like Keap
Keap provides a comprehensive consumer connection management (CRM) and marketing automation solution tailored for small businesses and business owners. We appreciate Keap’s focus on simplifying sales processes and supporting consumer relationships with powerful automation tools. The platform’s all-in-one technique combines CRM, e-mail marketing, invoicing, and task monitoring, making it particularly eye-catching for services seeking to combine their technology stack.
Essentially, it just functioned reliably with minimal fuss or maintenance needed. My open and click-through prices were terrific (like 35% wonderful). Automations ran smoothly without issues.
So why in the world was I tempted to uproot my entire operational structure from a system that worked to try something unverified and untried?
In knowledge I can confess I got seduced by the alarm phone call of “shiny item syndrome”. You understand the feeling: when every person’s talking about a brand-new device that will revolutionize your organization … The lawn usually looks greener on the other side, and I wondered whether GoHighLevel might lower friction factors that I ‘d learned to endure for many years with Keap.
I withstood initially, but a couple of even more aggravations led me to assume maybe it was time for a modification.
The Financial investment: Moving My Agency to GoHighLevel
Earlier this year I chose to start. I signed up for HighLevel’s Firm plan at $297/month, spending dramatically more than the $97/month starter price.
This had not been a choice I ignored. I knew switching over platforms was mosting likely to need moving all my Keap data and essentially restoring my entire technology facilities from scratch making use of all of the GoHighLevel integrations readily available.
Below’s a review of just some of the effort needed:
- By hand exporting 20,000+ email customer records
- Recreating lots of automations and workflows
- Moving client profiles, notes, and task data to the new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe payment integration
- Establishing landing pages, coupons, and sales funnels all over once again
- Learning a completely foreign UX and user interface layout
Done in, I spent around 30-40 laborious hours of configuration job transitioning whatever over– in addition to managing shed performance during the button.
But inevitably, it was a computed investment I was willing to make. I figured some temporary pain would certainly repay with GoHighLevel providing a much better long-term solution for my business, Dripify. Oh how wrong I was …
It only took me concerning a month of hands-on use to realize I had actually made a big blunder. The issues started accumulating promptly, until it got to a point I had to reduce my losses and switch back to Keap completely.
Let’s walk through the horrible problems I encountered.
Protection Issues & Several Bugs
Offered GoHighLevel placed itself as an all-in-one automation system, I made sure to carefully recreate each and every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These included series for onboarding brand-new email subscribers, onboarding brand-new clients, automating follow-ups for webinar enrollments, sending out occasion reminders, managing subscription expiries and much more.
Every little thing seemed to be functioning penalty … up until suddenly it had not been. One morning, I woke up to discover 171 totally pointless emails had been sent out to customers that must NOT have obtained them. This happened 3 days straight, with a various batch of 160 individuals daily.
I hysterically tried fixing and restoring the automation from square one. However the trouble persisted.
When I seriously connected to their assistance group, they slightly claimed “web server concerns” were at fault. Yet this explanation didn’t make any feeling, considering that the errors continued occurring each morning like clockwork unassociated to any kind of downtime.
In my mind, this large failure was completely unacceptable and simply didn’t help my company. I have countless calls relying on my automated campaigns running efficiently.
So if GoHighLevel was going to be completely unstable, exactly how could I turn over mission-critical workflows and delicate customer data to their innovation?
The unintuitive interface only intensified these concerns …
Irritating UX
Originating from Keap where every little thing was smooth and intuitive, GoHighLevel’s learning contour really felt high and complex.
Straightforward tasks like modifying workflows entailed digging with menu systems that were all over the place. Secret setups were unexplainably spread in totally various areas. Moving between features felt disjointed or complex.
I’ll inform you what I mean by talking about their funnel builder as an example. There were 3 separate settings panels to manage total, private, and product setups. Yet for some crazy reason, the links to accessibility each of these core setups were spread out on opposite sides of the screen. What!?
As someone who values tidy, thoughtful design, this seriously upset me.
It enhanced that GoHighLevel still seemed like a work-in-progress as opposed to a sleek item all set for prime-time usage. Their top priorities appeared concentrated on cramming in every feature imaginable, with inadequate usability as a second thought.
And talking features, I soon understood the low cost tag included costly concessions …
Misleading Pricing GoHighLevel Auto Payouts Via PayPal
Among GoHighLevel’s biggest selling factors is the inexpensive rate for access to so many features. But I rapidly learned this low-cost base cost was misleading.
They nickle-and-dimed users with occasional costs for core performance. Suddenly my bank card statements had obscure $10 costs from GoHighLevel occasionally.
As it ended up, you get billed each time you send out an e-mail with their servers. So for high volume users, this amounted to thousands of dollars in unanticipated prices.
In between these per-email fees and paying extra for deliverability attachments like Mailgun, my “cost effective” GoHighLevel registration ended up costing substantially MORE than my Keap plan.
The low sticker price was alluring, but simply not sensible in practice. This bait-and-switch left a poor taste in my mouth.
Email Fees Suffered
The final dealbreaker was seeing my carefully supported email open rates plummet nearly overnight after switching over to GoHighLevel.
Previously, my audience interaction regularly hit 35-40% open rates in Keap month after month. Once I migrated their records over to GoHighLevel, efficiency tanked instantaneously to a worthless 9% open price.
No matter how much I maximized my sending out practices or attempted every fixing technique, I could barely nudge open rates back right into the teens– still a 50%+ decrease from my previous benchmarks GoHighLevel Auto Payouts Via PayPal.
Let me repeat: my exact same audience and e-mails unexpectedly had awful involvement. The only thing I might believe that would certainly be causing this was whatever was happening behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a firm so dependent on email marketing, this was a big deal.
Between the debilitating deliverability concerns, hidden costs, busted features, and horrible interface, I had lastly reached my restriction …
Why I Quit GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Simply 45 days after moving my agency to GoHighLevel, I understood I had made a massive blunder. The cons drastically exceeded any type of advantages.
No software application is excellent, yet the large quantity of issues was beyond appropriate.
At the end of the day, software application comes down to trust fund. If I can not trust it to handle critical functions properly or believe a vendor has my benefits in mind, then it’s time to walk away– also after spending substantial time, money, and initiative moving.
So I made the challenging contact us to reverse program and return back to Keap entirely simply weeks after going all in on GoHighLevel. Let’s explore what I picked up from this debacle.
Trick Takeaways: What I Learned From My GoHighLevel Error
My time with HighLevel can be summed up as a costly misadventure. However in knowledge, it showed me a couple of key lessons:
- Stay with what jobs. Don’t upset what’s working unless something is definitively far better across the board. Change brings danger.
- Veterinarian asserts extensively. Marketing buzz around new software application commonly obscures bigger underlying flaws. Deep due diligence is essential.
- Pick simpleness over features. Properly designed devices need to make your job life much easier, not extra difficult and unpleasant.
- Openness builds count on. Nontransparent pricing, shady reseller terms, and finger-pointing to evade problems destroys trust.
- Look for unbiased reviews. Satisfied support examines suggest much less if excessive problems indicate poor overall use.
- Excellence is impossible. No solitary remedy can perfectly fulfill every special company requirement. Discover the least-bad fit.
- Development over transformation. Incremental improvements commonly outweigh high-risk wholesale reinvention of what currently functions fine.
Simply put, I discovered to be extra doubtful of “too excellent to be real” marketing claims and much less lured by the attraction of glossy new items. The tools you utilize daily need to gain trust fund with transparency and efficiency, not slick advertising.