Springbot

Hydroviv signed up for Springbot in October 2018 with the goal of simplifying our company’s marketing efforts. We signed up for all offerings (Email, Audience Expander, Onsite Abandonment, Ad management) so our monthly cost was $1300 plus ad spend. We left Springbot on Feb 18, 2019, so this review is for our four-month experience.

Facebook Ad Management: Per terms of agreement, Springbot was to build two Facebook campaigns per month. Simply put, this did not happen. In entirety, two campaigns were built over the 4 month period, and one campaign was never actually turned on. The campaign that was turned on was never touched after it was set up. Long story short, Springbot’s Facebook ad campaigns generated zero revenue on $1500 ad spend, and we were charged $800 for ad management over the duration of our relationship.

Audience Expander, Onsite Abandonment Prospecting Tools: These tools have their own dashboards that display attributed revenue, so you can see ROI at a glance for prospecting done on their platform (a major selling point). The problem was, the dashboard was showing a revenue that didn’t align with data from our other analytics tools. When I asked my account manager for a list of customers/orders that served as the basis for the number, I found that a bug was causing Springbot to mistakenly take credit for sales that occurred months before I signed up for the platform, which artificially inflated the revenue that Springbot attributed to its platform. Once Springbot’s bug (that my team discovered) was fixed, there were zero dollars of attributed revenue from that point forward for any of the prospecting services.

AdRoll Ad Management: When Springbot manages your Adroll accounts, you get locked out of the account, so the only data you can see is what they show you in the dashboard (which was wrong in the case of Audience Expander/Onsite Abandonment). Using the data from their dashboard, there was was about $1100 in click through revenue, on about $8000 in authorized Ad spend, but we have no way of verifying any of the numbers.

Experience With Company: Because Springbot didn’t uphold their end of contract (Facebook Ad Campaign building), and because overall performance was poor, I submitted a written request to put in our 30 day cancellation request on December 28, 2018. I was informed that despite the fact that Springbot didn’t uphold their end of the contract the service wouldn’t actually be terminated until Feb 18, because the 30 day termination notice is really a 30 day plus billing cycle notice. While annoying, it wasn’t worth the money to make a big deal out of it and pursue breach of contract as a justification to terminate immediately. However, I was very surprised to see that Springbot processed another charge for $2996 on January 19 to purchase ads for the remainder of the cycle. It is absolutely inconceivable to me that an ad management service would continue to pull ad spend from a client more than 20 days after the client submitted a 30 day termination notice because they weren’t actually building campaigns or managing ads.

In summary, I feel fortunate that Hydroviv was in a financial position to eat the $13,000 cost of trying Springbot ($5200 for 4 months of the platform & management fees plus over $8k in additional ad spend), while continuing to keep our other email/analytics systems in place. I would encourage early stage companies who sign up for Springbot to have a person from their team actively managing and monitoring all aspects of onboarding, campaign management, campaign performance, and double-checking dashboard metrics against other analytics for attribution for at least the first 6 months. In our experience, the fundamental problems were discovered only because our team proactively dug and cross-referenced the data from Springbot’s dashboard with our other reporting platforms.

Eric Roy, Ph.D.
Founder, CEO

For what you will pay for their services you're left with a lot of work you have to do yourself. Save the money and do it yourself with other apps. For the $600 a month (base package) its not a smooth process to create an ad. Instagram promotion will get you a far better return in your investment for a tenth of the price, or less. This app also has a HUGE learning curve. So expect to invest a lot of your time learning their system. For the most part the information they provide is information you get from Shopify for free. I did a giveaway where all you had to do was sign up to our newsletter on their email service. I wasn't able to find the winner's email address. So I signed up using my email and wasn't able to find it either. Not a user friendly system. I was able to get better sales numbers and didn't cost me $600 to achieve them. I wanted something more automated where I can make a couple adjustments and have ads running in a couple days. NOT the case. Can be the case if you spend a large amount of your time learning the system, adjusting ads, (also the errors I asked to be fixed on my ads were never done). Lastly you will be charged for an extra month if you don't cancel over 30 days before they charge you. Its like a little $600 thank you charge for not liking there services, they will not waive that charge. They will remind you however that you agreed months earlier to pay that ( as per their policy) .

Fabulous Customer Service. The entire team has truly jumped in with both feet to help us and made the learning period of using Springbot actually fun and easy. Kristen, Jared, Matt and Lang have been phenomenal through the whole process. I never have to worry about what I will do if I have an issue or problem. Someone is always there to respond or answer questions in a timely manner. All of the team has been very personable and kind. Truly a class act company with outstanding staff.

We really tried hard to make SprinBot work for us but we just couldn't. It was full of glitches and inaccurate data. Customer support on their end was awful and overall a complete waste of time and money for us.

This is a great crm manager great team always willing to help and take as much responsibilty for your marketing as they can

We were very disappointed in springbot and how they conduct business. When they gained access and we signed them up they contacted a lot of our competitors which they would of found from reports they did for us. They contacted them using us as leverage using a generic email that had mistakes throughout. This not only showed us that we could not trust them but that they are obviously not thorough in how they conduct business. It was very disappointing and time wasting experience. We did contact them and they did respond however we were not happy with their response/excuse.

Couldn't agree more with Tuner Tools below, if you have an app like Omnisend downloaded and are comfortable creating your own emails and "abandoned cart" emails, etc then SpringBot offers you no advantage.

Communication was poor and delivery deadlines they promised were not met. Delivered emails was poor quality and lacked marketing expertise.

They will ask you for your credit card info outside of Shopify and then it will be impossible to cancel. Promised me 4-7x ROI, didn't even break even. Regardless, they keep trying to charge me. I had to contact AdRoll directly to get the ads to stop running because they refused to pause the ads. It doesn't take 30 days to pause an ad campaign, it takes about 3 minutes. Unless, of course, you never deliver and all your clients cancel so you have to scam people out of any extra dollars you can get.

My experience with this company has been horrible. It all started with a cold call. They mask their Atlanta phone number as a local number to get customers to pick up the call. I heard the sales girl Christina out and since we are in the middle of launching a new product line I asked how they could help with that. She explained all of these different ways they could target this new market I am seeking. Eventually the cost deterred me, they offered me a deal (still crazy expensive) and I figured okay, I'll try it one month. It is absolutely useless. This offers NOTHING you cannot do on your own with Adroll + Mailchimp. All of the extras they said they could do to help target a new market cost MORE MONEY! They spread the training across 6 weeks (yes, 6 WEEKS) of 30 minute phone calls. The technology behind Springbot is glitchy and full of inaccurate information. Your Shopify reports tell you more than this does. I highly highly discourage a partnership with this company. Upon cancellation they said I would be charged for another 30 days. This is such a joke, it is just a money making scheme that promises the moon and does not deliver.

EDIT: 07/12/17

We were contacted continually over the course of three-four months by one of their sales representatives. They were pretty good at selling the product, making all kinds of promises. Eventually we decided to give it a go. $499 a month... Once we signed up we scheduled an on-boarding call which didn't go well. I was told that the first call was 30 minutes and couldn't run over. We had lots of questions as we wanted to get the best out of springbot immediately. The integration was set over SIX weeks of single 30 minute phone calls. The email tool was terrible, use Mail Chimp!!! The analytical data was inconsistent and didn't match what we knew from other tools. They say 'no contract' but when you cancel they try to take an extra months payment. In comparison we use Mailchimp Yotpo and Zenstores. All three of which have been fantastic, good customer service and worth the investment. These guys are a bunch of misleading condescending rip-off-merchants. AVOID AT ALL COSTS. 0/5 stars.

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Springbot reached out. It turns out they did indeed charge us for a second month, after confirming that they wouldn't via email. Having communicated with them a little further they refunded both payments. So as a business we aren't left with close to $1000 down the drain. The whole experience wasn't great. But the most recent contact from Emily was much better. She was really considerate and objective. In her own words she gave us a amicable exit, which was much easier than the emergency exit we used initially. The first part of the review is reflective of the experience. Although I feel Emily's customer service efforts have been very good. So I have adjusted the review to 2/5 stars. I wish springbot all the best in the future, and hope other customers receive better service than I did. I think Emily should teach some of the other members of the team about customer service.