As a firm owner for over a decade, I rely on software and automation to enhance operations and deliver outcomes. So when GoHighLevel emerged on the scene couple of years back, it certainly caught my interest Become A White-Label Customer on GoHighLevel.
The concept was attractive– an all-in-one customer administration platform with marketing, sales, and service tools integrated with each other. As an entrepreneur always aiming to streamline and scale my organization, it looked like a dream become a reality on paper. Who would not desire a single solution that does it all?
Yet in this thorough GoHighLevel evaluation, I’ll take you inside my tragic journey of trying (and falling short) to switch over to this preferred brand-new software. You’ll learn:
If you’re considering whether GoHighLevel is right for your very own company needs, with any luck you can pick up from my excruciating blunders and inflated assumptions.
Looter: I do NOT recommend GoHighLevel. If you require a CRM, start with this checklist of best CRMs instead. I make use of Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re trying to find a sales, marketing, and task management alternative to GoHighLevel, then right here are a few we advise.
Backstory: Why I Thought About Switching Over from Keap
To recognize what attracted me to GoHighLevel to begin with, you require context concerning my previous configuration. For over 5 years I had been gladly relying on Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) to fulfill all my client administration and automation demands.
I found Keap user-friendly to make use of and it managed every little thing I needed– CRM, e-mail marketing, sales funnels, subscription websites, and customer support.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are made to assist local business maintain their customers while including brand-new ones effortlessly. Automate follow-ups with e-mails and messages, making sure leads and customers get the ideal messages at the correct time. Use website and social networks kinds to improve lead follow-up, and handle your growth with easy consultation organizing and lead tracking. Boost sales with automated estimating, invoicing, and settlement processing, liberating your time. With Keap, small businesses can conserve 10 hours each week and boost income by 39%. Beginning with a 14-day free trial, no charge card required.
Why we like Keap
Keap supplies a detailed consumer connection management (CRM) and marketing automation service customized for small businesses and entrepreneurs. We value Keap’s focus on simplifying sales procedures and supporting consumer partnerships through effective automation devices. The platform’s all-in-one approach combines CRM, e-mail marketing, invoicing, and task monitoring, making it particularly appealing for companies aiming to combine their tech pile.
Generally, it just functioned accurately with very little fuss or upkeep needed. My open and click-through prices were wonderful (like 35% great). Automations ran efficiently without any issues.
So why on earth was I lured to uproot my whole operational structure from a system that functioned to attempt something unproven and untried?
In knowledge I can admit I obtained attracted by the siren telephone call of “shiny object disorder”. You understand the feeling: when everyone’s speaking about a brand-new tool that will transform your business … The turf typically looks greener on the other side, and I asked yourself whether GoHighLevel could decrease friction points that I would certainly learned to tolerate for many years with Keap.
I withstood in the beginning, yet a few more frustrations led me to believe possibly it was time for an adjustment.
The Investment: Moving My Company to GoHighLevel
Earlier this year I made a decision to start. I enrolled in HighLevel’s Firm plan at $297/month, investing significantly greater than the $97/month starter cost.
This had not been a choice I ignored. I recognized changing systems was going to require migrating all my Keap data and essentially restoring my entire technology framework from the ground up making use of all of the GoHighLevel integrations readily available.
Right here’s a summary of simply a few of the effort needed:
- Manually exporting 20,000+ email customer documents
- Recreating loads of automations and workflows
- Moving client profiles, notes, and job data to the brand-new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe payment integration
- Establishing landing pages, coupons, and sales funnels throughout once more
- Learning an entirely international UX and interface layout
All in, I invested around 30-40 tedious hours of arrangement work transitioning every little thing over– not to mention dealing with lost efficiency during the switch.
Yet ultimately, it was a computed financial investment I wanted to make. I figured some temporary pain would settle with GoHighLevel offering a far better lasting solution for my business, Dripify. Oh just how incorrect I was …
It just took me about a month of hands-on usage to realize I had actually made a big error. The issues began piling up rapidly, till it got to a point I needed to reduce my losses and switch back to Keap entirely.
Let’s walk through the horrible issues I experienced.
Safety Issues & Numerous Vermin
Provided GoHighLevel positioned itself as an all-in-one automation platform, I took care to meticulously recreate every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These included series for onboarding brand-new email clients, onboarding new customers, automating follow-ups for webinar registrations, sending out event suggestions, handling membership expiries and a lot more.
Every little thing seemed to be functioning penalty … until all of a sudden it wasn’t. One early morning, I woke up to find 171 totally pointless e-mails had been sent out to users that should NOT have actually received them. This took place three days in a row, with a various set of 160 people every day.
I frantically attempted repairing and reconstructing the automation from the ground up. But the problem continued.
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, because the mistakes continued occurring each early morning like clockwork unrelated to any type of downtime.
In my mind, this large failure was completely inappropriate and simply really did not work for my organization. I have hundreds of get in touches with relying on my automated campaigns running smoothly.
So if GoHighLevel was going to be totally unreliable, just how could I leave mission-critical workflows and delicate customer data to their innovation?
The unintuitive user interface only compounded these issues …
Irritating UX
Coming from Keap where every little thing was seamless and intuitive, GoHighLevel’s learning contour really felt high and challenging.
Basic jobs like editing workflows included excavating via menu systems that were all over the place. Secret settings were unexplainably scattered in entirely different sections. Moving between functions felt disjointed or confusing.
I’ll inform you what I indicate by talking about their funnel builder as an example. There were 3 different setups panels to handle overall, private, and product arrangements. Yet for some crazy reason, the web links to accessibility each of these core settings were spread out on opposite sides of the display. What!?
As a person that values tidy, thoughtful style, this seriously irritated me.
It reinforced that GoHighLevel still seemed like a work-in-progress instead of a sleek product all set for prime-time use. Their priorities seemed concentrated on stuffing in every feature under the sun, with bad usability as an afterthought.
And speaking of features, I soon understood the small cost tag came with expensive concessions …
Deceptive Pricing Become A White-Label Customer on GoHighLevel
Among GoHighLevel’s greatest marketing points is the inexpensive rate for accessibility to so many features. However I promptly discovered this low-cost base price was deceptive.
They nickle-and-dimed individuals with erratic costs for core capability. Instantly my credit card statements had unclear $10 charges from GoHighLevel here and there.
As it ended up, you obtain charged each time you send an email via their web servers. So for high volume users, this amounted to thousands of bucks in unforeseen costs.
In between these per-email fees and paying additional for deliverability add-ons like Mailgun, my “cost effective” GoHighLevel membership ended up setting you back significantly greater than my Keap plan.
The low sticker price was tempting, yet just not practical in practice. This bait-and-switch left a bad taste in my mouth.
Email Fees Suffered
The last dealbreaker was seeing my very carefully nurtured email open prices plummet almost overnight after switching to GoHighLevel.
Previously, my audience involvement regularly struck 35-40% open prices in Keap month after month. Once I moved their documents over to GoHighLevel, efficiency tanked immediately to a useless 9% open price.
Despite just how much I optimized my sending out practices or attempted every repairing technique, I can hardly nudge open prices back into the teenagers– still a 50%+ decline from my previous benchmarks Become A White-Label Customer on GoHighLevel.
Let me repeat: my exact same audience and emails unexpectedly had terrible engagement. The only point I might believe that would certainly be creating this was whatever was taking place behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a company so based on email marketing, this was a big deal.
In between the crippling deliverability concerns, hidden charges, busted features, and terrible interface, I had actually finally reached my restriction …
Why I Quit GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Just 45 days after moving my agency to GoHighLevel, I recognized I had made a substantial error. The cons substantially exceeded any type of advantages.
No software application is best, but the sheer volume 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 critical functions effectively or believe a supplier has my best interests in mind, after that it’s time to leave– also after spending substantial time, cash, and effort migrating.
So I made the tough call to turn around training course and return back to Keap totally just weeks after going done in on GoHighLevel. Allow’s explore what I gained from this fiasco.
Key Takeaways: What I Gained from My GoHighLevel Mistake
My time with HighLevel can be summarized as a pricey misadventure. Yet in knowledge, it educated me a couple of vital lessons:
- Stay with what works. Don’t upset what’s working unless something is definitively better across the board. Change brings threat.
- Veterinarian asserts extensively. Marketing hype around new software program usually obscures larger underlying imperfections. Deep due persistance is vital.
- Pick simplicity over features. Properly designed tools must make your work life easier, not extra challenging and messy.
- Openness constructs count on. Nontransparent pricing, shady reseller terms, and finger-pointing to evade problems damages depend on.
- Seek impartial testimonials. Happy support assesses mean much less if excessive concerns indicate bad overall usability.
- Perfection is difficult. No solitary solution can completely satisfy every distinct business need. Find the least-bad fit.
- Evolution over change. Incremental renovations normally surpass dangerous wholesale reinvention of what already works fine.
In short, I learned to be a lot more cynical of “as well good to be real” marketing cases and less attracted by the attraction of shiny brand-new items. The devices you utilize daily need to make trust fund through transparency and performance, not glossy advertising.