Adobe Marketo Engage (acquired by Adobe in 2018) is a marketing automation platform whose basic features include email marketing, drip nurturing, landing pages, and lead scoring, but other editions offer additional advanced features. Typical customers are B2B firms with complex sales cycles.
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Springbot
Score 6.0 out of 10
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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…
$199
for up to 5,000 subscribers (includes email marketing, social hub, reporting and dashboards, signup forms, automations, account management, support and onboarding. See website for additional package options.
Pricing
Adobe Marketo Engage
Springbot
Editions & Modules
Growth
Pricing based on database size.
per month
Select
Pricing based on database size.
per month
Prime
Pricing based on database size.
per month
Ultimate
Pricing based on database size.
per month
Platform Base Package
$199/month
for up to 5,000 subscribers (includes email marketing, social hub, reporting and dashboards, signup forms, automations, account management, support and onboarding. See website for additional package options.
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Adobe Marketo Engage
Springbot
Free Trial
Yes
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Yes
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
Optional
No setup fee
Additional Details
—
See website for pricing calculator for additional pricing options.
Adobe Marketo Engage is an excellent tool for hosting registration forms and sending out tokenized emails based on a particular person's information within your database. For example, if someone attends an event or webinar and indicates that they'd like to learn more about your product, then Adobe Marketo Engage can easily trigger a specific email template to that person that will be personalized with tokens about them. The pixel tracking that can be applied to any web page is also very helpful. If you want to focus on a more 1:1 type of follow up with a Lead, then the automated emails are not going to be as useful.
It keeps all of our very important lead data in one place. It's very flexible, allows us to do a lot of different things around list building and segmentation. It deploys our email campaigns for us and it's also where our landing pages are built. So it does a lot of the things that we need to do from a data and deployment perspective.
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.
Adobe Marketo Engage crashes a lot or freezes. We don't have many users and less than 300k contacts so there's no reason it should ever crash.
It's really expensive! It would be nice to pick which features we want a la cart versus being stuck paying more for a feature and not using the others in the package.
Because of our integration with Dynamics, we had to use a 3rd party tool called Scribe for field matching. No one at Adobe will help us now that we have a 3rd party tool
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.
In some aspects, the tool can feel quite clunky in parts. But with the rich feature set it has, it's understandable. There is a lot of room for improvement for the user interface. The system itself doesn't have a slick or modern feel, so the usability could feel nicer to use with these areas considered.
Marketo provides different way and abilities to connect. If you are having product support or unexplained errors you can get someone on Marketo support 24 hours a day. One of Marketo's greatest assets in my opinion however would be the community. Often times our company is just looking for case success stories from someone else. In the community you can search for problems you are currently facing and see others having the same issue and solutions for those issues. If not, you can pose a question to the whole community and champions of the product and others can chime in to provide suggestions to fix your needs. The community is truly a 24/7 place to get your answers quickly.
There are times when it is slightly slow for us, where we sit on a screen waiting for it to load. This could be our internet since we have had the same issue occasionally with other systems, but it is enough to make you crazy.
On multiple occasions we've had Marketo support (technical and license based) issues. Technical issues were minor and resolved within a day. License based issues (even things encouraged by Marketo for partners, like provisioning another license) took WEEKS. They actually took so long to respond that the client we were working with withdrew from the contract because they were no longer convinced Marketo was capable of supporting their business. As an agency trying to sell the software, you can only explain away so much before they just made us look silly.
We have raved about Springbot's support because they always get back with us so quickly. Our rep, Jared has been phenomenal in helping us, always being available to chat with us and explaining some of the metrics with us so we can better understand. He completely handles our ads, checks on them, and lets us know when to update and why.
Our account rep stopped out in Lincoln, NE to ensure we were properly set up and running. This was very much appreciated. I was very, very new at this point, so I can't comment very much on the extent of what was taught because I was still brand new to the company and the system
I had never used Marketo prior to taking this job so online training was my starting point. I was able to follow along, it was interesting and quickly and efficiently taught me what I needed to know without a lot of fluff. It was far from boring and really helped me get my hands dirty with Marketo.
1. Have a content marketing plan to run in parallel with the marketing automation installation--you'll need a lot of content to make full use of Marketo's capabilities. 2. Work with sales (and ISRs) to define and document a workflow--build your Marketo installation around how you do business--not figure out how to apply your business to the tools 3. Spend time of data cleaning--both an initial project as well as a strategy for ongoing data management. We found some change manaement issues (no more appending ZZZ to the first name to identify contacts who have left the company, for example, or prohibiting the entry of "info@company.com" email addresses). 4. Find some champions in the sales and ISR teams. You'll have both fans and detractors--work with the fans to build some success stories
Adobe Marketo Engage is one of the best email sending platforms I have worked with, because there is so much you can do on a lead scoring area and also then connect this to other platforms such as Salesforce. It allows for seamless reporting and working alongside sales colleagues. We chose Adobe Marketo Engage because it allows for more sophisticated audience segmentation and management of ongoing large scale nurture flows across a number of complex criteria.
We look at scaleability in a few different ways. First, the speed while using Marketo has remained relatively the same as our database has grown. Though I would say Marketo is slow at times, it has not gotten slower over the last few years. If anything, it has improved, and they are working to improve it. Second, the amount of programs we have developed in Marketo has exponentially grown as well. Marketo has allowed us to drastically increase our output without having to drastically increase our headcount.
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.
