As an entrepreneur or marketer looking to grow your online business, one of the most important decisions you’ll make is choosing the right software platform for your website and digital marketing strategies.
Two popular options are Klaviyo, a dedicated email marketing and automation platform, and Market Hero, an all-in-one growth platform with e-commerce and marketing tools built in.
Choosing the right email marketing platform can tremendously impact your ability to effectively reach customers, drive conversions, maximize revenue, and scale your operations over time. In this Klaviyo vs Market Hero comparison article, we evaluate the two platforms across various criteria business owners should consider to make the right decision.
1. Understanding the Basics
Klaviyo is a dedicated email marketing and automation platform founded in 2012 by Andrew Bialecki and Ed Hallen. It has quickly become one of the most popular solutions in its market. As of 2022, Klaviyo powers email marketing for over 100,000 businesses and counting.
Market Hero is a newer, all-in-one growth platform for e-commerce brands. It was founded in 2016 by Alex Becker. Although a younger company, Market Hero already serves over 2,500 merchants.
Both platforms have strong and growing online communities:
When it comes to core market position, Klaviyo strictly focuses on robust email marketing and automation features. Market Hero takes a wider approach as an integrated platform combining e-commerce storefront capabilities, email marketing, SMS, popups, and more.
This means Klaviyo has more years of perfecting email functionality, while Market Hero aims to provide broader tools for emerging e-commerce brands under one roof. Understanding these differing approaches is key when evaluating the two platforms.
2. Features and Functionality
Automation
Klaviyo
Klaviyo offers robust email automation with pre-built workflows and sequences that can be customized. You can create automated campaigns triggered by specific subscriber actions like signing up, making a purchase, or clicking a link. These automations are configured through an intuitive drag-and-drop workflow builder.
Additional capabilities include behavioral targeting based on profiles and real-time data, as well as automated SMS and web push notifications. Klaviyo makes it easy to segment contacts and tailor messaging accordingly without coding. Dynamic content blocks also allow for personalized one-to-one messages at scale.
Overall, Klaviyo shines with granular customization for triggered email flows, powerful segmentation tools, and broad automation features beyond just email.
Market Hero
Like it’s competitor, Market Hero comes with service automation integrated. It enables workflow automation for ecommerce businesses across multiple channels including email, SMS, web push, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and more. Pre-built automations are available or can be customized.
The platform focuses on ease of use, providing a visual journey builder to configure triggers and create multi-channel campaigns without the technical skills needed. Dynamic content, segmentation, and event-based automation are also included out of the box.
While Klaviyo offers deeper email customization, Market Hero simplifies cross-channel automation in one integrated platform allowing you to talk to customers via their preferred channel.
Winner: Klaviyo
When it comes to pure email marketing automation, Klaviyo is the winner thanks to incredibly robust features, customizations, and triggers that optimize complex subscriber journeys. Market Hero makes multi-channel execution easier but cannot match Klaviyo’s email-specific capabilities.
Email Templates
Klaviyo
Klaviyo offers hundreds of professionally designed email templates covering common marketing use cases like welcome series, product announcements, newsletters, and more. These can be easily customized within the platform with a drag-and-drop editor to match your branding.
There is also a Template Gallery allowing you to browse templates made by other Klaviyo users and import ones you like into your account. Hand-coding expertise is not required with the intuitive editor. Images, layouts, and content blocks can be adjusted as needed.
Advanced custom CSS can also be added for fuller design control. Overall, Klaviyo focuses heavily on providing beautiful, customizable email templates to accelerate your marketing.
Market Hero
Market Hero also provides professionally designed email templates for welcome flows, promotions, announcements, and even built-in feed templates for your email marketing campaigns. The template editor enables easy customization of content blocks, images, colors, and fonts to align with your brand style.
While template selection is more limited compared to Klaviyo, core product, and brand templates are covered. And no coding expertise is required thanks to the intuitive editor.
Market Hero’s templates are also optimized for mobile devices automatically. You can preview email rendering on desktop and mobile before sending.
Winner: Klaviyo
With far greater template selection and variety spanning more potential use cases, Klaviyo wins for best email templates. Their gallery allows you to mix and match templates from other users for expanded customization with ease for marketers. Both platforms remove customization barriers, but Klaviyo’s volume of choices stands out.
Segmentation
Klaviyo
Klaviyo enables advanced subscriber segmentation for precise targeting and customized messaging. You can create granular segments based on profile attributes, and behaviors like email opens/clicks, purchase history, custom events, and more to target high-intent shoppers. Klaviyo automatically tracks and updates user segments in real time.
Complex conditional logic is also supported in building segments to reach hyper-targeted groups. Once created, you can filter email and automation workflows to only send to specific audiences for relevance.
With robust built-in tools for segmentation pooled across your subscriber base, Klaviyo gives immense flexibility in personalized messaging.
Market Hero
Market Hero also provides contact segmentation tools to group users and customize communication streams accordingly. Standard attributes like location, purchase history, page visits, etc. can dynamically define segments.
Simple segment creation is enabled through their visual journey builder without complex configuration needed. Send tailored messages to subscribers that match defined criteria with just a few clicks.
While capable of basic segmentation needs, Market Hero trails Klaviyo in advanced segmentation depth leveraging custom profile attributes, behavioral data, and complex logistical filtering.
Winner: Klaviyo
With greater capability to track comprehensive user data and craft extremely customized segments, Klaviyo wins for best segmentation functionality. Market Hero simplifies the process with their journey builder, but lacks robust depth. Klaviyo’s granular tracking and segmentation unlock more targeted personalization.
Analytics
Klaviyo
Klaviyo provides insightful campaign analytics reports to track email and landing page performance. Dashboards display high-level metrics and trends including open rates, clickthrough rates, conversions, revenue-driven, ROI, and subscriber engagement over time.
You can dive deeper into reports filtered by campaign, template type, segment, period, and more to analyze what content resonates. Integration with Google Analytics for deeper analysis, along with A/B testing capabilities to optimize performance.
With robust analytics at multiple levels, this ecommerce platform enables data-driven refinement of email strategy over time.
Market Hero
Market Hero also includes email analytics tracking opens, clicks, unsubscribes, bounce rates, and sales revenue generated. High-level dashboards show recent activity and trends, while campaign-specific reporting provides deeper insights.
E-commerce analytics are also more tightly integrated to connect email efforts to overall store goals. However, segmentation and content drilling down is more limited compared to Klaviyo. Market Hero analytics cater more towards visual trajectory tracking rather than multifaceted statistics.
Winner: Klaviyo
Klaviyo wins for best analytics and reporting thanks to very granular data favorable to data-driven marketers. Duty-specific tracking offers greater visibility into the nuances of email campaign performance from content to segments and everything between compared to Market Hero.
Unique Features
Klaviyo
One of Klaviyo’s most unique features is its comprehensive tracking at the individual subscriber level. Detailed customer profiles include granular events, custom attributes, purchase data, behavioral trends, and advanced list management tools that customize communication highly and allow you to continuously optimize your campaigns.
This data also dynamically flows into Klaviyo’s powerful segmentation and automation capabilities referenced earlier for personalized flows. Ultimately the platform is purpose-built around exploiting rich data for hyper-relevant messaging.
Market Hero
As an integrated e-commerce platform, some of Market Hero’s unique features revolve around broader business functionalities beyond marketing. This includes integrated payment processing, cross-border trade and internationalization, subscription management, and more.
The platform also offers built-in services for securing fraud monitoring, shipping optimization rates from leading carriers, inventory tracking across sales channels, and handling returns/exchanges. This enables comprehensive business oversight.
Winner: Tie
Both Klaviyo and Market Hero showcase unique standout capabilities. Klaviyo’s unparalleled granular tracking and streaming into robust automation gives it exemplary unified data-to-activation proficiency.
Meanwhile, Market Hero covers more ground as a holistic commerce platform with wide-ranging tools that centralize operations. Ultimately their specialized strengths achieve different strategic advantages.
3. Ease of Use
Klaviyo
Klaviyo provides an intuitive user interface focused specifically on email marketing and automation features. The dashboard uses a clean, distraction-free design making key metrics and workflows easy to access.
Even for beginners, Klaviyo is relatively simple to start using quickly thanks to streamlined menus and self-guided product tours introducing key capabilities. Setting up campaigns, building segments, and configuring automation can be done through visual drag-and-drop builders.
While there may be learning curves scaling complexity for advanced features, Klaviyo accelerates proficiency focusing solely on email specialization rather than a crowded system.
Market Hero
As an integrated e-commerce platform, Market Hero inevitably has a more complex interface supporting manifold business functions from storefront builder to reporting. This can mean a steeper learning curve.
However, for the email marketing toolkit specifically, Market Hero has simplified user experience benefitting beginners through visual workflow builders requiring no coding. Setting up templates, broadcasts, and automation is accessible even for novice users.
However, those seeking advanced customization may need more ramp-up time to navigate options. Market Hero makes platform-wide ease of use a priority.
Winner: Tie
For core email capabilities critical to digital marketers, both Klaviyo and Market Hero emphasize intuitive usage without technical barriers. Klaviyo’s focused scope allows marginally easier pickup. But Market Hero offsets broader platform depth with UX simplifying for beginners. For ease of use, they are evenly matched.
4. Email Deliverability
Klaviyo
Klaviyo invests heavily in email deliverability capabilities given its specialization. The platform optimizes for factors impacting inbox placement including sender reputation, domain/IP health, spam filtering triggers, and engagement metrics.
Automatic list cleaning, bounce handling, compliance checks, and advanced suppressions all improve deliverability. Klaviyo also enables domain authentication including SPF/DKIM/DMARC setup for security.
Granular email and domain performance dashboards provide visibility enabling further optimization. For those prioritizing email reliability at scale, Klaviyo delivers results.
Market Hero
As an integrated platform, Market Hero includes a suite of deliverability capabilities like sender scoring, domain verification, inbox rendering previews, and compliance checks out-of-the-box for security.
Email activity analytics provide visibility into potential red flags, while list hygiene is automated based on bounces, opt-outs, etc. However, focused deliverability tools don’t match the pureplay functionality from Klaviyo.
But for most small brands, included protection suffices as long as volumes don’t wildly spike. Market Hero delivers on essentials.
Winner: Klaviyo
With email exclusively as its product, Klaviyo wins for best-in-class specialized email deliverability to maximize reach and engagement. Market Hero checks basic boxes but lacks the depth to troubleshoot issues or optimize at scale. Klaviyo’s precision deliverability toolset offers brands peace of mind.
5. Customer Support and Community
Klaviyo
Klaviyo offers multiple customer support options including email, live chat, phone, and premium support ticketing systems. Their team is staffed 24/7 to assist around the clock no matter what time zone users are located in.
Average response times are impressively under one hour even for basic inquiries, reflecting Klaviyo’s commitment to prompt user attention. Beyond standard docs, they also provide an extensive help article knowledge base, tutorial videos, and active user community forums focused on self-service troubleshooting as well.
Speaking of community, Klaviyo facilitates highly engaged user networking and ideation through their 33,000+ member official Facebook Group. Professionals exchange tips on creating high-converting campaigns, discuss new platform capabilities, and even showcase results from innovative strategies. This cultivates shared success.
Market Hero
Compared to Klaviyo, Market Hero has more limited but solid support coverage through email, chat platforms, and direct phone channels during typical US and European business hours. Response times run a bit longer than Klaviyo, averaging a few hours for basic inquiries during peak demand according to users.
Available self-help resources are still maturing compared to the veteran Klaviyo, through early documentation and an emerging community is growing. Market Hero’s official 2,000-member Facebook Group enables ideation and troubleshooting between merchants on the platform. As Market Hero scales up, community cultivation can certainly expand.
Winner: Klaviyo
With around-the-clock premium support responsiveness, an unparalleled knowledge base, and a vastly larger community enabling advanced peer learning, Klaviyo edges out as the winner here by a wide margin. Market Hero delivers respectable assistance for most needs, but simply cannot stack up yet to Klaviyo’s ecosystem and experience supporting over 100k diverse customer profiles.
6. Integrations
Klaviyo
Klaviyo has flexible integrations that allow you to connect with an extensive range of third-party platforms and data tools via native integrations, Zapier, and custom API capabilities.
The global vendor has native app integration including all major e-commerce platforms (Shopify, WooCommerce, etc), CRMs, analytics, subscription billing, chatbots, and more. Klaviyo also has a partnership ecosystem with complementary martech solutions and affiliate platforms to further your marketing efforts.
This makes it easy to centralize data flows from across your tech stack into Klaviyo segmentation and personalization without extensive coding skills. You can even add surveys like the compliance customer surveys Drip offers to get the maximum degree of customer behavior information possible.
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Market Hero
As an all-in-one platform, Market Hero focuses more on proprietary tool unification so online businesses can execute the company’s exact business functions from a unified dashboard natively. There is less emphasis on third-party integrations.
That said, Market Hero does connect with Shopify, WooCommerce, and common shipping/payment systems out-of-the-box so you can work with your existing marketing stack seamlessly. Extensibility is enabled through Zapier along with developers’ docs for custom integrations and you can create business applications when needed. However, the scope lags behind Klaviyo.
Winner: Klaviyo
With an integrated ecosystem across virtually every common martech tool needed from CRMs to analytics and more, Klaviyo easily wins for the deepest and most diverse integrations. Market Hero unifies more inherently, but cannot match Klaviyo for third-party connectivity breadth empowering extensive personalization.
7. Pricing
Klaviyo
Klaviyo is one of the most powerful email marketing tools that offer a free forever plan including up to 500 contacts and unlimited emails. Paid plans scale from $45/month up to custom enterprise pricing for exponentially larger contact volumes into the millions.
Most small to medium businesses find ample capacity on paid plans ranging from $60/month supporting 1,5K+ contacts and 1,250+ SMS/MMS credits. Overall Klaviyo is competitively priced in the email marketing landscape for serious performance.
Their free trial gives the hassle-free ability to validate the return on investment before paying. Transparent pricing helps calculate hard value.
Market Hero
Market Hero begins with a forever free plan for core storefront capacity supporting unlimited contacts. Customer communication capabilities remain limited on this tier, however.
Opening engagement features drives monthly costs between $29-$199 for 5k-100k contacts including SMS channels, advanced popups, and multi-platform automation alongside centralized data. Enterprise quotes are available for larger needs.
The platform does extend flexible annual billing cycles offering discounts as well. Competitively priced, especially for integrated tool breadth.
Winner: Tie
Both Klaviyo and Market Hero offer strong value across mid-market and enterprise plans for comprehensive functionality. Market Hero’s bundling unlocks additional capabilities for the investment, while Klaviyo allows more contacts on popular tiers. Ultimately pricing parities for the robust tools.
8. Reviews and Reputation
Klaviyo
Klaviyo earns overwhelmingly positive reviews from users highlighting the platform’s power and customization for optimized email marketing. Typical praise calls Klaviyo a “game changer” for the segmenting and automation that drive more relevant subscriber engagement.
Reviews on platforms like G2 and Capterra give them high marks for accelerating results and boosting customer loyalty, with common recurring feedback that adding advanced functionality to drive customer loyalty has learning curves. But customer support earns raves backing success.
With over 100k mid-market businesses powered by Klaviyo, a proven reputation abounds. Shortcomings center only on matching needs to proper plan tiers.
Market Hero
As a younger platform, Market Hero has limited specific reviews so far but initial feedback praising the unified toolkit for emerging e-commerce brands is very positive.
Users highlight valuable time savings from integrated data and workflows. The one no-code platform allows retail enterprises to create a dynamic content event, send personalized text messages, and target audiences based on a variety of factors.
Critiques on sites like Trustpilot recommend Market Hero for scaling growth given some limitations on advanced functionality compared to specialized tools. But the broader feature set beyond just email marketing earns strong marks for customer conversion capabilities in a single pane of glass.
For those wanting a straightforward central dashboard, Market Hero has built early goodwill and trust in a competitive space.
Winner: Klaviyo
With an extensive track record serving tens of thousands of mid-market businesses, Klaviyo is the reputational leader here. Market Hero shows promise but cannot match the years of proven results Klaviyo boasts tailoring email marketing efficiencies for diverse online stores. Klaviyo simply has more credibility through experience.
9. FAQ’s
Klaviyo FAQs
- What types of email campaigns can I create with Klaviyo?
Klaviyo enables welcome emails, behavioral automation, segmented broadcasts, cart abandonment flows, product announcements, newsletters, and more customized email campaigns. Advanced segmentation and automation build highly targeted messaging. - Does Klaviyo have e-commerce capabilities beyond email marketing?
No, Klaviyo is specialized specifically for email marketing and automation features. It integrates with e-commerce platforms like Shopify but does not provide native storefront tools. - Does Klaviyo work with SMS/mobile messaging?
Yes, Klaviyo recently launched an integrated SMS marketing solution alongside email. You can build SMS workflows to coordinate multi-channel campaigns.
Market Hero FAQs
- Does Market Hero offer email marketing features?
Yes, Market Hero provides a full email marketing toolkit including templates, automation, contract import, advanced analytics, and deliverability protection. - What e-commerce capabilities come with Market Hero?
As an integrated platform, Market Hero offers complete storefront hosting, shopping cart, payment processing, shipping management, plus central marketing. - Can Market Hero connect to my existing online store?
Market Hero integrates out-of-the-box with Shopify and WooCommerce, syncing key store/customer data into the platform for unified coordination.
Final Thoughts
Choose Klaviyo If…
You want a platform built for commerce entrepreneurs. As an email marketing specialist platform for over 10 years, Klaviyo shines best for established e-commerce businesses focused on maximizing email efficiency through advanced segmentation and automation.
If you have outgrown basic email providers and need to graduate to more sophisticated deliverability, customizations, and analytics informing your strategy, Klaviyo should be strongly considered. The platform streamlines complexity for revenue-driving relevance.
However, if you’d like to consider some other platforms, check out my article on Klaviyo alternatives for more info.
Choose Market Hero If…
As an emerging all-in-one commerce growth suite, Market Hero hits the best notes for new e-commerce brands wanting unified data and workflows from storefront hosting to customer engagement.
If you need an integrated central dashboard to minimize operational overhead as you scale up across marketing, financials, shipping, and more, the bundled efficiencies of Market Hero make a compelling case to accelerate expansion.
Ultimately choosing the right platform depends on your business’s current growth stage and operational priorities. We urge you to request demos, thoroughly review capabilities against your needs, and ask any questions about how these solutions can facilitate goals. The success of your brand relies on maximizing the technologies supporting it!