February 02, 2016
Review: "Springbot Might be Good for Small Teams/Websites; Larger teams need something more robust"
I think Springbot is a great idea in theory. It gave me a lot of information about my demographic, deeper insight into the best-selling products and categories, and daily marketing suggestions based on my website performance. We liked that we could schedule social posts with the platform. I really liked the daily report on sales, abandoned carts, average order value (AOV) and conversion rate. I can create segments based on categories that customers ordered in. I wasn't just limited to opt-in email addresses either. Springbot could segment all the email addresses stored within Magento. I like that it integrated with Adroll and Mailchimp. I was so excited to use this platform. I felt like I could accomplish a lot with this one platform and it would make my job easier.
- 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.
- 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.