As a firm owner for over a decade, I rely on software application and automation to simplify procedures and deliver outcomes. So when GoHighLevel arised on the scene couple of years back, it absolutely captured my focus GoHighLevel Zap MarketerMagic.
The concept was appealing– an all-in-one customer monitoring system with marketing, sales, and solution tools incorporated with each other. As an entrepreneur always wanting to streamline and scale my business, it felt like a desire become a reality theoretically. Who wouldn’t want a single service that does it all?
Yet in this extensive GoHighLevel review, I’ll take you inside my tragic journey of trying (and stopping working) to change to this popular new software application. You’ll learn:
If you’re taking into consideration whether GoHighLevel is right for your own organization needs, with any luck you can learn from my uncomfortable errors and pumped up assumptions.
Spoiler: I do NOT suggest GoHighLevel. If you need a CRM, start with this listing of finest CRMs rather. I make use of Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re searching for a sales, marketing, and task management option to GoHighLevel, then below are a couple of we recommend.
Backstory: Why I Took Into Consideration Changing from Keap
To recognize what attracted me to GoHighLevel to begin with, you require context regarding my previous arrangement. For over 5 years I had been gladly relying upon Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) to meet all my client monitoring and automation demands.
I found Keap intuitive to make use of and it took care of every little thing I required– CRM, e-mail marketing, sales funnels, membership sites, and client support.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are developed to assist small businesses maintain their customers while adding new ones easily. Automate follow-ups with emails and texts, making certain leads and customers get the right messages at the right time. Usage website and social networks types to enhance lead follow-up, and manage your growth with very easy consultation scheduling and lead monitoring. Boost sales with automated quoting, invoicing, and payment handling, maximizing your time. With Keap, small businesses can conserve 10 hours weekly and rise earnings by 39%. Beginning with a 14-day free trial, no bank card needed.
Why we like Keap
Keap provides a comprehensive client partnership administration (CRM) and marketing automation remedy customized for local business and business owners. We appreciate Keap’s concentrate on improving sales processes and nurturing consumer relationships through effective automation tools. The platform’s all-in-one approach combines CRM, e-mail marketing, invoicing, and job management, making it specifically eye-catching for organizations looking to settle their tech pile.
For the most part, it simply worked dependably with minimal fuss or upkeep called for. My open and click-through rates were great (like 35% terrific). Automations ran smoothly without issues.
So why in the world was I attracted to uproot my whole functional foundation from a system that functioned to attempt something unproven and untried?
In knowledge I can admit I got attracted by the siren telephone call of “glossy item syndrome”. You know the sensation: when every person’s talking about a brand-new device that will certainly change your organization … The lawn usually looks greener beyond, and I wondered whether GoHighLevel could minimize friction points that I would certainly discovered to tolerate for many years with Keap.
I withstood at first, but a few even more stress led me to believe maybe it was time for a modification.
The Investment: Migrating My Company to GoHighLevel
Previously this year I determined to take the plunge. I registered for HighLevel’s Company plan at $297/month, spending significantly greater than the $97/month starter expense.
This wasn’t a decision I ignored. I recognized switching over systems was going to need migrating all my Keap data and basically rebuilding my whole technology facilities from the ground up using all of the GoHighLevel integrations readily available.
Right here’s a review of simply a few of the initiative called for:
- By hand exporting 20,000+ email subscriber records
- Recreating lots of automations and workflows
- Moving customer profiles, notes, and project data to the brand-new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe payment integration
- Establishing landing pages, coupons, and sales funnels throughout again
- Learning a totally international UX and interface design
Done in, I spent around 30-40 tedious hours of setup job transitioning whatever over– and also dealing with shed performance during the button.
However eventually, it was a calculated investment I agreed to make. I figured some temporary pain would certainly repay with GoHighLevel giving a far better long-term option for my organization, Dripify. Oh just how incorrect I was …
It just took me about a month of hands-on usage to realize I had made a huge blunder. The issues began accumulating swiftly, up until it reached a point I had to cut my losses and switch back to Keap completely.
Allow’s go through the nightmarish issues I ran into.
Safety Issues & Several Vermin
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 included sequences for onboarding new e-mail customers, onboarding new clients, automating follow-ups for webinar registrations, sending occasion tips, handling subscription expiries and far more.
Every little thing seemed to be operating fine … until instantly it had not been. One early morning, I woke up to locate 171 entirely unnecessary emails had been sent to customers that ought to NOT have actually obtained them. This occurred 3 days straight, with a different batch of 160 individuals each day.
I anxiously attempted fixing and reconstructing the automation from the ground up. However the problem persisted.
When I seriously reached out to their support group, they slightly asserted “web server issues” were to blame. Yet this explanation really did not make any type of sense, given that the errors proceeded occurring each early morning like clockwork unconnected to any type of downtime.
In my mind, this enormous failure was completely inappropriate and simply really did not work for my company. I have hundreds of contacts counting on my automated campaigns running efficiently.
So if GoHighLevel was mosting likely to be entirely unstable, how could I hand over mission-critical workflows and sensitive customer data to their innovation?
The unintuitive user interface only intensified these concerns …
Aggravating UX
Originating from Keap where every little thing was smooth and instinctive, GoHighLevel’s learning contour felt steep and challenging.
Easy tasks like editing and enhancing workflows included excavating via menu systems that were all over the place. Secret setups were unexplainably scattered in absolutely different sections. Relocating between functions felt disjointed or complicated.
I’ll inform you what I suggest by speaking about their funnel builder as an instance. There were 3 separate settings panels to manage general, private, and product configurations. Yet for some insane reason, the web links to accessibility each of these core setups were spread out on contrary sides of the display. What!?
As a person who values clean, thoughtful design, this seriously frustrated me.
It strengthened that GoHighLevel still seemed like a work-in-progress as opposed to a refined product prepared for prime-time use. Their concerns appeared focused on stuffing in every feature under the sun, with poor functionality as an afterthought.
And speaking of features, I soon realized the small cost tag included expensive compromises …
Deceptive Pricing GoHighLevel Zap MarketerMagic
Among GoHighLevel’s most significant selling points is the inexpensive cost for accessibility to numerous features. However I quickly discovered this low-cost base expense was misleading.
They nickle-and-dimed individuals with erratic costs for core functionality. Suddenly my charge card declarations had unclear $10 costs from GoHighLevel here and there.
As it ended up, you get billed whenever you send out an e-mail via their web servers. So for high volume individuals, this added up to hundreds of bucks in unexpected costs.
Between these per-email costs and paying additional for deliverability attachments like Mailgun, my “affordable” GoHighLevel registration wound up setting you back dramatically greater than my Keap plan.
The low price tag was alluring, however just not sensible in practice. This bait-and-switch left a negative preference in my mouth.
Email Rates Suffered
The last dealbreaker was seeing my thoroughly nurtured e-mail open prices plunge almost overnight after changing to GoHighLevel.
Previously, my audience interaction regularly struck 35-40% open prices in Keap month after month. Once I migrated their records over to GoHighLevel, efficiency tanked immediately to a useless 9% open price.
No matter how much I optimized my sending practices or attempted every troubleshooting technique, I can hardly push open prices back into the teens– still a 50%+ decline from my previous standards GoHighLevel Zap MarketerMagic.
Let me repeat: my exact same target market and e-mails suddenly had dreadful involvement. The only point I might think that would certainly be causing this was whatever was happening behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a company so dependent on email marketing, this was a big deal.
In between the debilitating deliverability problems, hidden charges, busted features, and horrible user interface, I had lastly reached my restriction …
Why I Give up GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Simply 45 days after migrating my firm to GoHighLevel, I recognized I had made a big mistake. The cons dramatically exceeded any kind of advantages.
No software program is ideal, yet the large quantity of problems was past acceptable.
At the end of the day, software program boils down to depend on. If I can’t trust it to handle crucial functions competently or think a vendor has my benefits in mind, then it’s time to leave– also after spending considerable time, money, and effort moving.
So I made the challenging call to reverse program and return back to Keap totally just weeks after going all in on GoHighLevel. Let’s discover what I gained from this fiasco.
Trick Takeaways: What I Picked up from My GoHighLevel Error
My time with HighLevel can be summarized as a costly accident. Yet in knowledge, it educated me a couple of essential lessons:
- Stay with what jobs. Don’t upset what’s working unless something is definitively far better across the board. Change brings danger.
- Vet claims extensively. Marketing hype around brand-new software application typically obscures larger underlying imperfections. Deep due persistance is crucial.
- Select simpleness over features. Well-designed devices ought to make your work life easier, not more complicated and messy.
- Openness develops count on. Opaque pricing, shady reseller terms, and finger-pointing to avert troubles destroys trust.
- Look for impartial testimonials. Satisfied support reviews mean much less if extreme concerns indicate bad overall functionality.
- Excellence is impossible. No single service can completely fulfill every special company requirement. Locate the least-bad fit.
- Development over transformation. Incremental improvements typically exceed dangerous wholesale reinvention of what currently works fine.
In short, I discovered to be a lot more hesitant of “as well excellent to be real” marketing cases and less tempted by the allure of shiny brand-new objects. The devices you utilize daily need to gain depend on through openness and performance, not glossy advertising.