As a company proprietor for over a years, I rely upon software application and automation to enhance procedures and supply outcomes. So when GoHighLevel emerged on the scene few years back, it most definitely caught my interest GoHighLevel Query Key.
The concept was enticing– an all-in-one customer management system with marketing, sales, and service tools incorporated together. As an entrepreneur always aiming to simplify and scale my company, it appeared like a dream come true on paper. That wouldn’t desire a solitary solution that does it all?
However in this comprehensive GoHighLevel testimonial, I’ll take you inside my tragic journey of trying (and failing) to switch over to this popular new software. You’ll find out:
If you’re considering whether GoHighLevel is right for your very own company requirements, with any luck you can learn from my excruciating blunders and inflated assumptions.
Spoiler: I do NOT suggest GoHighLevel. If you need a CRM, start with this checklist of finest CRMs rather. I utilize Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re seeking a sales, marketing, and task management alternative to GoHighLevel, then below are a few we advise.
Backstory: Why I Took Into Consideration Changing 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 depending on Keap (previously Infusionsoft) to satisfy all my client administration and automation requirements.
I found Keap instinctive to utilize and it took care of every little thing I needed– CRM, email marketing, sales funnels, subscription websites, and customer assistance.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are designed to help local business maintain their clients while adding new ones easily. Automate follow-ups with emails and messages, making sure leads and customers receive the ideal messages at the right time. Usage web site and social media kinds to enhance lead follow-up, and manage your growth with very easy visit organizing and lead monitoring. Boost sales with automated pricing estimate, invoicing, and settlement processing, liberating your time. With Keap, small businesses can save 10 hours each week and rise income by 39%. Begin with a 14-day free trial, no bank card required.
Why we like Keap
Keap uses a thorough client relationship monitoring (CRM) and marketing automation service tailored for local business and business owners. We value Keap’s concentrate on streamlining sales processes and supporting consumer partnerships with effective automation devices. The platform’s all-in-one strategy combines CRM, email marketing, invoicing, and job monitoring, making it especially appealing for companies wanting to consolidate their tech pile.
For the most part, it simply worked reliably with very little hassle or maintenance called for. My open and click-through rates were terrific (like 35% excellent). Automations ran smoothly without any issues.
So why on earth was I lured to uproot my whole operational structure from a system that functioned to try something unverified and untested?
In knowledge I can confess I got seduced by the siren phone call of “shiny object syndrome”. You recognize the sensation: when every person’s talking about a new device that will revolutionize your service … The grass usually looks greener on the other side, and I asked yourself whether GoHighLevel may decrease friction factors that I ‘d learned to endure over the years with Keap.
I resisted at first, however a couple of more frustrations led me to assume possibly it was time for a change.
The Investment: Migrating My Firm to GoHighLevel
Previously 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 wasn’t a choice I took lightly. I recognized changing platforms was mosting likely to require migrating all my Keap information and essentially rebuilding my entire technology infrastructure from scratch using every one of the GoHighLevel integrations readily available.
Here’s a review of simply several of the effort called for:
- Manually exporting 20,000+ email subscriber documents
- Recreating loads of automations and workflows
- Relocating client accounts, notes, and task data to the new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe invoicing integration
- Setting up landing pages, coupons, and sales funnels around once more
- Learning an entirely foreign UX and user interface style
All in, I spent around 30-40 tedious hours of configuration job transitioning every little thing over– and also managing lost productivity during the button.
However ultimately, it was a calculated financial investment I was willing to make. I figured some temporary pain would pay off with GoHighLevel supplying a much better long-lasting solution for my company, Dripify. Oh just how wrong I was …
It only took me regarding a month of hands-on use to recognize I had made a large error. The issues began accumulating promptly, up until it reached a factor I needed to reduce my losses and change back to Keap totally.
Let’s go through the nightmarish troubles I encountered.
Safety And Security Issues & Several Bugs
Offered GoHighLevel positioned itself as an all-in-one automation platform, I took care to thoroughly recreate every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These consisted of sequences for onboarding new e-mail customers, onboarding brand-new customers, automating follow-ups for webinar enrollments, sending out event pointers, taking care of subscription expirations and far more.
Every little thing seemed to be working penalty … till all of a sudden it had not been. One morning, I awoke to find 171 entirely unnecessary e-mails had been sent to users that must NOT have actually received them. This occurred three days straight, with a different batch of 160 people each day.
I anxiously attempted troubleshooting and reconstructing the automation from square one. But the problem persisted.
When I seriously reached out to their assistance group, they slightly claimed “server concerns” were at fault. However this description really did not make any type of sense, since the errors continued taking place each morning like clockwork unassociated to any downtime.
In my mind, this substantial failure was completely undesirable and just didn’t help my organization. I have countless contacts counting on my automated campaigns running smoothly.
So if GoHighLevel was going to be totally unstable, just how could I hand over mission-critical workflows and sensitive customer data to their technology?
The unintuitive user interface only intensified these concerns …
Frustrating UX
Originating from Keap where every little thing was smooth and instinctive, GoHighLevel’s learning curve felt steep and challenging.
Easy jobs like modifying workflows included excavating via menu systems that were all over the place. Trick setups were unexplainably spread in completely various sections. Moving in between functions really felt disjointed or complicated.
I’ll inform you what I suggest by talking about their funnel builder as an instance. There were 3 separate setups panels to handle general, specific, and item arrangements. Yet for some insane factor, the web links to access each of these core settings were expanded on opposite sides of the display. What!?
As a person who values tidy, thoughtful design, this seriously irritated me.
It enhanced that GoHighLevel still felt like a work-in-progress rather than a polished item ready for prime-time use. Their top priorities appeared focused on cramming in every feature imaginable, with poor usability as a second thought.
And speaking of features, I quickly realized the low cost tag featured pricey concessions …
Deceptive Pricing GoHighLevel Query Key
Among GoHighLevel’s most significant marketing factors is the budget friendly price for access to so many features. However I swiftly learned this inexpensive base price was deceptive.
They nickle-and-dimed individuals with occasional charges for core performance. All of a sudden my bank card statements had unclear $10 charges from GoHighLevel here and there.
As it turned out, you get charged each time you send an e-mail through their web servers. So for high quantity individuals, this amounted to thousands of bucks in unexpected expenses.
Between these per-email costs and paying extra for deliverability attachments like Mailgun, my “inexpensive” GoHighLevel membership wound up costing significantly greater than my Keap plan.
The reduced price tag was appealing, yet just not practical in practice. This bait-and-switch left a bad preference in my mouth.
Email Fees Suffered
The last dealbreaker was seeing my carefully supported email open prices drop almost overnight after switching over to GoHighLevel.
Formerly, my audience interaction constantly struck 35-40% open prices in Keap month after month. But once I moved their documents over to GoHighLevel, efficiency tanked instantly to a worthless 9% open price.
No matter how much I enhanced my sending methods or attempted every troubleshooting method, I can barely push open rates back right into the teenagers– still a 50%+ decline from my previous standards GoHighLevel Query Key.
Let me repeat: my exact same target market and e-mails instantly had horrible interaction. The only thing I can believe that would certainly be triggering this was whatever was taking place behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a company so based on email marketing, this was a big deal.
Between the crippling deliverability issues, concealed costs, damaged features, and terrible interface, I had ultimately reached my limit …
Why I Quit GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Simply 45 days after migrating my agency to GoHighLevel, I knew I had made a massive blunder. The disadvantages drastically exceeded any kind of advantages.
No software is perfect, however the sheer quantity of issues was past appropriate.
At the end of the day, software program boils down to trust fund. If I can not trust it to manage essential features effectively or believe a vendor has my benefits in mind, then it’s time to walk away– even after spending considerable time, cash, and initiative moving.
So I made the difficult phone call to reverse program and return back to Keap totally simply weeks after going all in on GoHighLevel. Allow’s discover what I picked up from this debacle.
Secret Takeaways: What I Gained from My GoHighLevel Mistake
My time with HighLevel can be summed up as an expensive ill fortune. However in hindsight, it showed me a few essential lessons:
- Stay with what works. Don’t distress what’s functioning unless something is definitively better across the board. Change brings danger.
- Veterinarian declares extensively. Marketing buzz around brand-new software program frequently obscures bigger underlying defects. Deep due diligence is important.
- Choose simpleness over features. Properly designed tools should make your job life easier, not extra complex and messy.
- Transparency constructs depend on. Opaque pricing, unethical reseller terms, and finger-pointing to escape problems damages trust fund.
- Look for objective reviews. Delighted support reviews indicate much less if too much issues indicate poor total functionality.
- Excellence is difficult. No single remedy can flawlessly satisfy every one-of-a-kind business demand. Locate the least-bad fit.
- Advancement over transformation. Step-by-step improvements normally outweigh high-risk wholesale reinvention of what currently works penalty.
In other words, I found out to be more cynical of “too good to be true” marketing cases and much less lured by the allure of shiny brand-new objects. The devices you make use of daily must gain trust fund through transparency and performance, not glossy advertising.