What’s This Platform All About?

GoHighlevel is a new-age marketing tool that attempts to consolidate the most useful marketing tools under a single umbrella.

HighLevel is a new product targeting the same customer base with a different approach. It's a really interesting direction for a new SaaS product to take. Although the market is not very huge, there isn't a similar product like this apart from a few SEO, reputation management tools, etc. There are similar products such as Close, Outreach, etc. but they serve a different type of customer and not specifically local marketing agencies.

Highlevel is a marketer’s best friend.

If you’re looking for the TLDR of this GoHighlevel review, here it is: 100% give it a shot, you won’t regret it. GoHighlevel is the tool of the decade – completely replacing the previous titans like Clickfunnels for landing pages and Pipedrive/Hubspot for CRMs.

The massive value proposition that it brings to the table is that you can get an insanely profitable tech stack for a fraction of what you would normally pay, while making it simple enough that a non-tech savvy person could set it up.

Personally, I don’t like sacrificing quality for a cheaper price and I’m happy that GoHighlevel, despite being less expensive, is actually an upgrade.

Later in this GoHighlevel review, I’ll go into more detail on how we use GoHighlevel, but for now I want to give you a summary to help you figure out if it’s right for you:

GoHighlevel helps us with:

• Client acquisition.

• Link building (It’s an SEO thing).

• Automating our business (this was a monumental & breakthrough moment for our agency).

• Client fulfillment.

• It’s our ultimate client retention tool.

• Serves as a scalable CRM for ourselves and for our clients.

• Reputation management.

• Building out funnels.

• Call tracking, revenue tracking, and lead tracking.

• Increasing ROI on adspend and existing clients.

Go HighLevel promises to bring a lot of functionality under a single tool that will enable a marketing agency to stop using many other individual tools designed for a specific purpose like email marketing, two-way text messaging, etc. Is it possible? Well, let's find out.

HighLevel Dashboard

The dashboard on the first login is clean and intuitive with a minimalistic UI design. It is quite a refreshing approach as CRM's add more and more functionality, the dashboard can become cluttered and sometimes completely confusing.

The first thing to be done before the tool even gets usable is to connect the details of your Twilio account. HighLevel uses Twilio as the back end service provider for text messaging and calling features.

Once the Twilio account is connected, it is now possible to add the account of your clients, agency team members, etc.

There is a neat way to add accounts by searching the name of the local business and it pulls in all the information from the client's Google My Business listing. It definitely saves a lot of time. Of course, you can always add the information manually as well.

The next step is to add the Mailgun API key for sending emails. Quite straightforward but it is important to add the TXT records in the DNS settings of your domain provider. Mailgun has detailed tutorials on how to do this for all major domain providers.

One of the cool features in Mailgun is the built-in email validation. HighLevel has this API integrated and the feature can be turned on for each location based on your preference. This really helps to improve the email deliverability and maintains the list of your clients clean.

Remember that apart from Mailgun, you can add any email provider's SMTP like SendGrid or Gmail.

The final important thing is to add a phone number from settings that will complete the set-up to start using the software.

Again, the clean and minimalistic UI makes the initial set-up process quite a breeze.

The dashboard offers a great graphical representation of the marketing funnel for each client with stats and numbers on prospects, pipeline value, opportunities, appointments won, conversion rate, etc. It shows a great bird's eye view of everything that is happening that results from your marketing efforts for your clients.

It also gives a clear view of which stage of the marketing funnel the client is losing prospects and potential customers so that your agency can focus more on that specific stage.

Campaigns

Campaigns, as the name suggests, is the place where all the outbound activities including emails, text messages and voice calls are set up.

The first thing to do in a campaign is set up a time window so that all the marketing messages and emails go out within a specific time interval. It is very important to set this up so that the customers don't get messages in the middle of the night which might really annoy them and perhaps spoil your client's reputation.

There are two options to set this up. First is a "when" condition, which means that a lead will be added to a campaign only within a specific time interval to fire up the triggers and automation. The next one is an "if" condition, which will add a lead only if it is brought in within a specific time interval and if it out of this interval, it will never be added.

The next step is to set up users. If there are many users or teammates in your agency, the leads coming in will be assigned in a round-robin.

Then comes a really cool feature called "next campaign". What this offers is a way to forward the leads of this campaign to a separate and different campaign. This will be greatly useful if the results of the current campaign are not so encouraging and yo would want the leads to go through a completely different nurturing sequence.

Another important feature to turn on is "stop on response". This shuts down and terminates the automation sequence once the goal of the response is achieved.

For example, let us consider the goal of the campaign is to get a booking and the campaign has an email, a text message and an automated voice call in sequence. If the customer responds and confirms the booking just with the first of contact, which is the email, the subsequent text message and voice call will be turned off.

The following elements can be added in a campaign,

• SMS or text message

• Messenger text

• Email

• Call

• Voicemail

• Wait

• Manual SMS

• Manual call

• Webhook

All these elements can be set up in various configurations to fit your client's use case to form a really powerful marketing campaign.

All the triggers in the campaigns can be saved under different folders for better organization and management of clients.

Reputation management

Reviews are an integral part of gaining a presence online for local businesses.

HighLevel makes it extremely easy to generate reviews by sending out review requests to customers at a defined time limit that can be set.

It also integrates with invoicing tools like QuickBooks that makes it very useful.

There is also a review widget which can be installed on the client's website that will pull the reviews from Google and Facebook. Conditions can be set on the minimum stars allowed to be displayed.

Funnel builder

HighLevel has a built-in funnel builder that is incredibly easy to use and build an entire marketing funnel for your clients including forms, landing pages, etc.

So, if you would need to run a promo for a client that would involve a landing page with a form connected to it and a thank you with a booking calendar, all of this can be achieved within HighLevel without ever leaving once.

That is really great as it saves a lot of time and money by avoiding the use of so many different tools for all the functionality that puts a funnel together.

Although the pages built are mobile responsive by default, the various elements in a page can be optimized easily for desktop and mobile mode separately. It is even possible to hide or show different sections only in desktop or mobile mode.

The steps you build in each funnel can be easily cloned into other funnels and campaigns to save a lot of time in building funnels for multiple clients in the same niche.

Another really unique feature in the funnel builder is the ability to import the funnels from ClickFunnels directly into HighLevel's builder. This is of great help when you have all the funnels set up in ClickFunnels and have to transfer everything to HighLevel. Importing from more landing page builders like Instapage and Unbounce are to be added soon.

The sections that are built inside a funnel can be saved as a template and reused in different pages. This is extremely useful for an agency that has many clients in the same niche as one section template can be used in different funnels for all the clients.

Native stripe integration is in place, so it is easy to make checkout pages and sell your products and services.

The stats of each funnel including page views, opt-ins, sales, and earnings can be reset at any time so that you can start a new campaign from scratch with the same funnel.

You can also add custom meta tags to the pages in each funnel which helps in SEO.

HighLevel also lets you install a live chat widget on your funnels. Just copy the code you can get from support documentation and paste it in the body tag of the funnel and you are good to go.

Another cool thing you can do in HighLevel funnels is to add dynamic texts in the funnels which pulls the data from forms and displays personalized texts. This really helps to ramp up conversion rates.

Overall, the funnel builder is excellent with tons and tons of features. It could easily replace your current funnel or landing page builder like ClickFunnels, LeadPages, Unbounce, etc.

With a few more payment gateways and third-party app integrations, it could well become the best funnel builder in the market.

Call tracking

It is highly important to track and get the statistics of the calls that are set up in a campaign to get the metrics of how many and which call brings in the leads.

HighLevel has this feature built-in and hence it is not needed to use a third-party tool like CallRail.

It is also possible to set up a missed call trigger where you can automate to send a text message whenever your client misses any call from a prospective customer.

Facebook messenger ad campaigns

In addition to SMS and voice calls, Highlevel also allows automating your Facebook messenger ads with two-way messages. This is a really unique feature which none of the similar CRM's offer.

Just connect your Facebook account and the messenger ad to set up the follow-up sequences. Of course, it is not as powerful as a standalone chatbot platform like Manychat or Chatfuel, but it is a nice additional feature that covers the basics.

Smart lists

Smart lists are an incredibly useful way to organize the contact lists, get it dynamically updated and trigger actions only to the contacts in the smart list.

These lists let you filter the contacts based on a lot of available parameters and copy them to a separate list.

For example, you can build a smart list of contacts that do not have an email address but only a phone number. This list will be automatically updated whenever a contact is added without an email address but with a phone number.

You can trigger an automation to this list via a text message or voice call to ask for their email address.

There are so many possibilities like this and smart lists really make contacts & list management so powerful and organized.

Some of the other filters include age, pipeline stage, city, last appointment, last activity, etc.

Integrations

The number and robustness of the integrations could make or break such a tool. Thankfully, additional to many native integrations available, HighLevel has a well tested Zapier integration that makes integration with almost any other app possible.

HighLevel also has integration with Yext Listings which is great in easily updating the contact information of local businesses across so many channels & directories Yext has a partnership with.

It also improves the search rankings of local businesses by building citations. These citations act as backlinks to the local business websites which will tremendously improve their search engine optimization.

One huge negative when it comes to integrations is the lack of options in available payment gateways. Stripe is the only option and it is seriously limiting in certain countries where Stripe is not available.

Pricing

There are two plans available.

The single location plan costs $99 a month and as the name suggests, can be used only for a single location. The agency plan costs $297 a month and has unlimited access to a number of locations.

The agency plan gives the most value for money as you can serve many clients across various locations.

There is a white label plan as well that costs an additional $497 to the agency package, so it is $794 a month. You will get a fully white-labeled mobile app and also a custom zap set up for your brand in zapier.

It is also possible to get some specific services like HIPPA compliance done by HighLevel team for your account for an additional charge. This is very useful for agencies serving clients in the medical and personal care industry.

There is an annual plan as well costing $2970 for the agency plan that gives 2 months for free.

Support

This is something HighLevel absolutely excels in. The customer support to solve issues for users and getting feedback to improve the product further is simply fantastic.

The official Facebook support group is highly engaging where many issues are discussed and fellow users help each other with tips and solutions. Even the founder is very active in the group answering any potential issue that users need help with.

There is a dedicated ideas board where all the users actively give out ideas for new features and the founders are really responsive to these. The most voted ideas are monitored, taken into consideration and implemented depending on the priority.

There is a good level of helpful documentation available that provided answers to most of the general queries.

Additionally, there is also a Slack channel for any support queries discussions and that is extremely active as well.

Apart from the co-founders, users can also interact directly with the development team to get issues sorted out. That's not many SaaS companies do, even early-stage startups, so massive praise for it.

Best use cases

Highlevel as a CRM is a perfect fit for the below types of services,

• Agencies offering marketing services for medical, healthcare professionals & dentists due to the availability of HIPPA compliance in HighLevel.

• Agencies offering marketing services for local and home improvement businesses like cleaning, plumbing, pest control, roofing, and electrical services.

HighLevel is a Full Suite Platform for Agencies. Included in the Platform is a full featured Page Builder to capture leads.

CREATE WEBSITES, funnels & LANDING PAGES

Our intuitive platform allows you to create full featured websites with custom menus. Create high-performing and captivating landing pages all in one place!

DRAG & DROP SURVEYS AND FORMS

Built right in is the ability to capture leads through Surveys and capture forms. You can integrate directly with our page builder or embed them on your own sites.

ONLINE APPOINTMENT SCHEDULING

The major step for many business is to capture appointments and request appointments. We've built our own calendar application within HighLevel so you can capture the appointment all in one straightforward flow.

"We built GoHighLevel to be the most comprehensive and affordable sales and marketing automation platform on the market.

Our agency partners and clients drive more leads, convert more leads to sales, and optimize their entire funnel with our all-in-one solution.

GoHighLevel gives you powerful, easy-to-use tools, so you can concentrate on what matters most – building the growth you deserve."