As a company owner for over a decade, I rely on software program and automation to enhance procedures and deliver outcomes. So when GoHighLevel emerged on the scene couple of years back, it most definitely caught my attention GoHighLevel For Ad Agencies.
The idea was appealing– an all-in-one customer administration platform with marketing, sales, and service tools incorporated with each other. As an entrepreneur always seeking to simplify and scale my company, it looked like a dream come to life on paper. That wouldn’t want a single option that does it all?
But in this in-depth GoHighLevel review, I’ll take you inside my dreadful journey of attempting (and failing) to switch to this preferred brand-new software application. You’ll find out:
If you’re thinking about whether GoHighLevel is right for your own service requirements, ideally you can learn from my excruciating errors and blew up expectations.
Spoiler: I do NOT suggest GoHighLevel. If you require a CRM, begin with this listing of best CRMs rather. I utilize Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re searching for a sales, marketing, and task monitoring alternative to GoHighLevel, after that here are a couple of we suggest.
Backstory: Why I Thought About Changing from Keap
To recognize what attracted me to GoHighLevel to begin with, you need context about my previous arrangement. For over 5 years I had actually been happily counting on Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) to meet all my client monitoring and automation needs.
I found Keap user-friendly to make use of and it handled every little thing I required– CRM, email marketing, sales funnels, membership sites, and customer support.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are developed to help local business keep their customers while adding new ones easily. Automate follow-ups with emails and messages, ensuring leads and clients receive the best messages at the right time. Use internet site and social media types to improve lead follow-up, and manage your development with easy consultation organizing and lead monitoring. Boost sales with automated pricing quote, invoicing, and settlement handling, maximizing your time. With Keap, local business can conserve 10 hours weekly and rise income by 39%. Begin with a 14-day free trial, no credit card called for.
Why we like Keap
Keap offers an extensive customer relationship administration (CRM) and marketing automation remedy customized for local business and entrepreneurs. We appreciate Keap’s focus on simplifying sales procedures and supporting customer connections via effective automation devices. The system’s all-in-one technique combines CRM, e-mail marketing, invoicing, and job administration, making it specifically eye-catching for businesses aiming to consolidate their tech pile.
Essentially, it simply worked accurately with marginal fuss or maintenance needed. My open and click-through prices were terrific (like 35% terrific). Automations ran smoothly without any problems.
So why in the world was I lured to uproot my entire functional structure from a system that worked to try something unproven and untested?
In hindsight I can admit I got seduced by the alarm call of “glossy things syndrome”. You know the feeling: when every person’s talking about a new device that will certainly reinvent your service … The lawn commonly looks greener on the other side, and I wondered whether GoHighLevel could lower friction points that I would certainly learned to endure for many years with Keap.
I resisted at first, but a couple of even more stress led me to believe possibly it was time for a modification.
The Investment: Moving My Firm to GoHighLevel
Earlier this year I chose to take the plunge. I registered for HighLevel’s Company plan at $297/month, investing substantially greater than the $97/month starter cost.
This had not been a decision I took lightly. I recognized changing systems was mosting likely to need moving all my Keap information and basically reconstructing my entire tech framework from square one utilizing every one of the GoHighLevel integrations readily available.
Here’s a summary of simply several of the initiative called for:
- Manually exporting 20,000+ e-mail subscriber records
- Recreating loads of automations and workflows
- Moving client profiles, notes, and job data to the new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe billing integration
- Setting up landing pages, coupons, and sales funnels throughout once more
- Learning a completely foreign UX and interface style
All in, I invested around 30-40 laborious hours of arrangement work transitioning whatever over– and also managing lost efficiency during the switch.
However ultimately, it was a calculated investment I was willing to make. I figured some short-term pain would certainly settle with GoHighLevel offering a much better long-lasting option for my business, Dripify. Oh how incorrect I was …
It just took me regarding a month of hands-on usage to recognize I had actually made a huge mistake. The concerns started piling up quickly, till it got to a factor I had to cut my losses and switch over back to Keap completely.
Allow’s walk through the nightmarish problems I experienced.
Security Issues & Several Vermin
Offered GoHighLevel positioned itself as an all-in-one automation system, I took care to thoroughly recreate every workflow from my old Keap account.
These consisted of sequences for onboarding brand-new e-mail customers, onboarding brand-new clients, automating follow-ups for webinar registrations, sending out event tips, handling subscription expirations and much more.
Everything seemed to be operating fine … till all of a sudden it wasn’t. One morning, I awoke to find 171 totally irrelevant emails had actually been sent out to users that must NOT have actually gotten them. This happened three days straight, with a different batch of 160 individuals each day.
I hysterically tried troubleshooting and restoring the automation from scratch. Yet the problem lingered.
When I desperately connected to their support team, they vaguely declared “web server issues” were responsible. However this explanation really did not make any kind of sense, considering that the errors proceeded occurring each morning like clockwork unconnected to any downtime.
In my mind, this substantial failing was entirely inappropriate and simply really did not benefit my company. I have hundreds of contacts relying on my automated campaigns running efficiently.
So if GoHighLevel was mosting likely to be totally undependable, how could I turn over mission-critical workflows and sensitive customer information to their modern technology?
The unintuitive user interface just worsened these issues …
Aggravating UX
Coming from Keap where every little thing was seamless and user-friendly, GoHighLevel’s learning contour felt steep and difficult.
Straightforward jobs like modifying workflows included digging with food selection systems that were all over the place. Trick setups were unexplainably spread in absolutely various areas. Relocating between functions really felt disjointed or confusing.
I’ll inform you what I imply by speaking about their funnel builder as an example. There were 3 different setups panels to handle overall, specific, and product configurations. Yet for some insane factor, the links to accessibility each of these core setups were expanded on opposite sides of the display. What!?
As a person who values tidy, thoughtful layout, this seriously frustrated me.
It strengthened that GoHighLevel still seemed like a work-in-progress rather than a sleek item prepared for prime-time use. Their top priorities seemed concentrated on stuffing in every feature under the sun, with inadequate use as an afterthought.
And speaking of features, I quickly understood the low cost tag came with expensive concessions …
Deceptive Pricing GoHighLevel For Ad Agencies
Among GoHighLevel’s biggest selling factors is the inexpensive rate for accessibility to numerous features. But I swiftly discovered this affordable base cost was deceitful.
They nickle-and-dimed users with occasional costs for core performance. All of a sudden my bank card statements had unclear $10 fees from GoHighLevel here and there.
As it turned out, you get charged every single time you send an email via their servers. So for high volume users, this added up to thousands of bucks in unforeseen costs.
Between these per-email fees and paying added for deliverability attachments like Mailgun, my “affordable” GoHighLevel registration ended up costing dramatically greater than my Keap plan.
The low price tag was tempting, yet just not realistic in practice. This bait-and-switch left a poor taste in my mouth.
Email Fees Suffered
The last dealbreaker was seeing my carefully supported e-mail open rates plunge virtually over night after switching to GoHighLevel.
Previously, my target market involvement regularly hit 35-40% open rates in Keap month after month. But once I migrated their documents over to GoHighLevel, efficiency tanked immediately to a pitiful 9% open rate.
Despite how much I optimized my sending practices or attempted every fixing technique, I could hardly push open rates back into the teenagers– still a 50%+ decrease from my previous criteria GoHighLevel For Ad Agencies.
Let me repeat: my exact same audience and e-mails all of a sudden had horrible engagement. The only thing I might assume that would be causing this was whatever was happening behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For an agency so based on e-mail marketing, this was a big deal.
Between the debilitating deliverability concerns, hidden charges, busted features, and terrible interface, I had actually lastly reached my limitation …
Why I Quit GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Simply 45 days after migrating my agency to GoHighLevel, I knew I had made a massive error. The cons drastically outweighed any benefits.
No software program is perfect, however the sheer quantity of issues was past acceptable.
At the end of the day, software application comes down to depend on. If I can’t trust it to manage essential features capably or believe a supplier has my best interests in mind, then it’s time to leave– also after spending significant time, money, and initiative migrating.
So I made the challenging contact us to turn around program and return back to Keap completely just weeks after going done in on GoHighLevel. Allow’s discover what I picked up from this ordeal.
Secret Takeaways: What I Learned From My GoHighLevel Blunder
My time with HighLevel can be summarized as an expensive ill fortune. Yet in knowledge, it taught me a couple of essential lessons:
- Adhere to what jobs. Don’t distress what’s functioning unless something is definitively far better across the board. Modification brings threat.
- Veterinarian asserts completely. Marketing hype around new software usually obscures bigger underlying problems. Deep due diligence is important.
- Select simpleness over features. Properly designed devices ought to make your work life much easier, not extra challenging and untidy.
- Openness develops count on. Opaque pricing, shady reseller terms, and finger-pointing to evade troubles damages trust.
- Look for objective reviews. Delighted support assesses imply less if too much issues suggest bad overall usability.
- Excellence is impossible. No single remedy can perfectly satisfy every unique company need. Locate the least-bad fit.
- Evolution over transformation. Incremental improvements generally surpass dangerous wholesale reinvention of what already works fine.
In short, I learned to be a lot more unconvinced of “as well good to be real” marketing cases and much less lured by the attraction of glossy brand-new items. The tools you utilize daily ought to make trust fund through openness and efficiency, not slick advertising.