Springbot opens a customer data co-op for retail SMBs

Springbot, a marketing automation platform for online stores, is trying to give small and medium-sized retailers access to the kind of data co-op their larger brethren enjoy.

Today, the Atlanta-based firm is launching its Exchange, which it describes as the “first data cooperative for eCommerce SMBs.”

The Springbot platform offers email, social media and other marketing tools to about a thousand retailers, mostly in the US, that utilize the BigCommerce, Shopify or Magento e-commerce environments.

With the new Exchange, a participating retailer can upload an anonymized list of its best customers — with email addresses and such attributes as purchase history or demographics — and the Springbot Exchange will lookalike-match the attributes against the attributes of other customers in the co-op.

A shoe store, for instance, might be looking for more customers to buy hiking boots. It uploads its list of hiking boot-purchasing customers, with anonymous IDs instead of their names and its store name removed, so that other retailers can’t target its customers.

The uploaded customers become part of the overall data pool, and Springbot’s software finds similar profiles of customers based on, for instance, a previous history of buying hiking boots or outdoor gear, or a home ZIP code in a geographical area with a large number of hikers, or other factors.

The data pool comes from other participating retailers, and CEO Brooks Robinson told me that connections have been made with three large data co-ops, although he declined to name them.

Once the retailer has, say, a list of lookalike profiles of potential new customers, Springbot is set up to conduct a drip email campaign of three emails, written by the retailer. After three emails, responding prospects are moved into the retailer’s regular marketing effort.

Robinson said that SMBs have often been shut out of such data cooperatives frequently utilized by large retailers because of the complexity and cost.

About The Author

Barry Levine

Barry Levine covers marketing technology for Third Door Media. Previously, he covered this space as a Senior Writer for VentureBeat, and he has written about these and other tech subjects for such publications as CMSWire and NewsFactor. He founded and led the web site/unit at PBS station Thirteen/WNET; worked as an online Senior Producer/writer for Viacom; created a successful interactive game, PLAY IT BY EAR: The First CD Game; founded and led an independent film showcase, CENTER SCREEN, based at Harvard and M.I.T.; and served over five years as a consultant to the M.I.T. Media Lab. You can find him at LinkedIn, and on Twitter at xBarryLevine.