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I Bought, Tested, and Built a Company With GoHighlevel So That You Don't Have To

By Bruno Souza, Founder of Black Swan Media

In 2019 I started my marketing agency as a brand new entrepreneur. For the first year I struggled to both get clients and deliver incredible results to them, but after adding GoHighlevel to our services, we went from a start up, with myself and one VA to working with Fortune 500 brands and growing to over 45 employees in just 3 years. Last year we brought in over 75 million revenue for our clients and will close this year with even bigger numbers. I don’t say this to brag, I say this because those are the results that GoHighlevel was able to get for me. And so in this GoHighlevel review I’ll be evaluating the software on those claims, going deep into its functionality, and showing you how to use GoHighlevel.

I want to preface this Go Highlevel review: Do not make the same mistake that I did by trying Highlevel out on my own. 

Highlevel has as a TON of free resources dedicated to helping new users to QUICKLY become profitable with the Highlevel software. 

When I first started taking advantages of those resources with GoHighlevel one of the things that I loved the most was the amount of attention from their support team in the form of 1:1 calls, courses, and live chats. 

I learned early on that unlike other softwares, Highlevel goes above and beyond to make sure new users get profitable with Highlevel FAST (because they know that’s how you’re going to stick as a user)…

By going through their programs and learning from other community members, I was able to build Black Swan Media into a 7 figure marketing agency – something I could not have done alone.

And so, if you’re interested in trying Highlevel out, do it the right way – by going through one of their free bootcamps or courses which I’ve included a link to above for free access.

Access The Best Free GoHighlevel Resources Below

Get The Longest Free Trial of GoHighlevel

*For new and existing users looking to explore ALL of GoHighlevel’s features

Get The 48 Minute Bootcamp + Free Trial

*For new users looking to get a super fast crash course on how to use GoHighlevel.

Get the 5 Day Challenge + Free Trial

*For new users looking to start with GoHighlevel and walk away with a few clients in just 5 days.

Table of Contents

What is GoHighLevel?

GoHighlevel is a new-age marketing tool that attempts to consolidate the most useful marketing tools under a single umbrella. High level is a marketer’s best friend.

If you’re looking for the TLDR of this Go High Level 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.

The Biggest Drawback: At the same time, the biggest drawback with Highlevel is that because it’s such a comprehensive tool, it can have quite the learning curve. Additionally, it’s easy to focus on the 80% of GHL that produces 20% of the results your agency is looking for as opposed to the 20% of GHL that produces 80% of the results

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:

Back in 2019, I was a solopreneur with just 3 clients and an income of 4k/mo. Now, we directly generate over $75,000,000 every year online with digital marketing for our clients. And to achieve these results I needed a lot of different things to click:

  • An easy way to get marketing agency clients…

  • An easy way to onboard them…

  • An easy way to deliver results for them…

  • And an easy way to scale everything…

Additionally, I needed a lot of technology:

  • An easy way to track leads…

  • An easy way to nurture them…

  • An easy way to build websites…

  • And an easy way to collect payments…

The difference between me going from a solopreneur to building my marketing agency into what is today sparked the day that I started exploring the GoHighlevel CRM. And what it came down was having both access to the right tools and education that I needed to grow my agency.

And so in this GoHighlevel review I am going to cover the following:

  1. GoHighlevel Pros & Cons

  2. My First Impression of GoHighlevel (It was a nightmare)

  3. The GoHighlevel Pricing & Sign Up Process (free trials, free offers, coupons, etc…)

  4. Both the Paid and Free GoHighlevel Education options

  5. What Other Marketing Tools the GoHighlevel CRM replaces

  6. GoHighlevel Marketing Automations & Strategies

  7. How to Build Websites with GoHighlevel

  8. High Level Pricing

 

GoHighlevel at a Glance

Revenue Potential

User Experience

Integrations

Value For Money

GoHighlevel Review Part 1: Pros & Cons

Believe it or not, GoHighlevel is not all sunshine and rainbows. In fact, it can be completely useless if you approach it from the wrong angle.

GoHighlevel Pros:

  • All in one marketing tool (and really good at everything that it does)…

  • Plenty of free amazing education on how to both start and scale a business with GoHighlevel…

  • Results for your digital marketing clients will be incredible, enhancing your client management…

  • Getting new digital marketing clients and lead generation will be easy…

  • Incredible customization (if you can think it, there’s probably a way to build it in GoHighlevel)…

  • Consolidates most tools (which will very likely save you far more than what it costs)…

  • Great integrations (we’ll go over that later)…

  • You can resell and keep 100% of the profits…

Overall, if you take one thing away from this section of my GoHighlevel Review it is this: if you go into Highlevel with education (which is free) you’re going to have a really easy experience growing with Highlevel. If you go into it blind, you’ll probably get overwhelmed.

gohighlevel alternatives

GoHighlevel Cons:

  • HUGE learning curve without training/mentorship, making it a steep learning curve for new users…

  • Cannot replace ecommerce platforms such as Shopify, WooCommerce, or Bigcommerce…

  • The 24/7 support can troubleshoot most of your problems but if you run into something unique their specialists can sometimes take 2-3 days to even respond…

My First Impressions of GoHighlevel

The first time I used GoHighlevel I made the mistake of not going into it with any training. I was honestly confused: I saw the utility in Highlevel and how cool it was, but I couldn’t figure out how to translate that into meaningful revenue for my marketing agency or my clients, which negatively impacted my user experience.

Eventually, I ended up shelling out 2k for a training program from an online guru… And it worked. Within 30 days, I brought in an extra 10k, a few months later I was at 20k MRR, and a few years later I cracked my first milllion. However: you’re not going to have to do that because the education these days is free.

Both the Paid and Free GoHighlevel Education Resources

I love that unlike in the past, these days there are so many training materials available to learn how to use GoHighlevel. It makes getting started incredibly easy. GoHighlevel provides you with a couple of online courses that will help you land your first client while learning to use the software. Additionally, they have an incredible Facebook group and YouTube community that plenty of training as well.

Free Ways To Get Started with GoHighlevel

Below are going to be the best free resources that I recommend:

Access The Best Free GoHighlevel Resources Below

Get The Longest Free Trial of GoHighlevel

*For new and existing users looking to explore ALL of GoHighlevel’s features

Get The 48 Minute Bootcamp + Free Trial

*For new users looking to get a super fast crash course on how to use GoHighlevel.

Get the 5 Day Challenge + Free Trial

*For new users looking to start with GoHighlevel and walk away with a few clients in just 5 days.

Paid Options for GoHighlevel Education

Quite frankly, in terms of free education and getting your first client, then the GoHighlevel education options that I listed above more than enough to get you started.

If you are interested in learning directly form me, then I have a both a free community and paid community where I share my GoHighlevel marketing campaigns, provide a step-by-step training on the business model, and provide live weekly coaching.

GoHighlevel Review Part 2: Highlevel for Digital Marketing Agencies

Highlevel brings in two crowds of people: marketers who already have digital marketing agencies and beginners looking to start their own business, focusing on client acquisition. In this section, I’ll go over how I used about 20% of what Highlevel offers to add an extra $10,000 in MRR in just 30 days.

Database Marketing: My Favorite Marketing Campaigns in GHL

Black Swan Media Co branding and logo for digital marketing services.

When I started my marketing agency, the biggest bottleneck for me was client acquisition. It was hard to get prospects interested. It was hard to close them. And it was somewhat hard to keep them. Using GoHighlevel for database marketing completely changed all that by improving our sales process.

I changed my sales pitch from “Hey, let me sell you SEO, which is really expensive and takes months to get results” to “Let me make you a years worth of your marketing budget in profits upfront, and then we can do business after”.

Our sales funnels exploded with traffic, our customer relationships improved, and we were getting multiple clients from every email outreach campaign.

To fulfill on our promise, all we would do is use Highlevel’s automation tools to plug OUR customer’s database of existing customers and leads into remarketing campaigns.

We then used the other suites of automation tools to take the leads being generated, book sales appointments for our clients, and follow up with them.

If it sounds complicated, it’s not – the whole thing takes 20 minutes in a few clicks you will have made a minimum of 20k+ in revenue for small business owners.

You can learn how to set up one of these campaigns for free here.

GoHighlevel Review Part 3: CRM Functionality

Below you’re going to find a full list of Highlevel’s CRM functionality. However, I want to focus on the 20% of the tools that got 80% of our results, and the ones that I enjoyed the most.

Marketing Automation Tools

  • Email marketing

  • SMS marketing

  • Voicemail Drops

  • Lead Nurturing

  • And Lead Tracking

When I was looking for an all in one solution that would have all the features that a small business owner would need, what stood out to me about Highlevel was the ability for the CRM to organize leads and nurture them.

A new lead would come in, our marketing automation campaign would register them, and the nurturing process would begin. Without any manual intervention, the lead would go through our sales funnel with both SMS marketing campaigns and email marketing campaigns on autopilot.

Additionally, we used the Highlevel marketing automation suite to book the leads straight into my sales calendar and automated the follow up process to make sure that the leads would show up (we’ve all been there when the no-shows happen).

In the past we needed multiple tools to make this all happen, and with multiple clients it got complicated. Highlevel consolidated it all and not only did it save us money, but gave access to more powerful online marketing strategies and improved customer engagement.

The Full List of Highlevel CRM Functions

Lead Management

  • Lead source tracking
  • Pipeline creation, customization, and management
  • Customer segmentation
  • Lead tagging
  • Leads can have custom notes
  • Document creation, storage, and signing
  • Lead history (see all actions the lead has taken in funnels and websites)

GoHighlevel Analytics / Reporting

GoHighlevel allows you to create a fully customizable dashboard based on every data point you could possible imagine. This part I leave up to your creative brain, but at the end of this section are some the data points I track for one of our clients:

  • New leads generated each day
  • New conversations started each day
  • Leads disqualified each day (broken down by team member DQing)
  • Leads qualified each day (broken down by individual team member performance)
  • Sales Appointments booked each day (broken down by individual team members)
  • Sales appointments closed
  • Sales funnel analytics per source (leads generated, leads qualified, leads closed)
  • SMS / Email performance (opens, responses, clicks, bounces)
  • Payments received, customer churn, and payments to be collected
  • Call reporting (answered calls, vs missed calls, along with average call length per marketing source)
  • Agent reporting (to track how each member on our team is performing)

Understand though that the sky is the limit, you can track whatever it is that you want.

Marketing Automations

  • SMS
  • Email
  • Voicemail Drops
  • Outbound Dialing
  • Chatbots
  • Social media responses
  • A/B Testing

Operations Automations

  • Billing customers
  • Assigning leads
  • Sending out docs for signing and with reminders
  • Appointment booking with reminders
  • Marketing campaigns based on lead status in pipeline
  • AI blogging or email newsletters
  • Social media scheduling / posting
  • Review requests, monitoring, and responses
  • Assigning tasks
  • Automating lead stages in pipeline

Other Useful GoHighlevel Features

  • Forms
  • Surveys
  • Websites
  • Sales Funnels
  • The 1,000+ templates that come for the automations, websites, and funnels
  • All the integrations (covered later)
  • QR code generation
  • Redirect link generation

GoHighlevel’s AI features

  • AI sales appointment booking bot
  • New: AI Voice (AI to do your outbound calling)
  • New: AI Employee (An AI that can take calls for clients)
  • AI conversation bot in workflows for SMS, Emailing, Chatbots, Social Media, and Google Business Profiles

Access The Best Free GoHighlevel Resources Below

Get The Longest Free Trial of GoHighlevel

*For new and existing users looking to explore ALL of GoHighlevel’s features

Get The 48 Minute Bootcamp + Free Trial

*For new users looking to get a super fast crash course on how to use GoHighlevel.

Get the 5 Day Challenge + Free Trial

*For new users looking to start with GoHighlevel and walk away with a few clients in just 5 days.

Creating Sales Funnels and Designing Websites With Highlevel

I found that the Highlevel website builder is straightforward. If you have ever used a drag and drop interface (WYSWG editor), then you’re familiar with what you would be working with, and it can significantly improve your conversion rates. The learning curve is not steep at all when it comes to designing sales funnels or landing pages.

Additionally, what I loved the most was that the websites and sales funnels would have a direct integration directly into the different Highlevel marketing automations, meaning we were able to cut down on our web design tech stack too.

Although we still prefer wordpress sites for the SEO reasons, Highlevel recently released a new standout feature: direct wordpress hosting integration, simplifying the process even more.

The Funnel Builder and Templates

The website builder and the funnel builder are one in the same, it’s just the interface that’s different. Both of them come with thousands of templates for every niche and objective, including landing pages, making it easy for new users to get their website launched while saving time.

Review of GoHighlevel platform by Black Swan Media Co for marketing success.
 GoHighlevel Alternatives

Having tested most of the GoHighlevel alternatives out there, it’s hard to recommend any of them because they all need a massive tech stack & multiple platforms to compete with High Level CRM software.

However, some GoHighlevel alternatives include:

  1. Hubspot for customer relationship management

  2. Clickfunnels for funnel building (while I would recommend Clickfunnels’ education, Clickfunnels 1.0 is just a funnel builder and 2.0 is a dumpster fire that I was shocked was publicly released)

  3. Active Campaign for email marketing

  4. Shopify to sell products. And with the right add ons, it would even outperform Highlevel.

  5. Keap – formally known as Infusionsoft (great if you like overpaying for lower quality products)

  6. Kartra, Skool, and Podia for membership sites (personally, I like Podia out of those 3)

  7. Builderall for websites

  8. Pipedrive for pipeline management

  9. Zoho and Salesforce if you really hate yourself and everyone who works with you*

*I can’t tell you how many times we’ve had to replace a salesforce build out that some CEO invested 200k+ into, that never got used the way it was supposed to, that everyone in the company hates, with our Highlevel SaaS.

GoHighlevel Direct Integrations

GoHighlevel has direct integrations with the following platforms and softwares:

  1. The Google Ecosystem (Google Suite, Analytics, GMBs, Maps, etc…)
  2. The Meta Ecosystem (Facebook, Instagram, and business suites)
  3. Quickbooks
  4. Clio
  5. Stripe
  6. Shopify
  7. Tik Tok
  8. Linkedin
  9. Slack
  10. Printful
  11. Shippo
  12. Whatsapp
lead tracking pipeline management sales automation customer segmentation task management appointment scheduling email marketing SMS marketing reporting analytics integrations custom fields tags notes reminders workflows automation templates forms surveys landing pages funnels memberships reputation management review requests review monitoring review responses social media management social media scheduling social media analytics social media posting social media engagement social media monitoring social media ads Facebook ads Google ads LinkedIn ads Instagram ads Twitter ads YouTube ads PPC management SEO tools keyword research backlink tracking site audits rank tracking content management blog management content scheduling content analytics content creation content distribution email templates SMS templates campaign management campaign tracking campaign analytics campaign optimization A/B testing Email Campaigns split testing conversion tracking lead scoring lead nurturing customer journey mapping customer feedback customer support helpdesk ticketing system live chat chatbot knowledge base FAQs customer satisfaction NPS CSAT customer retention customer loyalty upselling cross-selling referral programs affiliate programs partner management reseller management white-label solutions API access webhooks data import data export data migration data security GDPR compliance CCPA compliance HIPAA compliance Community feature user roles permissions audit logs activity tracking

Additionally,  Highlevel has a pretty robust API for a direct integration with Zapier and with platforms that accept webhooks.

Meaning, we give Highlevel a 5/5 star review for their ability to integrate with other platforms.

*A creative way we have been using the GoHighlevel integrations are hooking up the AI bot to our Google Business Profile & social media accounts to book sales appointments.

Highlevel Pricing

Highlevel has 3 tiers of pricing. I tested all 3 tiers, and can easily recommend the right one for you depending on the scale of your business.

  • Tier 1: is The Highlevel Starter Plan at $97/mo.

    The Highlevel Starter plan is perfect for people who are just looking to start their business because it gives you all of the marketing tools. I personally was on this plan for my first 2 clients before I upgraded to their Tier 2 plan.

  • Tier 2: The Agency Plan at $297/mo.

    The only advantage to upgrading to the Agency Plan is that the Agency Plan gives you unlimited subaccounts.

    Every agency client you bring on requires their own subaccount. And while other platforms would charge you on a per subaccount basis, Highlevel gives you an unlimited accounts at a fixed price – meaning, even if you grow, your expenses stay static.

    I would recommend the Agency Plan to new users looking to bring on 3-5 clients in a short amount of time.

  • Tier 3: Highlevel Agency Pro Plan (SAAS Mode): $497

    The Agency Pro Plan is by far my favorite plan and what I would suggest to any user looking to have more than 5 sub accounts.

    The cons to the Agency Pro Plan are that it’s more expensive.
    The pros are the following:

    • You can automate the onboarding process for your clients (including sign up, onboarding, sub-account creation, snapshot selection)

    • You can automatically rebill the variable costs of Highlevel to your clients including SMS/Emailing fees while throwing on a surcharge of your choice

    • You can build and make your own pricing plans for your SaaS (software as a service)

    • You get access to Highlevel’s AI agent: Eliza (and this is something I will review in a separate post)

Access The Best Free GoHighlevel Resources Below

Get The Longest Free Trial of GoHighlevel

*For new and existing users looking to explore ALL of GoHighlevel’s features

Get The 48 Minute Bootcamp + Free Trial

*For new users looking to get a super fast crash course on how to use GoHighlevel.

Get the 5 Day Challenge + Free Trial

*For new users looking to start with GoHighlevel and walk away with a few clients in just 5 days.

Highlevel Support Team

I love that Highlevel themselves offer a ton of support through several mediums.

  1. First, you have all the free courses that I had previously mentioned to help you get started and scale. Each of these courses come with their own support staff and coaches to guide users and ensure success. I’ve taken a couple of the programs myself and can confirm that they’re not all fluff – Highlevel will try and help you get new clients.

  2. Second, every week they host office hours and frequently post updates. Back in 2019 when I started using Highlevel when it was a new software, it was about 20% of what it is today. Highlevel is always aggressively developing so that their users can offer more marketing services to their customers.

  3. Third, every week they’re interviewing successful Highlevel users and agency owners and publishing the content on their channel. This gives you the advantage of seeing how other business owners are using the High Level software to sell websites, marketing, and the other services.

    Through their content, you’ll frequently meet owners who have a unique business and different takes on the SaaS business model.

  4. Fourth, High Level has an extensive support library that can answer just about any question. This is different from various tools that tend to be lackluster with their support.

  5. Fifth, they have live support pretty much 24/7. I will say the skill between each support agent will vary. However, if the first agent you speak with can’t solve your issue, they will ALWAYS escalate it to a more qualified person.

Point being, that compared to other tools, Highlevel is the only one that will educate you, help you find potential customers, help you nurture leads, streamline operations, and that can be seamlessly integrated with any other software you decide to keep.

Conclusion: Would I Recommend Highlevel

Whether you’re a beginner looking to make some money, or an existing marketing company looking to add revenue, I think if you’re not using Highlevel you’re leaving a TON of money on the table.

They’re far better than the Highlevel alternatives, especially for local businesses, they have a huge community and one of the best free resource platforms out there.

My honest review of High Level is that it is a complete game changer for most businesses. The only people I would suggest to avoid High Level are the ones trying to sell products through an ecom store. Just straight up, Shopify’s solutions tend to be better.

But, if you’re looking for the one platform that can be the game changer – then High Level is it.

Access The Best Free GoHighlevel Resources Below

Get The Longest Free Trial of GoHighlevel

*For new and existing users looking to explore ALL of GoHighlevel’s features

Get The 48 Minute Bootcamp + Free Trial

*For new users looking to get a super fast crash course on how to use GoHighlevel.

Get the 5 Day Challenge + Free Trial

*For new users looking to start with GoHighlevel and walk away with a few clients in just 5 days.

Want Instant Access To Our GoHighlevel Agency Template Library, A 30 Day Free Trial & Highlevel Quickstart Launch Course?

If you want to give it a shot, we’ve set up the button above so that when you sign up using it, you’ll get access to all of our templates, builds, tutorials, and training.

Additionally, you’ll get an onboarding call with the GoHighlevel team and one of our team members will reach out to you to set up a free training 1:1 session to get you started.

If you’re someone who is looking for ways to save time through business automation and make more money, then this tool is the right one for you.

Please refer to the graphic below where you can see EVERYTHING that GoHighlevel replaces.

Besides what’s on that graph, there are a few more things you should know about “what GoHighlevel is” and does:

  1. You can white-label it as your own tool.

  2. It focuses heavily on automation. This frees up your time so you can focus on what matters.

  3. It’s infinitely scalable. Their agency plan starts at $300/mo and allows you to have unlimited accounts. We use this feature at our agency to create accounts for our clients, for our own websites, and for all our lead-generation GMBs.

  4. It’s cloneable. If you’re a digital marketer, I’m going to be giving you templates that you can upload to your account to hit the ground running. Once you create your first “build” for your clients, then you can clone them for the next. This is powerful for people who are niche specific.

Go Highlevel Review: Read More of this Section to See If It’s Right For You

In this section of our Go Highlevel review, I want to help you figure out if GoHighlevel is right for you and your business situation.

Starting off, I want to address Gohighlevel’s weaknesses. It’s not a perfect solution for someone who is into e-commerce. If that’s you, I would stick to Shopify and all of its plugins.

Aside from that, GoHighlevel is a great fit if:

  1. You’re already paying for and using any of the services above. GoHighlevel will consolidate all your tech under one umbrella. This will simplify your stack, and save you time, stress, and money.

  2. You are a digital marketer who is a freelancer, has an agency, or focuses on affiliates. Bonus points if you focus on SEM or Social Media advertising.

  3. You sell online courses or digital products that involve funnel building, auto-responders, or membership areas.

  4. You want new, creative, and easier ways of picking up digital marketing/agency clients.

  5. You’re looking for ways of simplifying your technology, and reducing costs, and would prefer to gain power instead of losing it.

If any of those descriptions seem right, then read on.

Our Honest GoHighlevel Review

For this GoHighlevel review, let’s talk about the negatives first because that list is a lot shorter than the positives.

Our first experience with GoHighlevel was that the software felt somewhat overwhelming. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing, but diving into GoHighlevel requires a certain mindset.

Because GoHighlevel does so much, it feels like there’s a serious learning curve. To combat that, and to properly train our team we had to approach it with a “one step at a time” mentality.

Here are some of the areas where we just put the time into understanding:

  1. What triggers are and how to use them.

  2. How to combine triggers and campaigns to automate a large portion of our business.

Once we figured out those two things, by sitting there and reading all the options, the rest became easy.

For us to learn how to use GoHighlevel it took about 2 days of being DEEP into the software.

However, to make sure we help you when you sign up using this link below (it’s connected to our GoHighlevel account), you’ll automatically get access to our Digital Agency Template and to a course that teaches you how to use GoHighlevel.

Reserve Your Spot: GoHighLevel 30 Day Free Trial

Overall though, GoHighlevel feels overwhelming because it’s 15 different tools in 1. However, taking the time to learn all the other tools that we replaced like Mail Chimp, Clickfunnels, Leadpages, CallFire, Zapier, WordPress took way longer cumulatively than just learning how to use GoHighlevel.

So for this GoHighlevel review, we’re going to give it 4/5 stars for usability.

GoHighlevel Review 2024: How We Use it At Our Agency

For this GoHighlevel Review, I want to share with you how we use GoHighlevel at our agency because there are plenty of people who promote/review products that they’ve never used – and that’s not us.

Starting off, it’s important to know you can white label Go Highlevel. This means that when clients “log in”, they’re not logging in at the Go Highlevel website. They will be logging in on your website. The white label feature allows you to customize and design Go Highlevel however you want, and to stand out from other Gohighlevel users. 

Although at our agency, we do not white label Go Highlevel, most other agencies will choose to do so.

If you’re interested in the white label feature, it’s free and easy to set up when you register for the 14-day free trial.

Method 1: Automating Client Acquisiton and Onboarding Using Go High Level

One feature that we absolutely love about GoHighlevel is that it consolidates and automates a multi-channel outreach approach.

Previously, most of our outbound marketing for link building and client acquisition was all done through email.

When we added GoHighlevel to our agency, we were quickly able to replace both Woodpecker and Mailchimp while getting a higher quality service through Gohighlevel.

Our process now for Client Acquisition includes multiple touch-points:

Day 1: Email

Day 2: Text

Day 6: Email

Day 7: Voicemail

Day 13: Email

Day 15: text

And we’ve seen our response rates skyrocket from around 4% using could emails to around 10-12% by combining text and the voicemail feature.

We’ve set it up so that if you’re interested in trying out GoHighlevel and use the link connected to our account, then you’ll automatically get some our templates emailed to you and built in your account

Reserve Your Spot: GoHighLevel 30 Day Free Trial

In doing our own research, we found that to add both text marketing automation and voicemail marketing automation would require 2 more services (on top of Woodpecker and Mailchimp), which would cost an extra $200/mo.

On top of that, we’d also need to somehow use Zapier to integrate and glue it all together.

Pro Tip: Once we built out a campaign that worked, we just hired a few more people to constantly prospect a list of potential clients and enhance that lists quality.

Every week, we upload about 100-200 highly targeted prospects into our funnel and schedule between 10-20 client appointments all through GoHighlevel.

While we’re on that note, for the clients that don’t sign up, we add them to a nurture sequence so that our agency stays in touch and is providing value to them.

For the ones that do close, they get an on-boarding sequence (automated) so that we can get access to the typical things an agency would need (Google Analytics, FB accounts, Search Console, Website/Hosting/DNS access, etc..).

Method 2: Automating Our Link Building

I know this section will only appeal to the very small percentage of readers out there who build links for your clients. The same methods that we use for client outreach, can also be used for link building.

We have dedicated team members that prospect websites we’re interested in getting links from. We then plug them into a multi-channel outreach campaign, funnel them into a form where they give us the information we need (TAT, pricing, content guidelines, niches, etc…) then that gets zapped to our partners list.

If you want to receive a copy of our link building templates, funnels, and playbook, then when you start your 14 day free trial of GoHighlevel using the link below, we’ll automatically send it to you.

Reserve Your Spot: GoHighLevel 30 Day Free Trial

Method 3: Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)

CRO is the most undervalued and neglected part of digital marketing. Most marketers focus on the front end – how to get leads in through the door, but never bother to figure out how to get leads to close.

We’ve dramatically increased our client’s ROI and decreased their customer acquisition cost by implementing GoHighlevel through several steps in the sales process, with the big one being when it comes to appointment booking.

By connecting GoHighlevel with Facebook Ads and Google Ads, you’re able to do quite a few things that lead to way higher conversion rates:

  1. Book appointments on the spot. What makes this special is that we use appointment reminder sequences via mobile and email. When a prospect books an actual appointment, they make a greater mental commitment to the service they’re interested in. By adding appointment reminders, you dramatically increase the rate at which people show up for a service by 30% at worst and 80% for outlandishly good clients.
  2. Force calling means that when somebody fills out a lead form, either through PPC, or Facebook ads, then they instantly get a call to connect them with you or your client. By using this system, you strike while the hammer is hot and thus dramatically improve your conversion rates.

Including this little bit of CRO into your marketing not only increases the conversions you get for yourself, but for your clients, thus making you a more valuable marketer to them.

Method 4: Using GoHighlevel for Client Retention

If you have ROI tracking and appointment booking in your business then it’s like rigging a slot machine in your favor so that everyday is payday, because now, your clients will (most likely) never fire you.

So why read this section? Because I’m going to show you how we use GoHighlevel to develop the ultimate client retention system.

If you implement what I show you in this GoHighlevel review, you can almost guarantee that you’ll retain all of your clients.

The only 2 reasons a client should ever fire you are because:

  1. They don’t like you.
  2. You don’t deliver results.

While I can’t help you with your personality in this GoHighlevel review, I can help you with the latter.

The thing about results is that if you can’t translate what you’re doing into ROI, then to the client, you’re not really producing results.

Here’s what I mean…

Let’s say a Black Swan even happens that sends the global economy into chaos and now your client has to tighten up their operations. They’re figuring out who to keep and who to fire.

GoHighlevel Review Scenario 1:

If the client knows that they spend $3,000/mo with you and net $21,000 back, then they know you bring in a 7x ROI net.

GoHighlevel Review Scenario 2:

But, if your client spends $3,000/mo with you and know that you “rank them for the #1 position on Search Engines” then they no longer know with clarity the ROI.

So, because they’re playing it safe, they’re probably going to cut costs/fire you because it’s not clear to them how much money you bring in.

GoHighlevel let’s you track inbound calls, texts, leads, and then organizes them into a pipeline for your clients (all automated) so that you have irrefutable proof of the results you generate for your clients.

In short, it bridges the gap between your marketing efforts and the results that the client is getting.

Additionally, besides bridging that gap, there’s one more thing I want to mention in this GoHighlevel Review.

And it’s that because you’re using GoHighlevel to provide so many services (see the first image of this article), then you become irreplaceable.

Because for a client to replace you, they have to sacrifice/replace their:

What is the GoHighlevel “Value Stack” Clients Would Need to Replace?

  • SMS Marketing
  • Email Marketing
  • Voicemail Marketing
  • Appointment Booking
  • Web Funnels
  • CRM
  • Primary Marketing (SEM / Social Media Marketing)
  • Business Automation
  • Reputation Management (automated review requests)
  • Sales Funnels
  • Online Course funnels
  • Software Funnels (Saas)

Delivering these sales and marketing services to your clients doesn’t take much. The results your clients get are incredible. But the hook is that for them to leave you, they have to either give up so much or replace everything they’re losing.

Being irreplaceable and proving your ROI is a bullet proof strategy for client retention.

>Reserve Your Spot: GoHighLevel 30 Day Free Trial

Method 5: Business Automation

We’re not bot coders or script writers, and because of that, we always thought automating our business would be hard.

GoHighlevel saves us hundreds of hours of work each week through automation – and the best part? It was pretty easy to set up. Through their systems of triggers and campaigns we’re able to automate nearly everything on the customer fulfillment end. For example, we can:

  1. Send out automated voicemails wishing our customers a happy birthday.
  2. Let customers use our calendar to schedule appointments. This sequence also comes with automated follow up reminders which dramatically increases conversion rates.
  3. Automate our follow up and nurture sequences.
  4. Automate our on-boarding messages and packages.
  5. Automate our reporting and call tracking.

Those are just some examples but list goes on and on. On top of helping our business out, this is a service that we’ve been able to offer to our clients that’s saved them hundreds of thousands of dollars in employee expenses and time.

As just 1 example, in the past, some of our contractor clients would have their admin manually call people and remind them to schedule maintenance. Through GoHighlevel we were able to automate this process using a voicemail campaign and literally save them 3 weeks worth of dedicated work.

GoHighLevel Review: The Different Parts – CRM, Reputation Management, Pricing, Funnels, Online Courses, SMS, Emails, and Software

In this section, we’re going to cover the different parts of GoHighlevel and review them briefly.

GoHighlevel CRM: Is It Good?

As far of CRMs go, we can only compare it to what we’ve seen and used. So far, the Gohighlevel CRM is very competitive with other CRMs like Hubspot, Pipedrive, Acuity, MindBody, Insightly, and Infusionsoft.

For most businesses, GoHighlevel is absolutely outstanding. But, for those who have e-commerce websites with 20+ products, we would not recommend using GoHighlevel (this recommendation does not include people selling digital products).

The GoHighlevel CRM completely replaces the CRMs we mentioned above and for only a fraction of the price.

Some of the other cool sales and marketing features included in the Go Highlevel CRM are that you can add unlimited employee accounts for each business, organize the teams, and automate the onboarding process.

This means the administrator, the sales team, and other members can all log in and access vital information for the business. This centralizes communication and helps keep the business accountable for communicating with their clients.

Additionally, you can control each individual employee’s level of access and visibility.

This means sales members can have access to the pipeline and conversations.

The admins/managers have access to the sales members.

And the business owner can have access to everything.

Or maybe, you sell GoHighlevel as individual pieces with up sells so the business only gets further access as they pay more.

GoHighlevel Review for Businesses: Is the Marketing Software System Good?

GoHighlevel’s marketing system consists of 2 main parts:

  1. Inbound/Outbound Outreach
  2. Inbound Traffic Conversion

The “Inbound/Outbound Outreach” has 5 channels: SMS, Email, Voicemail, Messenger, and Calls

  1. Text.
  2. Email.
  3. Voicemail.
  4. Messenger.
  5. Forced Call.

First, the power GoHighlevel offers you through these 5 marketing channels alone would cost you around $400/mo and requires 4-5 different tools that would all need to be integrated with each other.

Second, yes, they’re marketing is good. By combining the marketing channels with their “triggers” and “trigger links” you can get GoHighlevel’s outbound marketing system to do pretty much anything.

For example, if you want a campaign for customers who add to cart but don’t purchase, you can do that.

If you want a campaign for if customers click on email link, you can do that.

If you want custom messaging sequences based on where the prospect is in their buyers journey you can do that.

If you want to distribute leads to multiple vendors based on the lead’s qualifications, you can do that.

There are no limit when it comes to GoHighLevel’s marketing system.

Reserve Your Spot: GoHighLevel 30 Day Free Trial

GoHighlevel Vs. Clickfunnels and other funnel builders

Although we love Clickfunnels, we have to give the win to GoHighlevel. First, to even compare the two, you have to be looking at Clickfunnels Etison suite to match some of what GoHighlevel can do.

Right there, you’re looking at $300 for Clickfunnels and $97 for GoHighlevel.

Second, GoHighlevel literally does everything that Clickfunnels can do, but better, simpler, and with more in-house integrations.

Both Clickfunnels and GoHighlevel:

  1. Come with Funnel building tools (they use the same builder).
  2. Come with Website building tools (GoHighlevel’s is better and comes with templates).
  3. Comes with Email marketing and segmenting capabilities.
  4. Comes with an amazing community of talented marketers.
  5. Have an extensive library of training documents.

However, where GoHighlevel really stand apart is customer service and the affiliate programs.

Lately, Clickfunnels customer support has been beyond awful (we know because we used to be users prior to switching to GoHighlevel). On the other hand, GoHighlevel’s team is fantastic.

On top of that, the Clickfunnels affiliate program makes you jump through tons of hoops to get in for a 25% payout.

GoHighlevel gives you 40% and their affiliate program is super easy to get started with.

Where Clickfunnels Stops, GoHighlevel Picks up.

Clickfunnels has fallen behind. Their “product” hasn’t been further developed in years and it’s really set the stage for something like GoHighlevel to take the stage.

Clickfunnels is like a 1998 computer while GoHighlevel is the modern, 2021 one. Where Clickfunnels stopped, GoHighlevel picked up.

With GoHighlevel you can set up more than just email campaigns without having to do further integration.

There isn’t a single thing that Clickfunnels does that GoHighlevel does not. So your money is better spent on GoHighlevel rather than Clickfunnels.

GoHighlevel Review: Reputation Management

Reputation management can have several meanings. The way that we use it our agency is specifically to gather reviews our clients.

When Paul the Plumber has 400 5 star reviews on their Google My Business and Facebook pages, while their competitors only have 20 or so reviews, guess who is going to get the client? Paul the Plumber.

How Does GoHighlevel Help With Reputation Management?

There’s a really big green button on the top left of GoHighlevel. When a client needs to be checked into the business, all the business owner has to do is click that big green button.

Once they’re checked in, they’ll be plugged into an automatic review request messaging sequence that can be fired off 1 hour, 1 day, or even 1 week after their visit.

If you want to cancel and prevent the request from going out then you can do that too. But overall, it makes getting reviews super easy because “checking a client in” is something that admins need to do anyways.

Go High Level Review (1)

The Important Takeaways from the Go Highlevel Review

When Clickfunnels came out however many years ago, it was amazing because it bundled up every service that marketers used at the time. Since then, digital marketing evolved with more powerful tools being released over the last decade. This is where Go Highlevel comes in. 

Where Clickfunnels stopped innovating, Go Highlevel picked up – and because of that we absolutely love it and so do our clients. What I mean by this is that Go Highlevel is doing what Clickfunnels did years ago: removing the need for 300 different marketing tools by centralizing it all of them in one platform.

In the next section of our Go Highlevel Review, we’ll cover exactly what the platform does and compare Go Highlevel’s drag and drop builder to Clickfunnels.

What Does Go Highlevel Do?

Go Highlevel Review

In this section of our Go Highlevel Review, we’re about to cover the main functions of what Go Highlevel does and what you can expect to consolidate. If I had to sum it up at least in the way that our agency uses it, Go Highlevel is a combination of Clickfunnels, Salesforce, and several SEO/review management platforms.

    1. Directly text/email prospects and leads.
    2. Funnel building software (same capabilities as Clickfunnels, although, it’s a little bit more clunky in terms of user experience).
    3. Set up automated messaging sequences via the following channels:
      1. SMS.
      2. Email.
      3. Messenger.
      4. Voicemail.
      5. Auto-caller.
    4. Builder forms / surveys.
    5. Create HTML pages.
    6. Book appointments and integrate follow up sequences for:
      1. Appointment reminders.
      2. Appointment confirmation.
      3. No show sequences.
      4. Cancelation sequences.
      5. Rescheduling sequences.
    7. Reputation management / gathering (excellent for SEO).
    8. Citation management (insane discounts with Yext).
    9. CRM data importing/exporting.
    10. Lead/contact management.
  • Whitelabel Capabilities (set up a dashboard for your client, and have think it’s your own custom software).
  • Unlimited Client Accounts.
  • Whitelabel Mobile App
  • Ability to import funnels directly from Clickfunnels.

Yeah… Go Highlevel really does do everything.

Why you SHOULD NOT use Go Highlevel

Go High Level Review

Before I talk about how and why you should use Go Highlevel, I want to share with you why you shouldn’t use it and who it’s not for.

While Go Highlevel is releasing major updates every month that add even more utility to the platform, there is one specific area where they’re lacking and will be for the foreseeable future. 

The downside is that Go Highlevel cannot store client documentation – meaning, you can’t use it to store documents in a few major industries like medical, legal, and loan industries. 

Despite this downside though, thousands make the switch anyways as the software brings such a high ROI to the table that in the end it’s totally worth i

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