Springbot

We are so happy with Springbot and have just added a 2nd store! The help we get from Kristen and Ben make my life sooooo much easier! If your looking for email campaigns, social media and shopping cart conversions that make sense please check them out!

We started using Springbot about 6 months ago, and have been very happy with the results. First off, their Customer Service is fantastic, they are very responsive and I feel like we have a true partnership. We work directly with Andrew Foah and he is extremely attentive to our business. We have grown our email list significantly through their services, and their analytics are outstanding. The Springbot platform lets us do all the things that a big e-commerce business does, but at a fraction of the cost, and with a lot of helpful support along the way.

Every app obviously has its pros and cons. I'd say the one "con" to this app is that it requires you to invest time into the program to see really good results. However, it is one of those things where the more work you put into it the more you get out of it... & you TRULY can get a lot out of it! I do my best to take advantage of all its features so that I am getting the best bang for my buck.

Yes, you will be building your own marketing emails. For $300 (starter package) I think its appropriately priced for all of the features it offers. It's an all in one app & just makes your social marketing more consistent and creates brand recognition. I will say if you want to just pay $$ to have someone do all the work for you then you need to hire a marketing team, not add an app.

Also, The people at Springbot are very helpful & kind and I thoroughly enjoy working with them. Having an account manager always having your back and checking your stats and assisting you in improving is honestly something I never knew I would need!

Springbot offers tons of great marketing tools for businesses-I especially love their selection of triggered e-mails (it integrates nicely with Shopify as well). Springbot's customer service gets an A+. They are kind, helpful and responsive to all of my questions. Would definitely recommend.

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

If you're looking to offload your email marketing and Facebook advertising for your store, Springbot is a great solution for only a few hundred dollars a month. Great customer service and marketing consulting as well!

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) .

So we've been using Springbot for about 3 months now. I'm super happy with them and the data they collect. Their service has so many features and benefits. I won't go into the details of what they offer, you can read up on that elsewhere. There are a few things that I think they can improve upon. They aren't deal breakers, and I've found work arounds for them:

• They don't have an app so you need to post from a desktop.
• Facebook Social hub only allows 1 image at a time per post.
• Doesn't autofill Hashtags like IG
• Will not simultaneously post on IG and Facebook.
• Image size must be 3mb or less which ads time on my end because I have to resize images.
• Some of the data can be funky at times such as abandoned cart info.

What you should know is that their customer service is on point. I completed the on-boarding process with Ben. He was patient and helped me learn the interface quickly. We had weekly calls where he answered all my questions, and helped me get everything set up. After my first month I was assigned to Andrew. He's been super helpful giving me marketing ideas and helping me maximize my ROI using their service. I get responses to my emails in a timely fashion. I've been really happy with his suggestions, and he always makes himself available when I have a question or want to set up a meeting to discuss future actions. My Facebook acct. manager is Nichole. She's also been super helpful, answering my emails after hours, giving me suggestions and really helping me maximize my sponsored facebook posts. This was something that I was doing on my own before Springbot, and she's really helped bring it to the next lever. She sends me weekly reports allowing me to see what works and what doesn't.

The best way I can describe Springbot is: It's like having my own mini-marketing team helping me reach my customer base and make the most of my time. As a small business owner, It can be hard to find the time to fine tune this part of the business, but as we all know its very important to do so. The team at Springbot helps me do just that!

Springbot has been such a great tool for our business! The amount of data we are able to collect and use is outstanding (not to mention other features like automatic social posting, email creation, trackable links, adrolls, and so much more)! We have worked closely with Andrew Foah who goes above and beyond as our point of contact to Springbot. He is quick to respond (even though we are on the other side of the country), is extremely helpful and makes sure to complete all things that are asked of him in an extremely timely manner. This is a great tool if you are looking to start your data-driven ecommerce marketing journey!

I have been using Springbot for the last 30 days or so and I can really say I really like it. I do think that some elements of the platform were oversold to us but I will get into that later.

Pros:

The email segmentation and targeting is awesome. The whole email marketing platform is top notch. Very easy to use and has already provided us with great results. Much better than Mailchimp! The Ads platform is also very nice. The Adroll integration is amazing and again has already provided us with a big ROI. I do feel the creation and implementation of the ads can be a little clunky. It isn't as intuitive as the email creation stuff but the results make up for it.

Cons:

The social hub is virtually worthless in my opinion. I don't use it at all. You're very limited in what you can do inside of it in terms of functionality. The big thing is the ability to schedule post, which you can do in FB business manager anyways. You can also schedule tweets but our business doesn't use Twitter. No Pinterest integration or ability to post or manage your Instagram account. I guess the shoppable Instagram is cool but like I said you can't manage any other things from Instagram.

Conclusion:

Overall I love the platform. The social limitations aside everything else is really great and I do think it is worth the money. The Springbot team has been incredibly helpful, our sales person Preston was really great in addressing our initial concerns and getting us committed. The on-boarding specialist Olivia was really helpful in getting us setup and getting the ball rolling. Our Account Manager Ashley has been great so far, we haven't had a ton of time to work with her yet but I'm sure if she's anything like the other people on the Springbot team she'll be a great resource.

Overall I would recommend it if you can afford the expense and can spend the time learning the platform.