We used Underground Ecom for 3 months…
We used Underground Ecom for 3 months (they were recommended to us by an ad agency we were talking to) and, just to provide an alternative view to the reviews here, didn't have a great experience. The sales process was very slick. As agencies go, UE are very expensive - we were paying almost £4k a month for email management - but we took the view that they were reassuringly expensive, and believed the spiel about them being able to increase our email revenue significantly. For background, we are an ecom brand, already using Klaviyo, with email flows set up which were netting about 15-20% of our revenue. Clearly, if you are paying £4k to someone to take on email management, you expect a fairly significant return. In addition, we expected UE to take us up the curve on email design, and to employ some of the (admittedly very good) design skills that they showed us during the sales pitch. Some observations:
1) The sales team all appear to be based in the UK. All our work was offshored - our designer was based in Brazil, the rest of the team in South Africa. I don't recognise any of the names referred to in the reviews here. Offshoring is fine, but I sort of expected a London based team from the sales process.
2) Their design skills were not great. They basically took our existing emails, added a few images from our stock collection (many of which were some of the least attractive that they could have chosen) and left it at that. At the start, they were just using the standard Klaviyo blocks, rather than image based emails, meaning that we were far from acheiving the look that we wanted. In short, the designs were little more than we could have done ourselves. We really pushed on this, and to be fair they did respond to our feedback, but having acheived one really good design they slipped back into old ways (I suspect because the issue was escalated to head office, considered fixed and then handed back to the original designer). Due to our business model, we have a lot of products and do not do individual photo shoots - we have stock images some of which aren't great, but any competent designer should be able to make more of them, using the numerous design tools (including AI) that are available to anyone these days. If your experience is anything like ours, and you are looking to heighten the look and feel of your emails, you'd be better off getting yourself a Canva account and doing it yourself (which is what we are now doing).
3) Their merchandising skills were not good - thinking about products a customer might actually want to buy. All of our flows done by UE have the same product suggestion blocks showing the same products over and over again. In a welcome flow with 4 emails, why suggest the same products over and over again? Could they just not be bothered?
4) They made a big thing about their email calendar, but it often did not make sense. For example, we were very disappointed to find they sent an email asking people to buy stuff in preparation for Glastonbury on the Saturday of the festival itself. What exactly is the point of that?
5) Similarly, we had a real issue with delivery and proofing. Designs were delivered, usually, a couple of hours before they were due to be sent. As noted above, they were often not suitable and so we were left with a choice between making comments and jeapordising delivery or just releasing stuff we didn't really like. It felt, to be honest, that our account was a side of desk job, or perhaps we just didn't get the 'A' team
6) There are alot of account managers. You'll be asked to sign up for a 3 month initial term. We raised our concerns clearly before the start of our second month. We had several calls with our account manager, agreed improvement steps. When we reached the end of month 3 and we'd had enough and called time on the relationship, the account manager had the cheek to try to say that we hadn't provided "written" notice (nothwithstanding the numerous emails and discussions relating to our dissatisfaction) and attempted to stop us from leaving. They clearly are a maximise sign up and minimise churn agency.
All in all we were left feeling a bit duped, and annoyed that we had effectively wasted £12k that we could ill afford at that time.
UE seem to think that they can charge their fee and sit in your existing email revenue stream without producing the transformative results that they promise. I would suggest that they are charging too much for their services, although given the 10+ people that they added to our Klaviyo account (many of who we never interacted with) there are clearly alot of mouths to feed.
All in all, it was a very disappointing experience, and we would not recommend them, unless you have enough revenue that the (limited) convenience factor outweighs the cost, but be prepared for an at best mediocre experience.