GoHighLevel Review (2023) – Is it the Best CRM for Local Marketing Agencies?

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CRM's are everywhere. 

If you are running a small business and looking for a CRM to automate your business, there are a plethora of options and it is simply impossible to try and choose the right one.

Thankfully, there are CRM's built now exclusively for certain niches specifically for a certain customer journey.

For a long time, Close CRM is my personal favorite CRM with voice calls & text messaging needs for any type of industry

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 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.

Quick Navigation

Sign-up Process

The sign-up process was fairly straight-forward with just the basic information requested. There are a few done-for-you set-up features available for an additional cost which might be useful for many agencies that do not have the time to get used to and learn the tool. 

Upon completion, you are instructed to join the official Facebook support group. Overall, a nice and uncomplicated sign-up process.

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, and 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 of 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 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 setup 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 is 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 you 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 contact, which is the email, the subsequent text message and voice call will be turned off. 

The following elements can be added to 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 which makes it very useful. 

There is also a review widget that 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 builds 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 into 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 calls bring 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 sending 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 that 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 contact lists, get them 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, in addition 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 partnerships 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 setup for your brand in Zapier. 

The Pro SaaS mode gives you the best value for money as it enables you to have complete control over the billing for Twilio and other services. It essentially makes you an owner of a SaaS tool. 

Try the Pro SaaS Mode of HighLevel Now for Free

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 to get 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 and 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 what 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. 

Negatives?

There are many new features that are released very frequently. Although it is good to know that the founders and developers are on their toes, it could overwhelm the users.

Although there is a power dialer for automated calls, a predictive dialer is missing. Although it's quite a challenge to build a robust and fully functional predictive dialer, it looks like the team is working on it to be released later. 

Also, there is occasional slowness while refreshing the app which has been reported by a few users.

Useful Tools that Complement HighLevel

Although HighLevel is an excellent all-around CRM, there are a few tools that can be used to enhance its potential and get the best results for your and your client's business. Let's see a few of those. 

MarketPlan

MarketPlan is a SaaS tool that helps you to plan, map, and track all your sales funnels. It is similar to Funnelytics but has more features at a much lesser cost.

Considering how vital it can be to properly map a funnel before building it and optimizing it once it goes live, MarketPlan can be an excellent addition to your tech stack.

It also comes with white labeling and custom domain support that will let you provide a completely branded experience for your clients. 

LeadFuze

LeadFuze is a B2B lead generation database that has millions of business profiles along with their contact information like email addresses, phone numbers, etc. 

For an agency to do outreach to land more clients, this can be of incredible value to grow your business. 

LeadFuze has a native integration with HighLevel which makes it a lot easier to sync the contacts and automate the outreach process. 

Jasper.ai

Irrespective of the type of your marketing agency and the niche you serve, Copywriting is an absolutely essential part of it.

In spite of the nature of traffic sources, be it in PPC campaigns through paid ads, or organic traffic through blogs, you need good-quality writing. 

However, copywriting is just expensive if it has to be done the right way. This is where Jarvis comes to help.

It is an AI-assisted copywriting tool that can help you write copy for Google Ads, Facebook Ads, LinkedIn Ads, Google My Business Listings, Long-form content for blog posts, and a whole lot more. 

Try Jasper Now with 10,000 Free Credits

If you are an agency with multiple team members, you can also add additional users and collaborate to write content for your clients. 

WordHero

WordHero is another excellent AI copywriting tool that can be of huge help for you to set up ad campaigns for your clients and also for generating SEO-focused blog posts. 

It is available on one-time pricing which can save a lot of money for your agency. 

Grab the Lifetime Deal of WordHero

BrandBay

BrandBay is a platform that you can use to unified access to all of your clients' digital access.

Get the Lifetime Deal of BrandBay.io

Bant.io

For any agency, it is important to outsource some of the tasks in order to scale up and maximize the revenue. However, the difficult part is finding the right partner to outsource.

Bant solves that problem as they are one of the most efficient and reliable white-label service providers that you can use to offer services like PPC Ads, Retargeting, Cold email outreach campaigns, Social outreach campaigns, etc. at a very reasonable cost. 

Best HighLevel Alternatives

As good as HighLevel is, there are a few other CRM's that do a few things better. 

Close CRM

Close CRM is a multi-channel CRM tool with emails, calls, and text messages included in the platform. 

It integrates natively with Twilio for a cost-effective calling and text messaging solution. Close CRM stands out with its powerful voice-calling features. 

The combination of power dialer and predictive dialer makes it an incredibly powerful tool for outbound calling, particularly for agencies with multiple team members, sales employees, or remote workers. 

It is one of the very few CRM's with a predictive dialer or 3-way calling solution making it a fantastic choice for even medium to large-sized agencies with multiple team members. 

The built-in call coaching feature is an excellent tool to train all the team members of your agency easily right within the tool.

It can also come in very handy for agencies working with multiple virtual assistants as onboarding becomes way more streamlined and efficient. 

As a well-known CRM, it natively integrates with many of the sales engagement, video calling, customer support, and messaging tools in the market.

Try Close CRM Free for 14 Days

This saves you from the hassle of using a third-party integration tool like Zapier and might be a huge saving in cost as well based on the size of your agency. 

Bonsai

Bonsai is an excellent all-in-one Business Management software that can be used by agencies to manage all their clients and businesses.

Try Bonsai for Free

SuiteDash

SuiteDash is an agency CRM that specializes in client portals wherein you can manage multiple clients each with a unique client login. 

Starting at just $19 and even the highest plan costing only $99 for unlimited client portals and team members, it is a very affordable tool for all types of agencies. 

Try SuiteDash free for 14 days

You get complete CRM, calendar booking & appointment management, secure file exchange with clients, custom onboarding of clients, project management, time tracking, invoicing, contracts & e-signature, email marketing, team chat, custom forms, and a lot more. 

LeadCarrot

Lead Carrot is another agency-specific lead generation and CRM tool. 

One of the best parts about Lead Carrot is that apart from the CRM features, you get a built-in database of B2B leads that you can use to outreach and get clients. This saves a lot of money as there is no need to spend on cold leads.

It is also more affordable than HighLevel as the plans start at just $47 per month. You get more than 300 weekly searches for the leads even in the base plan.

You can connect with Twilio for two-way SMS and with an SMTP for emails to build multi-channel outreach sequences.

InfluencerSoft

Influencer Soft is another all-in-one tool for building websites, funnels, memberships & courses, etc.

It also has visual funnel mapping, email marketing, and affiliate management included within the tool, so there is no need to connect an external SMTP. 

You can connect an unlimited number of domains and even have up to 25 admin users. 

The only features missing would be voice calls and SMS marketing features of HighLevel and if you do not need these 2 features, InfluencerSoft is a very good option. 

Complete CRM (For advanced agencies)

Complete CRM is a full-fledged white-labeled CRM system that includes every feature you could imagine under a completely licensed structure. It is for advanced agencies that would want a CRM hand-coded and built for them. 

Some of the features included in Complete CRM are, 

• Website & landing page builder,
• Email marketing with tracking and analytics,
• Voice calls & SMS marketing,
• Affiliate management system,
• Project management,
• Booking management system,
• Marketing automation,
• Event management,
• Learning management & membership system, 
• Customer journey mapping,
• Ticketing system,
• Collaborative knowledgebase and wiki, 
• Live chat,
• Document signature, 
• Social media management,
• Form & survey builder,
• E-commerce,
• Campaign split testing, 
• Predictive analytics,
• Workflow management.

The list goes on & on.

It literally has almost any feature you would want from a CRM and hence you can offer a complete management service for your clients from marketing, and sales to operations. 

The earning potential is quite huge. 

Get a free demo of Complete CRM - Use the promo code "buildbusiness" and get 5% discount

Conclusion

So, is it good?

It is a reasonably good tool for agencies that serve local businesses. It is easy to use and has a lot of functions and possibilities for time-saving automation capabilities.

Try HighLevel Free for 14 days

Yes, there is room for improvements to be made with the UI & stability, with more robust options available for agencies that have been around for a much longer time.

General FAQ

What is GoHighLevel?

GoHighLevel is a CRM and marketing automation platform designed exclusively for marketing agencies.

How much does GoHighLevel costs?

The agency starter account for one client costs $97 per month and the agency unlimited plan costs $297 per month for unlimited number clients and a white-labeled desktop app.

Are emails, SMS and voice call charges included in the price?

No, you have to connect a Twilio account for SMS & voice calls and an SMTP service like MailGun, SendGrid, Sendinblue, Gmail, etc. for sending emails.

Can businesses directly use GoHighLevel?

No, you have to be an agency to purchase and use GoHighLevel.

Is it possible to white label the mobile app as well?

Yes, you can white-label both the mobile app and also set up a custom zap in Zapier for your agency for an additional cost of $497 per month.

What are the available support channels?

Support is via live chat and the official Facebook group.

Is there a limit on the number of funnels?

No, you can build an unlimited number of funnels for your clients.

What are the tools GoHighLevel can replace?

Using GoHighLevel, you can replace your email marketing platform, forms and survey builder, text message and voice mail marketing platform, funnel builder, call tracking tool, booking and appointment tool, website builder, etc.