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Springbot

Score6 out of 10

6 Reviews and Ratings

What is Springbot?

Springbot aims to bring all the marketing capabilities large retailers have to small businesses at a fraction of the cost. Through Springbot, online stores will be able to leverage automated marketing on channels such as email, SMS, social and online ads. Business owners and marketers who find themselves wearing many hats can still send the right message at the right time with confidence.


With an all-in-one marketing automation platform designed with ease of use in mind, business owners and marketers are able to bring new shoppers to their sites, turn one-time buyers into repeat customers and brand advocates and measure the success of their marketing efforts - all while saving time and energy to focus on other aspects of their businesses.


Media

Email Editor - Springbot's drag-and-drop email editor makes it effortless to design eye-catching, branded emails that look great on any device!
Automations Editor - Springbot's automations editor let's you easily create automations for common use cases like abandoned cart, and it gives you the ability to build highly customized automations to fit your store's needs.
SMS Marketing - Springbot makes SMS marketing simple with text-to-join campaigns that allow you to use custom keywords related to your brand. Combine SMS with the power of automation flows to enhance your multichannel marketing strategy.
Social Hub - Springbot's Social Hub helps you streamline your content and marketing efforts, so you can do it all in one place — post, schedule, track metrics and more!
Online Ads - Increase your site traffic and bring shoppers back to your store's site with prospecting and retargeting ads.
Reporting and Dashboards - Make data-driven decisions by tracking important metrics for your site traffic, product categories and marketing efforts. Get more insights about your ideal customer profile.

1 / 6

Top Performing Features

  • Lead scoring and grading

    Users can set up the software to automatically rate leads based on calculations such as buying signals, such as form submissions, or page views, and automatically qualify leads based on demographic factors.

    Category average: 8.4

  • Automated sales alerts and tasks

    The software helps ensure that a sales person is notified of lead activity and can act on the information in a timely fashion.

    Category average: 7.7

  • Landing pages

    Users can create web pages that are customized to a particular email or campaign. Landing pages often include web forms which can capture visitor information and integrate it back into the MA software.

    Category average: 7.5

Areas for Improvement

  • Social profile integration

    The software incorporates social profile data and social share histories to enhance segmentation and scoring of contacts.

    Category average: 8.2

  • Ability to test dynamic content

    Users can test dynamic content prior to launching a campaign.

    Category average: 6.8

  • Social sharing and campaigns

    Users can incorporate social share buttons into campaigns to allow recipients to easily share content. Users can track shares as well.

    Category average: 8.1

Satisfied Springbot User

Pros

  • Customer Segmentation - we know who we are marketing to.
  • Email Buildout Feature - it's easy to learn and use.
  • Support - Our support manager, Jared, has always been very willing and ready to answer any questions we have about the platform and offer suggestions to us for how we could be better.

Cons

  • Springbot ads - there isn't a preview to show what the current ads look like.
  • The backend of Springbot changes almost once a month and we're not always sure where to find the information we're looking for.
  • We'd love to see triggers for SMS messaging that are similar to the email triggers.

Return on Investment

  • We've received a 26x ROI by using Springbot.

Other Software Used

Shopify, monday.com

Usability

Save your money and use any other company

Pros

  • We were not able to implement anything.
  • We lengthy discussions with the sales person and had high hopes for this to work.
  • The plan was to create a better user experience while on our website. NOT to push sales but to create more accurate information for the user. Be more interactive.

Cons

  • After our purchase, I let spring or know that I was currently too busy to implement the system and to put things on hold. They ignored this request and kept charging us a monthly fee without using any of their systems. I have only logged in once. Nothing has been set up. They can see that from their side.
  • After multiple emails back and forth their out was in the user agreement. I never asked for my money back only credit so I can regroup and when I have time get on to implant the systems. They tell me they don't do that.
  • They don't care about any of the customer's needs. They only care about charging you that monthly fee. Terrible bus plan. With enough bad feedback, they will suffer from such a narrow plan.
  • I wish we had actual information about the cons using the system. Unfortunately I was not given the opportunity to do unless I wanted to keep paying while not using the system.

Return on Investment

  • Money spent with zero return. We got nothing from this investment.

Other Software Used

Mailchimp

Usability

Excellent Platform and Partner For Growing Commerce Business

Pros

  • One of the things that impressed me the most early on was their dedication to email deliverability and growing my "engaged" list of customers. Through this, they taught me the value of quality subscribers vs. quantity of subscribers, while still sharing new ways to grow my email list in a healthy and sustainable manner. For so long, my main focus was always having the biggest email list - and while that's good to have a lot of subscribers, the most important thing is to make sure they are ENGAGED with your brand. So together we've come up with fun ways to do that, and we've seen that reflected in our list growth and open rate.
  • One of the other things I was looking to do when I partnered with Springbot was to increase my site traffic. The original sales rep had a few recommendations on how we could do this, and our team was most excited about their Facebook Services offering. We were paired with a Facebook expert who did a discovery call with us, and then presented a strategic plan for us to follow for the first 90 days, until we could fully optimize. Their Facebook team narrowed down my target audience and has helped strategically grow my site traffic.
  • Finally, and maybe the part that I value the most, is the partnership that I've developed with Springbot. Out of the gate, there is absolutely work to do to get things set up and they don't sugar coat that. While much of the onboarding was smooth - we had a few obstacles to work through, and I'm thankful my Success Manager kept me up to date as we resolved anything that came up, and was proactive with her outreach and recommendations to get the most out of the platform. I find myself learning something new each time I chat with her, whether it be optimizations to my automations, new marketing ideas, or ways to increase engagement as I go into the holidays.
  • After being with them for a year, I feel this is more than a vendor + customer relationship, and think of it as a strategic and valuable partnership.

Cons

  • I'd love for Springbot to continue to expand on their email offering - the platform and automations are excellent, and I'd like additional conditionals as I build out my flows.

Return on Investment

  • Since I switched from Mailchimp, my email list has doubled, my open rates have improved and monthly sales have steadily increased.

Alternatives Considered

Mailchimp, Constant Contact and Klaviyo

Other Software Used

Shopify, AdRoll

Usability

Never work with Springbot.

Pros

  • They make promises
  • They could design nice things

Cons

  • They don't keep any of their promises
  • They don't listen

Return on Investment

  • We were not able to send a single email through them in 3 months.
  • Wasted numerous hours of dealing with onboarding.

Alternatives Considered

Mailchimp and SendinBlue

Springbot Might be Good for Small Teams/Websites; Larger teams need something more robust

Pros

  • The demographic data was great. I could see how many males vs. females, ages, income, married, with or without children. It gave me a good idea of who my customers were.
  • Using their tracking URLs in all of our campaigns allowed us to get a better idea of what exactly was driving revenue.
  • Not only could I see top performing products, which I can do within Magento, I could also see top selling categories and colors.
  • I can pull a Coupon Usage report our of Magento, but Springbot gave me additional info like AOV and ROI on those codes.
  • Springbot also gave me a lot of info about our abandoned carts. It shows us which products are most abandoned along with views, conversion rates, etc.
  • Springbot gave us an Instagram Shop page that allowed us to curate social shares and then tie them to products on our site.

Cons

  • Daily reports sometimes didn't arrive in my inbox. I'd have to contact my rep and wait several days before the issue was fixed. Sometimes the data on the daily report was incorrect. I would check revenue against the sales report in Magento and Google Analytics and the numbers didn't match up. It made it impossible for me to trust the data I was being given.
  • The Springbot shortened URLs were not adopted by our social engagement specialist because she felt they looked like spam links and our fans weren't clicking on them.
  • My social engagement specialist also didn't like the social posting tool. She felt it was more difficult to schedule her posts and decided to use Hootsuite instead. This took out an entire channel that we should have been able to track in Springbot.
  • All of the daily marketing suggestions pertained to SEO. Most of the time suggesting we increase the word count on our product descriptions. I would have loved to be able to turn off the SEO suggestions and find more actionable items than rewriting 900+ product descriptions which we had paid an SEO company thousands of dollars to write.
  • Our abandoned cart reporting was working at first and then stopped. When I asked why they said it was interference from another platform we were using on our site. But that platform was being used when the abandoned cart report was working, so that didn't make sense to me.
  • Springbot only integrated with MailChimp. At the time we were using Bronto for our ESP. My rep kept suggesting sending Welcome emails and Abandoned cart emails through Springbot. However, that would have screwed up my data in Bronto. Also, I didn't feel like I could customize the triggered emails enough to look like the emails going out in Bronto without having to bring a coder in.
  • We weren't able to use the trackable links in Google Adwords, which is where most of our revenue comes from. The trackable link caused a problem with Google Adwords' own tracking URLs.

Return on Investment

  • Springbot gave us a better idea of who our customer was. We just launched in January 2015 having been B2B previously. So we weren't really sure who we were marketing to.
  • I only paid $200/month for the service so I didn't waste a ton of money trying it out. They have a 30 day cancellation policy so I wasn't stuck in a year long contract.
  • It was a let down because I had such high hopes of everything it would allow me to do and see with one platform. Give them a couple more years and I think they will work out the kinks.

Other Software Used

Velaro Live Chat, Bronto Marketing Platform, Endeca, Magento, Hootsuite Pro, Offerpop

Usability