As a company proprietor for over a decade, I count on software and automation to simplify operations and deliver results. So when GoHighLevel emerged on the scene couple of years back, it most definitely captured my attention GoHighLevel Remote Jobs.
The concept was attractive– an all-in-one client monitoring system with marketing, sales, and solution devices incorporated together. As a business owner constantly wanting to streamline and scale my service, it appeared like a dream become a reality on paper. That would not desire a solitary option that does it all?
However in this thorough GoHighLevel review, I’ll take you inside my devastating trip of attempting (and stopping working) to change to this popular new software application. You’ll discover:
If you’re considering whether GoHighLevel is right for your own business requirements, hopefully you can learn from my uncomfortable errors and inflated assumptions.
Looter: I do NOT suggest GoHighLevel. If you require a CRM, start with this checklist of ideal CRMs rather. I use Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re seeking a sales, marketing, and project management choice to GoHighLevel, then right here are a couple of we recommend.
Backstory: Why I Thought About Switching from Keap
To comprehend what attracted me to GoHighLevel to begin with, you require context about my previous setup. For over 5 years I had actually been gladly depending on Keap (previously Infusionsoft) to meet all my client administration and automation requirements.
I found Keap intuitive to utilize and it managed everything I needed– CRM, email marketing, sales funnels, membership websites, and customer support.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are created to help small companies keep their clients while adding new ones effortlessly. Automate follow-ups with e-mails and texts, making certain leads and customers obtain the right messages at the correct time. Usage site and social media kinds to simplify lead follow-up, and manage your development with simple consultation organizing and lead monitoring. Boost sales with automated estimating, invoicing, and repayment handling, liberating your time. With Keap, small companies can conserve 10 hours each week and increase profits by 39%. Start with a 14-day free trial, no credit card required.
Why we like Keap
Keap provides a detailed client partnership administration (CRM) and marketing automation service customized for local business and business owners. We appreciate Keap’s focus on enhancing sales procedures and supporting consumer connections via effective automation tools. The platform’s all-in-one approach combines CRM, email marketing, invoicing, and job management, making it specifically appealing for services looking to settle their technology pile.
Essentially, it just worked accurately with minimal difficulty or upkeep called for. My open and click-through prices were fantastic (like 35% wonderful). Automations ran efficiently without issues.
So why on earth was I attracted to uproot my whole functional structure from a system that worked to attempt something unverified and untested?
In hindsight I can admit I obtained seduced by the alarm telephone call of “shiny item syndrome”. You recognize the sensation: when everybody’s speaking about a new device that will revolutionize your company … The turf frequently looks greener beyond, and I asked yourself whether GoHighLevel may minimize rubbing factors that I ‘d discovered to tolerate over the years with Keap.
I resisted initially, yet a couple of even more aggravations led me to think maybe it was time for a modification.
The Financial investment: Migrating My Agency to GoHighLevel
Earlier this year I determined to start. I enrolled in HighLevel’s Agency plan at $297/month, spending significantly greater than the $97/month starter price.
This had not been a decision I took lightly. I knew switching systems was going to require migrating all my Keap data and basically reconstructing my whole tech infrastructure from square one making use of every one of the GoHighLevel integrations readily available.
Here’s a summary of simply a few of the effort required:
- By hand exporting 20,000+ email client records
- Recreating lots of automations and workflows
- Moving client accounts, notes, and task data to the brand-new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe payment integration
- Establishing landing pages, promos, and sales funnels all over once more
- Learning a completely international UX and user interface design
Done in, I invested around 30-40 tedious hours of setup work transitioning whatever over– in addition to handling shed productivity throughout the button.
However inevitably, it was a computed investment I was willing to make. I figured some temporary discomfort would certainly repay with GoHighLevel providing a better long-term solution for my business, Dripify. Oh exactly how wrong I was …
It only took me concerning a month of hands-on use to realize I had actually made a large mistake. The concerns began accumulating promptly, up until it got to a factor I needed to reduce my losses and switch back to Keap entirely.
Allow’s walk through the nightmarish issues I ran into.
Protection Issues & Several Bugs
Given GoHighLevel placed itself as an all-in-one automation system, I made sure to carefully recreate every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These included series for onboarding brand-new e-mail subscribers, onboarding new clients, automating follow-ups for webinar enrollments, sending occasion suggestions, handling subscription expirations and a lot more.
Everything seemed to be functioning fine … until suddenly it wasn’t. One morning, I woke up to discover 171 entirely unimportant emails had actually been sent out to users who need to NOT have actually received them. This happened three days in a row, with a various set of 160 individuals daily.
I hysterically attempted repairing and reconstructing the automation from scratch. But the trouble lingered.
When I desperately reached out to their assistance group, they vaguely declared “web server concerns” were responsible. However this explanation didn’t make any feeling, considering that the mistakes continued happening each early morning like clockwork unconnected to any kind of downtime.
In my mind, this massive failing was totally undesirable and simply didn’t benefit my business. I have thousands of get in touches with relying upon my automated campaigns running efficiently.
So if GoHighLevel was going to be entirely unstable, exactly how could I delegate mission-critical workflows and delicate customer information to their technology?
The unintuitive user interface just worsened these concerns …
Aggravating UX
Coming from Keap where every little thing was smooth and instinctive, GoHighLevel’s learning curve really felt steep and complex.
Easy tasks like modifying workflows entailed digging through menu systems that were all over the place. Secret settings were unexplainably scattered in absolutely different sections. Relocating in between features really felt disjointed or complicated.
I’ll tell you what I mean by talking about their funnel builder as an example. There were 3 different settings panels to handle overall, specific, and item setups. Yet for some crazy reason, the web links to access each of these core setups were spread out on opposite sides of the screen. What!?
As a person who values tidy, thoughtful layout, this seriously frustrated me.
It reinforced that GoHighLevel still felt like a work-in-progress rather than a refined product all set for prime-time usage. Their top priorities appeared focused on cramming in every feature imaginable, with inadequate functionality as an afterthought.
And talking features, I quickly understood the small cost tag featured pricey compromises …
Misleading Pricing GoHighLevel Remote Jobs
One of GoHighLevel’s biggest selling factors is the affordable price for accessibility to many features. But I swiftly learned this cheap base expense was deceitful.
They nickle-and-dimed individuals with occasional charges for core capability. Unexpectedly my credit card declarations had unclear $10 fees from GoHighLevel here and there.
As it ended up, you obtain charged each time you send an email with their web servers. So for high quantity customers, this added up to numerous dollars in unforeseen prices.
Between these per-email fees and paying added for deliverability attachments like Mailgun, my “economical” GoHighLevel membership ended up setting you back significantly greater than my Keap plan.
The low price tag was tempting, but simply not practical in practice. This bait-and-switch left a poor taste in my mouth.
Email Fees Suffered
The last dealbreaker was seeing my meticulously supported email open prices drop nearly over night after switching over to GoHighLevel.
Previously, my audience engagement consistently struck 35-40% open rates in Keap month after month. Once I moved their records over to GoHighLevel, efficiency tanked quickly to a worthless 9% open price.
Despite how much I optimized my sending out methods or tried every fixing technique, I could barely push open rates back right into the teenagers– still a 50%+ decrease from my previous criteria GoHighLevel Remote Jobs.
Let me repeat: my exact same target market and e-mails unexpectedly had awful interaction. The only thing I might believe that would certainly be triggering this was whatever was occurring behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For an agency so dependent on email marketing, this was a big deal.
Between the crippling deliverability concerns, concealed charges, damaged features, and horrible user interface, I had ultimately 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 mistake. The disadvantages significantly outweighed any advantages.
No software program is best, however the large quantity of issues was beyond acceptable.
At the end of the day, software comes down to count on. If I can not trust it to handle crucial features properly or believe a supplier has my benefits in mind, then it’s time to walk away– even after spending significant time, cash, and initiative moving.
So I made the hard phone call to turn around course and return back to Keap entirely simply weeks after going done in on GoHighLevel. Let’s explore what I gained from this fiasco.
Trick Takeaways: What I Gained from My GoHighLevel Error
My time with HighLevel can be summarized as a pricey ill fortune. Yet in hindsight, it showed me a few essential lessons:
- Stay with what works. Do not upset what’s working unless something is definitively much better across the board. Change brings danger.
- Vet asserts thoroughly. Marketing hype around new software commonly obscures larger underlying imperfections. Deep due persistance is essential.
- Select simplicity over features. Well-designed devices need to make your work life much easier, not much more challenging and messy.
- Transparency builds trust fund. Opaque pricing, questionable reseller terms, and finger-pointing to avert problems ruins trust.
- Look for impartial evaluations. Happy assistance evaluates imply less if excessive issues suggest bad overall usability.
- Perfection is difficult. No solitary solution can flawlessly meet every one-of-a-kind business need. Find the least-bad fit.
- Development over revolution. Incremental enhancements normally surpass high-risk wholesale reinvention of what currently works penalty.
Simply put, I learned to be a lot more skeptical of “too excellent to be real” marketing cases and much less attracted by the attraction of shiny brand-new items. The devices you make use of daily must earn trust with openness and performance, not slick advertising.