As an agency proprietor for over a decade, I rely upon software application and automation to streamline procedures and deliver results. So when GoHighLevel arised on the scene couple of years back, it most definitely captured my focus GoHighLevel White Label.
The concept was attractive– an all-in-one client monitoring platform with marketing, sales, and service devices integrated together. As a business owner constantly looking to simplify and scale my organization, it seemed like a desire come to life on paper. That would not want a solitary remedy that does it all?
Yet in this comprehensive GoHighLevel evaluation, I’ll take you inside my disastrous journey of trying (and falling short) to switch over to this prominent brand-new software application. You’ll learn:
If you’re taking into consideration whether GoHighLevel is right for your own service requirements, hopefully you can learn from my excruciating blunders and pumped up expectations.
Looter: I do NOT advise GoHighLevel. If you need a CRM, start with this listing of ideal CRMs rather. I utilize Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re seeking a sales, marketing, and project monitoring choice to GoHighLevel, then right here are a few we advise.
Backstory: Why I Considered Switching Over from Keap
To understand what attracted me to GoHighLevel to begin with, you require context about my previous arrangement. For over 5 years I had actually been happily depending on Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) to fulfill all my customer management and automation requirements.
I found Keap intuitive to make use of and it took care of everything I needed– CRM, email marketing, sales funnels, subscription websites, and customer support.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are made to aid small businesses keep their clients while including brand-new ones effortlessly. Automate follow-ups with emails and messages, ensuring leads and clients receive the appropriate messages at the right time. Use internet site and social networks kinds to streamline lead follow-up, and manage your development with simple visit scheduling and lead monitoring. Boost sales with automated estimating, invoicing, and repayment handling, liberating your time. With Keap, small businesses can conserve 10 hours weekly and boost revenue by 39%. Beginning with a 14-day free trial, no credit card required.
Why we like Keap
Keap provides a thorough consumer relationship management (CRM) and marketing automation option tailored for small businesses and business owners. We appreciate Keap’s concentrate on streamlining sales procedures and nurturing client connections via powerful automation devices. The platform’s all-in-one approach integrates CRM, e-mail marketing, invoicing, and task administration, making it particularly eye-catching for organizations aiming to combine their technology pile.
Generally, it just functioned dependably with very little fuss or maintenance needed. My open and click-through prices were excellent (like 35% terrific). Automations ran smoothly without any concerns.
So why on earth was I tempted to uproot my whole functional structure from a system that worked to try something unverified and untested?
In knowledge I can admit I obtained attracted by the alarm telephone call of “glossy things disorder”. You recognize the sensation: when everybody’s speaking about a brand-new device that will change your service … The lawn typically looks greener beyond, and I questioned whether GoHighLevel might decrease friction factors that I ‘d discovered to tolerate for many years with Keap.
I withstood in the beginning, however a few more frustrations led me to think possibly it was time for an adjustment.
The Investment: Moving My Agency to GoHighLevel
Previously this year I decided to start. I signed up for HighLevel’s Firm plan at $297/month, investing significantly more than the $97/month starter expense.
This had not been a choice I ignored. I recognized switching over platforms was going to require migrating all my Keap data and essentially rebuilding my entire technology facilities from square one making use of all of the GoHighLevel integrations readily available.
Right here’s a review of simply a few of the effort needed:
- By hand exporting 20,000+ email client records
- Recreating lots of automations and workflows
- Relocating customer accounts, notes, and task information to the brand-new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe payment integration
- Setting up landing pages, coupons, and sales funnels throughout again
- Learning a totally international UX and interface design
All in, I invested around 30-40 laborious hours of setup work transitioning every little thing over– in addition to handling lost efficiency during the switch.
Yet inevitably, it was a calculated financial investment I wanted to make. I figured some temporary discomfort would certainly settle with GoHighLevel supplying a far better lasting option for my organization, Dripify. Oh exactly how wrong I was …
It just took me regarding a month of hands-on use to understand I had made a big blunder. The issues started piling up rapidly, until it got to a factor I had to cut my losses and change back to Keap entirely.
Let’s walk through the nightmarish issues I encountered.
Protection Issues & Many Bugs
Provided GoHighLevel placed itself as an all-in-one automation system, I took care to carefully recreate every workflow from my old Keap account.
These consisted of sequences for onboarding brand-new email subscribers, onboarding new clients, automating follow-ups for webinar registrations, sending event pointers, managing subscription expiries and far more.
Whatever appeared to be operating penalty … until instantly it had not been. One morning, I awoke to find 171 totally irrelevant emails had actually been sent to customers who need to NOT have actually received them. This took place three days straight, with a various batch of 160 people daily.
I anxiously attempted repairing and rebuilding the automation from square one. Yet the problem continued.
When I desperately connected to their support team, they vaguely declared “web server problems” were to blame. However this explanation really did not make any sense, since the mistakes proceeded taking place each morning like clockwork unrelated to any downtime.
In my mind, this massive failing was completely unacceptable and just didn’t help my service. I have countless calls relying upon my automated campaigns running efficiently.
So if GoHighLevel was going to be absolutely unreliable, exactly how could I entrust mission-critical workflows and sensitive client information to their innovation?
The unintuitive user interface only intensified these concerns …
Frustrating UX
Coming from Keap where every little thing was seamless and user-friendly, GoHighLevel’s learning curve felt high and challenging.
Basic tasks like editing workflows involved excavating with food selection systems that were all over the place. Secret settings were unexplainably scattered in completely different areas. Relocating between features felt disjointed or complex.
I’ll tell you what I imply by speaking about their funnel builder as an instance. There were 3 different setups panels to take care of total, specific, and product configurations. Yet for some crazy reason, the web links to access each of these core settings were expanded on opposite sides of the display. What!?
As someone that values clean, thoughtful style, this seriously annoyed me.
It enhanced that GoHighLevel still felt like a work-in-progress rather than a sleek item all set for prime-time usage. Their concerns appeared concentrated on stuffing in every feature under the sun, with poor use as a second thought.
And talking features, I soon recognized the low price tag featured expensive concessions …
Misleading Pricing GoHighLevel White Label
One of GoHighLevel’s most significant marketing points is the cost effective price for accessibility to so many features. However I swiftly learned this affordable base price was misleading.
They nickle-and-dimed individuals with erratic charges for core capability. Unexpectedly my bank card declarations had obscure $10 costs from GoHighLevel occasionally.
As it turned out, you obtain charged each time you send out an email through their web servers. So for high volume customers, this amounted to hundreds of dollars in unanticipated costs.
In between these per-email costs and paying added for deliverability add-ons like Mailgun, my “budget friendly” GoHighLevel membership ended up costing significantly MORE than my Keap plan.
The low sticker price was tempting, but simply not practical in practice. This bait-and-switch left a negative taste in my mouth.
Email Rates Suffered
The last dealbreaker was seeing my meticulously nurtured email open prices drop virtually overnight after switching to GoHighLevel.
Previously, my audience engagement continually hit 35-40% open rates in Keap month after month. Once I moved their documents over to GoHighLevel, efficiency tanked instantaneously to a worthless 9% open price.
Regardless of just how much I maximized my sending out practices or attempted every troubleshooting technique, I might hardly nudge open prices back into the teenagers– still a 50%+ decline from my previous criteria GoHighLevel White Label.
Let me repeat: my exact same audience and e-mails all of a sudden had dreadful interaction. The only point I could assume that would certainly be triggering this was whatever was taking place behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For an agency so depending on email marketing, this was a big deal.
Between the crippling deliverability concerns, concealed costs, damaged features, and horrible user interface, I had actually ultimately reached my restriction …
Why I Quit GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Simply 45 days after moving my agency to GoHighLevel, I knew I had actually made a huge blunder. The disadvantages dramatically exceeded any kind of advantages.
No software program is best, however the sheer quantity of issues was beyond appropriate.
At the end of the day, software program boils down to trust fund. If I can’t trust it to deal with important functions capably or think a supplier has my best interests in mind, then it’s time to leave– also after spending substantial time, money, and initiative migrating.
So I made the difficult call to turn around course and return back to Keap totally simply weeks after going done in on GoHighLevel. Let’s discover what I gained from this fiasco.
Key Takeaways: What I Gained from My GoHighLevel Error
My time with HighLevel can be summarized as a costly misadventure. However in hindsight, it instructed me a couple of vital lessons:
- Stay with what works. Don’t distress what’s working unless something is definitively far better across the board. Adjustment brings risk.
- Veterinarian asserts completely. Marketing hype around new software program usually obscures bigger underlying imperfections. Deep due diligence is important.
- Pick simplicity over features. Properly designed devices ought to make your job life simpler, not more difficult and untidy.
- Transparency builds count on. Opaque pricing, shady reseller terms, and finger-pointing to avert issues damages depend on.
- Look for impartial evaluations. Satisfied assistance reviews indicate less if extreme issues indicate inadequate total functionality.
- Excellence is impossible. No solitary remedy can completely satisfy every distinct organization need. Discover the least-bad fit.
- Development over transformation. Step-by-step renovations commonly outweigh high-risk wholesale reinvention of what currently works penalty.
Basically, I discovered to be much more skeptical of “as well great to be real” marketing cases and much less lured by the attraction of glossy brand-new objects. The tools you make use of daily ought to make count on via transparency and efficiency, not glossy advertising.