As a company proprietor for over a years, I rely upon software application and automation to simplify procedures and deliver results. So when GoHighLevel arised on the scene couple of years back, it certainly captured my interest GoHighLevel Top Affiliates.
The idea was enticing– an all-in-one customer monitoring system with marketing, sales, and service devices integrated with each other. As an entrepreneur constantly wanting to streamline and scale my organization, it appeared like a desire come true theoretically. That wouldn’t want a solitary service that does it all?
Yet in this in-depth GoHighLevel evaluation, I’ll take you inside my devastating trip of trying (and failing) to switch over to this popular new software program. You’ll discover:
If you’re taking into consideration whether GoHighLevel is right for your own business needs, hopefully you can pick up from my painful mistakes and inflated expectations.
Spoiler: I do NOT advise GoHighLevel. If you require a CRM, begin with this checklist of best CRMs instead. I utilize Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re searching for a sales, marketing, and task management alternative to GoHighLevel, then below are a few we suggest.
Backstory: Why I Considered Switching from Keap
To comprehend what attracted me to GoHighLevel to begin with, you require context concerning my previous configuration. For over 5 years I had actually been happily relying on Keap (previously Infusionsoft) to satisfy all my client administration and automation needs.
I located Keap intuitive to utilize and it took care of everything I needed– CRM, email marketing, sales funnels, membership websites, and customer assistance.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are developed to aid local business keep their clients while including new ones effortlessly. Automate follow-ups with e-mails and messages, guaranteeing leads and clients obtain the ideal messages at the correct time. Use website and social media types to enhance lead follow-up, and manage your growth with very easy appointment organizing and lead monitoring. Boost sales with automated quoting, invoicing, and settlement processing, maximizing your time. With Keap, local business can conserve 10 hours per week and increase income by 39%. Beginning with a 14-day free trial, no bank card required.
Why we like Keap
Keap provides a thorough client relationship monitoring (CRM) and marketing automation option customized for small businesses and entrepreneurs. We appreciate Keap’s focus on streamlining sales procedures and nurturing consumer relationships through powerful automation tools. The system’s all-in-one approach integrates CRM, e-mail marketing, invoicing, and job administration, making it especially eye-catching for businesses aiming to combine their tech stack.
Generally, it just worked accurately with very little fuss or upkeep required. My open and click-through prices were great (like 35% wonderful). Automations ran smoothly without any problems.
So why in the world was I lured to uproot my entire operational structure from a system that worked to attempt something unverified and untried?
In knowledge I can admit I obtained seduced by the siren telephone call of “glossy things syndrome”. You know the sensation: when everybody’s talking about a new tool that will certainly revolutionize your organization … The turf often looks greener beyond, and I questioned whether GoHighLevel might reduce friction factors that I ‘d discovered to endure throughout the years with Keap.
I withstood at first, yet a couple of more frustrations led me to think possibly it was time for a modification.
The Investment: Moving My Firm to GoHighLevel
Earlier this year I decided to start. I signed up for HighLevel’s Firm plan at $297/month, investing considerably greater than the $97/month starter expense.
This wasn’t a choice I took lightly. I recognized switching over platforms was mosting likely to require moving all my Keap data and essentially reconstructing my whole technology infrastructure from the ground up using every one of the GoHighLevel integrations offered.
Below’s an introduction of just a few of the effort required:
- By hand exporting 20,000+ email subscriber records
- Recreating loads of automations and workflows
- Moving client accounts, notes, and job data to the new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe billing integration
- Establishing landing pages, coupons, and sales funnels all over again
- Learning a completely foreign UX and user interface style
Done in, I invested around 30-40 tedious hours of setup work transitioning whatever over– as well as taking care of shed productivity throughout the button.
However ultimately, it was a computed investment I was willing to make. I figured some temporary discomfort would repay with GoHighLevel offering a better lasting service for my company, Dripify. Oh just how wrong I was …
It just took me about a month of hands-on usage to realize I had actually made a big error. The issues started accumulating swiftly, until it reached a point I needed to reduce my losses and change back to Keap entirely.
Allow’s go through the horrible problems I encountered.
Security Issues & Lots of Vermin
Given GoHighLevel positioned itself as an all-in-one automation platform, I took care to carefully recreate every workflow from my old Keap account.
These consisted of sequences for onboarding brand-new email subscribers, onboarding brand-new customers, automating follow-ups for webinar enrollments, sending out event pointers, managing subscription expirations and a lot more.
Every little thing seemed to be working penalty … up until all of a sudden it wasn’t. One early morning, I woke up to locate 171 totally pointless e-mails had actually been sent out to users who must NOT have gotten them. This occurred three days straight, with a various set of 160 people daily.
I hysterically tried repairing and restoring the automation from scratch. However the issue lingered.
When I frantically reached out to their support group, they vaguely declared “server problems” were at fault. Yet this description really did not make any sense, considering that the mistakes proceeded taking place each morning like clockwork unconnected to any downtime.
In my mind, this enormous failure was completely undesirable and simply didn’t work for my service. I have hundreds of calls counting on my automated campaigns running efficiently.
So if GoHighLevel was mosting likely to be absolutely undependable, exactly how could I entrust mission-critical workflows and delicate client information to their technology?
The unintuitive user interface only worsened these concerns …
Irritating UX
Originating from Keap where whatever was seamless and user-friendly, GoHighLevel’s learning contour really felt high and complex.
Basic jobs like modifying workflows involved digging via menu systems that were all over the place. Trick settings were unexplainably spread in completely various areas. Relocating in between functions really felt disjointed or complicated.
I’ll inform you what I indicate by speaking about their funnel builder as an instance. There were 3 different setups panels to take care of general, specific, and product arrangements. Yet for some crazy reason, the links to access each of these core setups were expanded on opposite sides of the screen. What!?
As somebody that values clean, thoughtful style, this seriously frustrated me.
It enhanced that GoHighLevel still seemed like a work-in-progress as opposed to a refined product all set for prime-time usage. Their concerns appeared concentrated on stuffing in every feature under the sun, with bad functionality as an afterthought.
And speaking of features, I quickly understood the small cost tag came with pricey concessions …
Misleading Pricing GoHighLevel Top Affiliates
One of GoHighLevel’s biggest marketing factors is the affordable rate for accessibility to so many features. But I rapidly discovered this cheap base price was deceitful.
They nickle-and-dimed individuals with sporadic costs for core functionality. All of a sudden my charge card declarations had unclear $10 fees from GoHighLevel here and there.
As it ended up, you obtain charged every single time you send an e-mail via their web servers. So for high quantity individuals, this amounted to hundreds of dollars in unanticipated costs.
In between these per-email fees and paying additional for deliverability add-ons like Mailgun, my “cost effective” GoHighLevel subscription wound up setting you back substantially MORE than my Keap plan.
The reduced sticker price was appealing, yet simply not realistic in practice. This bait-and-switch left a poor taste in my mouth.
Email Fees Suffered
The final dealbreaker was seeing my thoroughly supported email open rates drop nearly overnight after switching over to GoHighLevel.
Previously, my target market engagement continually struck 35-40% open rates in Keap month after month. Once I moved their records over to GoHighLevel, performance tanked immediately to a useless 9% open rate.
Regardless of how much I optimized my sending methods or tried every repairing trick, I could hardly nudge open prices back right into the teens– still a 50%+ decrease from my previous criteria GoHighLevel Top Affiliates.
Let me repeat: my exact same audience and e-mails all of a sudden had horrible interaction. The only thing I can believe that would be creating this was whatever was happening behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a company so depending on email marketing, this was a big deal.
Between the debilitating deliverability concerns, concealed charges, damaged features, and horrible interface, I had ultimately reached my limit …
Why I Quit GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Just 45 days after moving my company to GoHighLevel, I knew I had made a big error. The disadvantages significantly exceeded any type of advantages.
No software is perfect, but the sheer quantity of troubles was beyond appropriate.
At the end of the day, software program boils down to trust fund. If I can’t trust it to manage crucial features effectively or think a vendor has my benefits in mind, then it’s time to walk away– also after investing substantial time, money, and effort migrating.
So I made the hard contact us to reverse training course and return back to Keap entirely simply weeks after going all in on GoHighLevel. Let’s explore what I learned from this fiasco.
Trick Takeaways: What I Picked up from My GoHighLevel Mistake
My time with HighLevel can be summed up as a costly accident. However in knowledge, it showed me a couple of crucial lessons:
- Stay with what works. Do not upset what’s working unless something is definitively better across the board. Change brings risk.
- Vet claims completely. Marketing hype around new software program often covers larger underlying flaws. Deep due persistance is important.
- Pick simplicity over features. Properly designed devices ought to make your work life simpler, not much more complicated and messy.
- Transparency constructs trust. Nontransparent pricing, shady reseller terms, and finger-pointing to escape problems destroys count on.
- Seek unbiased reviews. Happy assistance assesses indicate much less if excessive problems indicate inadequate overall use.
- Excellence is difficult. No single service can completely fulfill every unique organization demand. Locate the least-bad fit.
- Evolution over transformation. Step-by-step renovations generally surpass high-risk wholesale reinvention of what already functions penalty.
Basically, I learned to be a lot more hesitant of “too excellent to be true” marketing cases and less tempted by the attraction of shiny brand-new things. The devices you utilize daily should gain depend on through transparency and performance, not glossy advertising.