GoHighLevel workflows are used to build fully automated processes for administrative tasks, communication, marketing, pipeline and calendar management, and much more.
The workflow screen maps out the automated process in a visual way so you can see how it progresses from start to finish.
Key Takeaways:
- Create unlimited workflows regardless of your chosen plan
- GoHighLevel includes 17 prebuilt workflow “recipes” for common automation processes
- Workflows consist of triggers, actions, wait steps, and if/else conditions
What Are GoHighLevel Workflows?
GoHighLevel workflows are used to create automation sequences for a wide number of processes, including administration, marketing, customer relationship management, and communication tasks
Rather than having to manually carry out tasks, which can be time-consuming and take up a lot of resources, automation takes care of these jobs on your behalf.
GoHighLevel’s automation capabilities are advanced and can get very complex if you are automating entire marketing campaigns.
The workflow screen is a way of mapping everything out in a visual manner, so you can see each step of the automation process and how it progresses.
What Can You Use GoHighLevel Workflows for?
Lead Capture and Nurturing
If you have landing pages, funnels, and websites with data capture forms, you can create workflows that automatically add the leads as contacts and add them to marketing campaigns and the relevant pipelines.
With smart pipeline management, your leads will move through the customer journey from start to finish on autopilot.
Customer Relationship Management
All steps of customer relationship management can be handled with a GoHighLevel workflow.
From managing smart contact lists and data to communication via email, SMS, and more.
Other tasks that can be automated include setting an individual’s communication preferences, sending review requests and payment requests, and granting or revoking offers and access to membership sites.
Communication
GoHighLevel’s communication capabilities are vast.
By using workflows, you can create multi-channel marketing campaigns.
Even better, the system uses AI to understand the difference between positive and negative responses, so it will follow the appropriate workflow path according to the type of response it receives.
This reduces frustration and annoyance as it prevents contacts from getting bombarded with unwanted marketing material.
Additionally, you can use GoHighLevel’s powerful AI to create a fully automated booking bot.
It’ll send out SMS messages to nurture the conversation through to making and confirming a booking.
Appointment Booking
Speaking of booking appointments, you can also create workflows for automatic calendar management.
Set your availability so the system knows which slots to display on the calendar widget, then let customers book their appointments without you having to intervene. You can also facilitate upfront payments to prevent no-show occurrences.
Then, create a workflow with a series of automated reminders so that the contact doesn’t forget about their upcoming appointment.
Campaign Management
All aspects of a marketing campaign are handled using the GoHighLevel workflow feature.
Create email drip campaigns that send out emails at timed intervals.
Determine what happens during each step of your funnel and create a workflow to accommodate it.
For example, if a contact submits an online form, you can have a workflow that initiates an SMS campaign for booking an appointment, or you can subscribe them to an email newsletter.
It sounds cliché, but the possibilities here are endless.
Compared with other platforms where automation is limited to a handful of tasks, GoHighLevel has raised the bar with its workflow capabilities.
How Do GoHighLevel Workflows Work?
Triggers
You need a trigger to kick off a workflow. These are the events that take place for the automation process to begin.
Triggers are divided into categories:
- Contacts
- Events
- Appointments
- Opportunities
- Affiliates
- Memberships
- Payments
- Shopify
- IVR
- Communities
There are over 50 triggers to pick from, some examples include:
- Submitting a form
- Customer booked appointment
- Pipeline stage changed
- Course lesson completed
- Payment received
Actions
Actions follow the triggers and determine what happens next after the trigger has been activated.
There are over 100 actions to pick from.
For example, if you have selected “Form Submitted” as your trigger, you may add “Send Email” as the action that follows it.
You can have as many actions as you like in a workflow, and it’s possible to have several actions occurring simultaneously if your workflow splits paths (see below).
The categories of actions are:
- Contact
- Communication
- Send data
- Internal tools
- Workflow AI
- Eliza
- Appointments
- Opportunity
- Payments
- Marketing
- Affiliate
- Membership
- IVR
- Communities
Wait Steps
Wait steps are a type of action that has great importance within a workflow.
If you didn’t add in wait steps, all the actions in the workflow would happen immediately in quick succession.
Wait steps slow everything down so that actions happen when you want them to.
For example, if you are setting up a workflow for an email campaign that consists of five emails, you don’t want them to all be sent immediately after each other.
Therefore, you might add a wait step of one week in between each one so they get sent over five weeks in total.
The different types of wait steps are:
- Time Delay: The next action doesn’t occur until a specific amount of time has passed.
- Event/Appointment Time: The next action doesn’t happen until before or after the appointment time.
- Overdue: The next action occurs on or after an invoice due date.
- Condition: The next action occurs once a specific condition has been satisfied.
- Contact Reply: The next action occurs when the contact has responded.
- Trigger Link Clicked: The next action occurs after a trigger link has been clicked.
- Email Event: The next action occurs once an email event has taken place (opened, clicked, unsubscribed, complaint, bounced).
If/Else Conditions
If/else conditions split the workflow into different branches depending on the previous action.
This is extremely useful if your workflow has a lot of variables because it allows for different outcomes.
It’s also clever!
Since the system can detect between negative and positive responses, this means it knows which path of the workflow to take just by the type of response it receives.
For example, you have an action that sends an SMS with a booking request to a contact. You can then set an if/else condition that splits the path depending on the response.
For example:
- The Response Is Positive: A booking link is sent via another SMS.
- The Response Is Negative: An SMS is sent thanking the contact for their time and an invite to unsubscribe.
- No Response Given: No further actions are taken.
GoHighLevel Workflow Recipes
Starting a workflow from scratch can be a tricky process, especially if you are new to using them.
Additionally, several common workflows tend to be used over and over again for similar tasks and campaigns.
To save you the effort of creating a workflow from scratch, GoHighLevel has provided 17 “recipes” which are prebuilt workflows for different purposes.
For example, there’s a workflow for appointment booking, an email drip sequence, webinar registration, and more.
To use a recipe, all you do is select the one you want and load it into the workflow screen.
All recipes are fully customizable.
How to Create a GoHighLevel Workflow (Step by Step)
Step 1: Log into GoHighLevel and select the relevant sub-account.
Click “Automation” and then click the blue “Create Workflow” button in the top right corner.
Step 2: Next, choose a GoHighLevel prebuilt recipe or start from scratch.
For this guide, we’re going to start from scratch.
Step 3: You will now be presented with an almost blank screen.
This is the workflow editor. Click along the top to give your workflow a name. This ensures it’s easily identifiable.
Step 4: To start the workflow, you must select a trigger.
This is the event that “triggers” the workflow to start.
Click where it says “Create New Workflow Trigger,” and a menu will open on the right-hand side.
If you know which trigger you are searching for, use the search bar at the top of the menu.
Otherwise, scroll down until you find what you need.
Step 5: Depending on which trigger you have chosen, you will be required to add some additional information.
In this example, we have chosen the “Customer Booked Appointment” trigger.
Here, it’s necessary to add a filter that tells the system the appointment is “In Calendar.” We have also had to specify which calendar this workflow refers to.
This means that when a customer books an appointment for the calendar specified in the trigger, the workflow will be activated.
When you have set the parameters for your chosen trigger, click on “Save Trigger.”
Step 6: Now we need to determine what happens after the trigger event. Click on the “+” icon to add an action.
Step 7: Similar to the trigger menu, an action menu will open up with a long list of the available actions.
Use the search bar or scroll to find the one you need.
In this example, we’re going to use the “Wait” action.
Step 8: Once you have picked an action, you will need to add the required information.
Our Wait trigger needs to understand what the wait is for and how long the wait will be.
We’ve selected “Time Delay” and a wait time of one day.
This means the subsequent action won’t take place until a day after the trigger event.
When you’re done adding the information for your chosen action, click “Save Action.”
Step 9: To add another action, click on the “+” sign underneath your previous action.
Step 10: Follow the same process to add your next action.
For this example, we have chosen the “SMS” action. So, one day after the trigger event, the contact will receive an SMS message.
You can choose to use an SMS template you have already created or write one in the workflow screen.
Here, we have included a reminder for the booking and added a link for a promotional offer.
Step 11: We’re now going to add another wait step, but this one is a bit different from before.
Essentially, we need to tell the system what to do if the contact clicks the promotional link contained in the SMS message.
Step 12: Instead of choosing “Time Delay” as we did in our previous wait step, we’re going to select “Trigger Link Clicked” and then select the trigger link we used in the SMS message.
Step 12: We’re now going to add an if/else action underneath the last wait step.
This is going to split the workflow path into two possible outcomes depending on whether or not the contact clicked the promotional offer link.
Step 13: We need to give the if/else condition a name so it’s clear on the workflow screen. We’ve called it “Promotional Link Clicked?”
Then, we set the condition by adding “Trigger Link Clicked” in the “Segments” section, selecting “Is” from the next dropdown, and selecting the relevant trigger link in the final dropdown.
Step 14: Our workflow now looks like this. The blue branch is followed if the contact clicks on the promotional link, and the red branch is followed if they don’t.
If the contact doesn’t click on the promotional link, we don’t want anything to happen.
Therefore, we don’t add any further actions to the workflow and it ends there.
However, if the link is clicked, we want something to happen so we need to add one final action after the “Yes” branch.
Step 15: We’ve chosen to add an action to send another SMS if the promotional link is clicked.
Once the SMS has been sent, this branch of the workflow will end.
This is one example of how a workflow could work. With so many customization options, there are endless ways to create them.
We recommend signing up for a 30-day free trial and having a go yourself.
Since you can create unlimited workflows, you can keep practicing until you are comfortable with how they work.
Frequently Asked Questions
How Do I Use GoHighLevel Workflows?
You use GoHighLevel workflows to create automated processes for administrative tasks, pipeline management, marketing campaigns, appointment booking, and more.
Are GoHighLevel Workflows Complicated?
GoHighLevel workflows have advanced capabilities and many options that allow millions of workflow combinations. Therefore, they feel complicated if you are new to them. To help you understand them, we recommend starting with the prebuilt “recipe” workflows.
How Many GoHighLevel Workflows Can I Create?
You can create unlimited numbers of GoHighLevel workflows, regardless of your chosen plan.
Can I Buy Prebuilt GoHighLevel Workflows?
Yes, you can buy prebuilt GoHighLevel workflows. Many freelancers and marketing agencies sell prebuilt sub-account templates called “snapshots,” and these will typically feature some workflows in relation to the type of snapshot you have purchased.
