As a firm owner for over a decade, I rely upon software and automation to improve operations and deliver outcomes. So when GoHighLevel arised on the scene few years back, it certainly captured my focus GoHighLevel Whitelabel Zap.
The concept was attractive– an all-in-one client monitoring system with marketing, sales, and service tools integrated with each other. As a business owner always aiming to streamline and scale my service, it appeared like a desire come to life theoretically. That would not want a single service that does it all?
Yet in this extensive GoHighLevel review, I’ll take you inside my dreadful trip of trying (and failing) to switch to this popular brand-new software program. You’ll discover:
If you’re taking into consideration whether GoHighLevel is right for your own organization requirements, with any luck you can learn from my excruciating blunders and blew up assumptions.
Spoiler: I do NOT advise GoHighLevel. If you need a CRM, begin with this listing of finest CRMs rather. I use Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re searching for a sales, marketing, and project administration choice to GoHighLevel, then here are a few we suggest.
Backstory: Why I Took Into Consideration Switching Over from Keap
To comprehend what attracted me to GoHighLevel in the first place, you need context about my previous setup. For over 5 years I had been gladly relying upon Keap (previously Infusionsoft) to meet all my customer monitoring and automation needs.
I discovered Keap intuitive to use and it took care of every little thing I needed– CRM, email marketing, sales funnels, subscription sites, and customer assistance.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are developed to assist small businesses keep their customers while adding new ones effortlessly. Automate follow-ups with emails and texts, ensuring leads and clients obtain the best messages at the right time. Usage site and social networks kinds to simplify lead follow-up, and manage your development with very easy consultation scheduling and lead monitoring. Boost sales with automated quoting, invoicing, and repayment processing, liberating your time. With Keap, local business can save 10 hours weekly and boost earnings by 39%. Start with a 14-day free trial, no bank card called for.
Why we like Keap
Keap supplies a comprehensive consumer connection monitoring (CRM) and marketing automation option tailored for small companies and entrepreneurs. We value Keap’s focus on simplifying sales procedures and supporting consumer partnerships with powerful automation tools. The system’s all-in-one strategy incorporates CRM, e-mail marketing, invoicing, and task administration, making it especially attractive for organizations looking to consolidate their technology pile.
Essentially, it just worked accurately with marginal fuss or upkeep required. My open and click-through rates were wonderful (like 35% terrific). Automations ran smoothly without any issues.
So why in the world was I lured to uproot my entire operational foundation from a system that functioned to try something unproven and untested?
In knowledge I can admit I obtained seduced by the alarm phone call of “shiny item disorder”. You recognize the sensation: when every person’s discussing a brand-new tool that will certainly revolutionize your organization … The yard commonly looks greener beyond, and I asked yourself whether GoHighLevel could decrease friction points that I ‘d found out to endure throughout the years with Keap.
I withstood in the beginning, however a few even more disappointments led me to believe possibly it was time for an adjustment.
The Financial investment: Moving My Firm to GoHighLevel
Earlier this year I decided to take the plunge. I registered for HighLevel’s Company plan at $297/month, spending significantly more than the $97/month starter cost.
This had not been a choice I took lightly. I recognized changing systems was going to need moving all my Keap data and basically rebuilding my whole tech infrastructure from the ground up using every one of the GoHighLevel integrations offered.
Right here’s a summary of simply some of the effort required:
- Manually exporting 20,000+ email subscriber documents
- Recreating loads of automations and workflows
- Relocating client profiles, notes, and task data to the new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe invoicing integration
- Setting up landing pages, coupons, and sales funnels all over once again
- Learning a totally international UX and user interface style
Done in, I spent around 30-40 laborious hours of arrangement job transitioning every little thing over– not to mention handling lost efficiency throughout the switch.
However eventually, it was a calculated financial investment I agreed to make. I figured some short-term pain would settle with GoHighLevel giving a far better long-term service for my company, Dripify. Oh just how incorrect I was …
It just took me regarding a month of hands-on use to recognize I had made a big error. The problems started piling up swiftly, until it got to a point I had to reduce my losses and change back to Keap entirely.
Let’s go through the horrible issues I experienced.
Safety Issues & Many Bugs
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 consisted of series for onboarding brand-new e-mail subscribers, onboarding brand-new clients, automating follow-ups for webinar registrations, sending occasion suggestions, managing subscription expirations and far more.
Whatever appeared to be working penalty … up until suddenly it wasn’t. One morning, I woke up to discover 171 entirely pointless e-mails had been sent out to individuals who need to NOT have actually obtained them. This occurred three days straight, with a various set of 160 individuals every day.
I desperately tried repairing and restoring the automation from the ground up. Yet the trouble lingered.
When I desperately reached out to their assistance group, they vaguely declared “server issues” were at fault. However this description didn’t make any type of feeling, because the mistakes proceeded happening each early morning like clockwork unassociated to any kind of downtime.
In my mind, this massive failing was completely undesirable and simply didn’t benefit my organization. I have thousands of calls depending on my automated campaigns running efficiently.
So if GoHighLevel was going to be entirely undependable, exactly how could I entrust mission-critical workflows and sensitive client information to their modern technology?
The unintuitive interface only compounded these concerns …
Discouraging UX
Originating from Keap where whatever was seamless and user-friendly, GoHighLevel’s learning curve really felt steep and complicated.
Basic tasks like editing and enhancing workflows included digging through food selection systems that were all over the place. Secret settings were unexplainably spread in entirely different sections. Relocating 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 take care of general, individual, and product arrangements. Yet for some insane reason, the web links to access each of these core settings were expanded on opposite sides of the display. What!?
As a person who values clean, thoughtful design, this seriously frustrated me.
It reinforced that GoHighLevel still felt like a work-in-progress as opposed to a refined item all set for prime-time use. Their top priorities appeared focused on cramming in every feature under the sun, with poor usability as a second thought.
And speaking of features, I quickly realized the low cost tag came with costly compromises …
Deceptive Pricing GoHighLevel Whitelabel Zap
Among GoHighLevel’s greatest marketing factors is the affordable rate for access to numerous features. But I rapidly discovered this cheap base price was deceptive.
They nickle-and-dimed users with occasional charges for core capability. Unexpectedly my credit card statements had vague $10 costs from GoHighLevel here and there.
As it turned out, you obtain charged whenever you send out an email through their servers. So for high quantity users, this added up to thousands of dollars in unexpected expenses.
Between these per-email fees and paying extra for deliverability add-ons like Mailgun, my “cost effective” GoHighLevel membership wound up costing significantly MORE than my Keap plan.
The low price tag was appealing, yet just not sensible in practice. This bait-and-switch left a poor preference in my mouth.
Email Fees Suffered
The last dealbreaker was seeing my thoroughly nurtured email open rates drop virtually overnight after changing to GoHighLevel.
Formerly, my target market engagement regularly struck 35-40% open prices in Keap month after month. Once I moved their records over to GoHighLevel, performance tanked promptly to a pathetic 9% open rate.
No matter how much I maximized my sending techniques or tried every fixing technique, I might hardly push open rates back right into the teens– still a 50%+ decrease from my previous benchmarks GoHighLevel Whitelabel Zap.
Let me repeat: my exact same target market and e-mails instantly had horrible involvement. The only point I could assume that would certainly be causing this was whatever was happening behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For an agency so dependent on email marketing, this was a big deal.
Between the debilitating deliverability issues, concealed charges, damaged features, and dreadful user interface, I had actually lastly reached my limitation …
Why I Quit GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Just 45 days after migrating my company to GoHighLevel, I understood I had made a massive mistake. The cons dramatically exceeded any type of benefits.
No software is best, but the large quantity of issues was past acceptable.
At the end of the day, software program boils down to depend on. If I can’t trust it to take care of vital functions effectively or believe a supplier has my benefits in mind, then it’s time to leave– also after spending considerable time, money, and initiative moving.
So I made the difficult contact us to reverse program and return back to Keap totally simply weeks after going all in on GoHighLevel. Let’s explore what I gained from this fiasco.
Key Takeaways: What I Gained from My GoHighLevel Blunder
My time with HighLevel can be summarized as an expensive accident. But in hindsight, it instructed me a couple of essential lessons:
- Stick to what jobs. Do not disturb what’s working unless something is definitively much better across the board. Modification brings danger.
- Veterinarian declares completely. Marketing hype around brand-new software usually obscures larger underlying problems. Deep due persistance is crucial.
- Select simpleness over features. Well-designed devices ought to make your job life simpler, not much more difficult and untidy.
- Transparency constructs count on. Nontransparent pricing, shady reseller terms, and finger-pointing to avert problems damages trust.
- Look for honest evaluations. Delighted assistance reviews indicate much less if extreme issues indicate bad overall functionality.
- Excellence is impossible. No single remedy can perfectly satisfy every special business requirement. Locate the least-bad fit.
- Advancement over change. Incremental renovations generally surpass dangerous wholesale reinvention of what currently works fine.
Basically, I discovered to be a lot more hesitant of “as well excellent to be true” marketing insurance claims and much less attracted by the appeal of shiny new things. The devices you use daily need to make trust fund via transparency and performance, not glossy advertising.