Product Updates
Upload a background image, place text with your brand fonts and colors, and save or download — a lightweight way to build on-brand heroes without leaving Backstroke.
What's Changing
Before, Hero Lab was focused on AI-generated heroes. If you wanted to place your own text on a background image using your brand fonts and colors, you needed an external design tool.
Now, the new Create option lets you upload a background image, add headline, subheadline, and CTA text with your brand fonts, and drag everything into position right on the canvas. Download as PNG or save straight to your hero library.
Surge adds predictive hero intelligence to the campaigns you're already building in Klaviyo. Instead of switching to a different tool, you stay in your ESP and let Backstroke handle the hero optimization behind the scenes. You pick the hero images, Surge predicts which one performs best for each audience segment, and delivers a ready-to-use content block you drag into your Klaviyo email.
What Surge Does
Today, when you build a campaign in Klaviyo, you pick one hero image and send it to everyone. You might suspect that different audiences respond to different visuals, but testing hero variations manually — building segments, creating conditional content blocks, managing merge tags — is tedious enough that most teams skip it.
Surge eliminates that work. It automatically detects your draft and scheduled campaigns from Klaviyo, lets you upload 2–10 hero image variations, predicts which hero will perform best for each audience segment, and generates a smart content block that handles the personalization for you. You drag one block into your email in Klaviyo and send. Each subscriber sees the hero predicted to drive the highest engagement for their profile.
Predictive Hero Images automatically matches the right hero image to the right subscriber. Instead of sending the same hero to your entire list, Backstroke's AI scores each of your hero images against audience segments and shows each subscriber the image most likely to drive a click — no manual segmentation required.
What Predictive Hero Images Does
Today, every subscriber on your list sees the same hero image. You might have a hunch that different audiences respond to different visuals — a lifestyle shot for younger subscribers, a product-focused image for older ones — but manually creating and assigning those variants is too time-consuming, so most teams don't do it.
Predictive Hero Images solves this. You provide 2–10 hero images, toggle on the feature, and Backstroke handles the rest. Our models analyze each image, scores it against your audience segments based on demographic profiles, and assigns the best-performing hero to each group. When the email sends through Klaviyo, each subscriber sees the hero predicted to drive the highest engagement for their profile.
The result: better click-through rates without any additional manual work beyond uploading your creative.
How It Works
Predictive Hero Images uses a proprietary machine learning model trained on real email engagement data. Here’s the high-level flow:
Image Analysis — Each hero image you upload is analyzed by an AI vision model, which converts the image into a numerical "fingerprint" that captures what's actually in it — scene type, colors, mood, product placement, text overlays, and more. This is far more nuanced than simple categories like "lifestyle" or "product shot."
Audience Matching — The model combines its understanding of each image with what it knows about your audience segments to predict which image is most likely to drive a click for each group.
Smart Assignment — For each audience segment, the model ranks all your hero images and assigns the winner. This means different segments can receive different heroes — all within a single campaign send.
Dynamic Delivery — Backstroke generates dynamic logic that gets embedded in your email. When Klaviyo sends the email, it evaluates each subscriber’s profile and serves the correct hero image at send time. No subscriber ever sees a broken or missing image.
Edit emails and templates together in real time — see which elements your teammates are working on as changes happen live.
What's Changing
Before: Only one person could work on an email or template at a time. If two people opened the same draft, one would overwrite the other's changes. Teams had to take turns or coordinate over Slack to avoid conflicts.
After: Multiple team members can now open and edit the same email or template simultaneously — whether it's a campaign email or a standalone template. You'll see which blocks your teammates have selected and watch their changes appear in real time — no more overwriting each other's work. Have a designer tweak the hero while a copywriter updates the body, or collaborate on last-minute edits together, all inside the same editor session.
Duplicate a campaign without losing the image swaps, link updates, and approved body copy you already finalized in the editor.
What's Changing
Before, duplicating a campaign always started you over from scratch. Any edits you'd made in the editor — swapped images, updated links, approved body copy — were thrown away. The duplicate reverted to the original generated output, which meant redoing all your work if you just wanted a quick copy with minor tweaks. This was especially painful if you'd already gotten copy approved and synced to Klaviyo, then needed to go back and make a correction.
After, when you duplicate a campaign that has a finalized email, you'll see a choice: Include email design or Start fresh. Choose "Include email design" and your duplicate keeps everything — images, links, body copy, layout, and audiences — and drops you straight into the editor so you can pick up right where you left off. Choose "Start fresh" and it works exactly like before, generating a new email from your brief. Campaigns that haven't been generated yet skip the prompt entirely, so nothing changes for early-stage drafts.
Leave feedback directly on any email block — comment, reply in threads, and resolve without leaving the editor.
Before: Giving feedback on an email meant switching to Slack, a shared doc, or a meeting. You'd screenshot the section, describe which block you meant, and hope the context carried over. Feedback got scattered across tools and threads got lost.
After: Click any element in the email editor — a hero image, text block, button, anything — and leave a comment right there. Your team sees who said what with names and avatars, can reply in threads to keep conversations focused, and resolve comments when the feedback is addressed. Everything stays attached to the email, so context is never lost. Collaborate on copy, design, and layout without leaving the builder
What's Changing
Before: To open or edit a campaign, you had to click the three-dot menu on each row and select "Edit." It was an extra step for the most common thing you do in the app.
After: Just click the row. Clicking any campaign row now takes you straight to the right place — the builder for drafts, the review screen for generated campaigns, and so on. The three-dot menu is still there for secondary actions like duplicating, archiving, or scheduling. Rows that don't have a natural destination (like already-sent campaigns) stay as they are — no confusing dead clicks.
Build your email campaigns faster - no more pressing "Complete" on every single section.
What's Changing
Before: Every section in the email builder required you to press "Complete" before moving on. Even if you'd filled everything out, you had to confirm each section individually. It was a lot of clicking and broke your flow.
After: The email builder now tracks your progress automatically based on what you've filled in. You can see at a glance which sections still need attention in the right panel. When you're ready, hit Generate Email. If anything's missing, we'll tell you exactly what before proceeding. One action to generate — no section-by-section confirmation.
Upload an existing hero image, swap the text, tweak the look, and generate a fresh variation — no more recreating proven creative from scratch.
What's Changing
Before: If you wanted a variation of an existing hero — different headline, updated promo code, seasonal refresh — you had to start a brand new generation from scratch. There was no way to use an existing asset as a starting point. You'd either rebuild the brief manually or go back to your design team and wait.
After: You can now upload any existing hero image directly into Hero Lab and remix it. Backstroke automatically extracts all the text from your image — headline, subhead, promo code, CTA — and surfaces each one as an editable field. Swap the copy, add optional visual tweaks, and hit Produce Remix. The new hero keeps the look and feel of your original with your changes applied. Start from what's already working and iterate in seconds.
Save rows like headers, footers, and common content blocks once, then reuse them in any template — no more rebuilding the same layouts from scratch.
What's Changing
Before: Every time you built a new template, you had to recreate common rows — footers, headers, logo blocks, link sections — from scratch. Even if you'd built the perfect footer last week, there was no way to carry it into a new design. You'd either rebuild it manually or copy-paste raw HTML and hope the styling held up.
After: You can now save any row directly from the email editor and reuse it across all your templates and emails. Your saved rows appear in a dedicated panel inside the editor — just drag one in. Name and organize them however you like. Build your footer once, save it, and use it everywhere.
