Open your Klaviyo campaign list right now. Scroll back six months. Can you tell me, in under thirty seconds, what percentage of those sends were promotional vs educational?

Probably not. And that's not your fault. Klaviyo doesn't ship with a "campaign type" field. It gives you tags. And tags, left to their own devices, turn into a junk drawer.

You'll find tags like bf2025, BF25, bf-2025, blackfriday, and Black Fridayall referring to the same campaign series. You'll find tags created by a freelancer two years ago that nobody remembers the meaning of. You'll find a tag that's used exactly once.

If you want to actually report on your send mix, the tag system has to do real work. Here's how to make it.

Why this matters more than people think

Send mix is the single most underrated metric in DTC email. Brands that send 90% promotional emails train their list to only open during sales. Brands that send 90% educational content build engaged audiences but struggle to convert. The sweet spot is somewhere in between, and you can't find your sweet spot if you can't measure where you are.

The other reason: when you eventually want to audit your year, or hand off to a new email manager, or run any kind of A/B test on send cadence, you need clean labels on every send. Retroactive tagging is the worst kind of busywork. Tag once, at send time, and your future self gets the data for free.

The two-axis system

Forget folksonomy tagging where everyone makes up their own labels. You want a small, fixed vocabulary that covers two axes:

Content type - what kind of email is this?
Campaign context - what larger initiative does it belong to?

Content type is the small list. Campaign context is the open-ended one. Keep them separate.

Content type tags (pick exactly one per send)

These are the only content type tags you need:

type:promo - the email's primary job is to drive a sale. Discount codes, sale announcements, last-chance urgency, "20% off ends tonight."
type:product - announcing or featuring products without a discount. New launches, restocks, collection drops, gift guides.
type:edu - teaching, storytelling, or brand-building. How-tos, founder stories, behind-the-scenes, customer features, lifestyle content.
type:transactional-ish - emails that aren't strictly transactional but are tied to behavior. Browse abandonment campaigns sent as one-offs, post-purchase asks, review requests.
type:list-care - re-engagement, preference center prompts, sunset warnings. Stuff that exists to keep your list healthy.

Five tags. That's it. Every campaign gets exactly one of these. No exceptions, no "well, it's kind of both."

If a send genuinely feels like two things at once, that's usually a sign the email is trying to do too much. Pick the primary job and tag accordingly.

Campaign context tags (pick zero or more)

This is where you tag the larger initiative. Examples:

ctx:bf2026 - Black Friday 2026 series
ctx:summer-collection - the summer collection launch
ctx:mothers-day - Mother's Day promotional series
ctx:welcome-series-update - if you're A/B testing a new welcome flow

The convention: lowercase, hyphens, prefix with ctx:. The prefix matters because it groups the tags visually in Klaviyo's tag picker and makes filtering trivial later.

The naming convention is the whole game

The colon-prefix trick (type:, ctx:) is doing a lot of work here. Klaviyo's tag picker sorts alphabetically, so all your type: tags cluster together, and all your ctx: tags cluster together. When someone new joins the team, they can scroll the tag list and immediately see the structure.

It also makes the analytics side workable. When you export campaign data and pivot on tags, you can split by tag prefix and get a clean "what was the type" and "what was the context" view without having to remember which tags meant what.

Compare that to a flat list of BFM, sale, discount-promo, summer, summer2026, educate, tips. Good luck doing anything useful with that.

How to roll this out without a six-week migration project

Most agencies and brands try to do a big bang cleanup. They block off a week, audit every old campaign, and try to backfill the new tagging system. They get through about three months of campaigns and abandon it.

Don't do that. Do this instead:

Step one: starting today, every new campaign gets exactly one type: tag and any relevant ctx: tags.That's the only rule. Write it on a sticky note next to your monitor if you have to.

Step two: pin a "tag cheatsheet" in your team's Klaviyo notes or shared doc. List the five type: tags and what they mean. Include one-line examples.

Step three: every Monday, spend ten minutes tagging last week's sends. Not three months of backlog. Just last week. If you fall behind, only catch up the most recent two weeks.

Step four: after three months, you'll have a clean recent dataset.That's enough to compute your real send mix and start adjusting. The ancient sends can stay messy. They're not changing your decisions.

What to do with the old tags

Don't delete them. Klaviyo will warn you that deleting tags removes them from historical campaigns, and you don't want to lose the audit trail, even if it's ugly.

Instead: create a tag called archive:legacy-tagand just stop using the old ones. They'll fade out of the relevant-tags filter naturally as you send new campaigns with the new system.

If a freelancer or agency made tags you don't recognize, leave them. Pretending you understand them won't help. They're dead pixels in the data.

How this connects to actual reporting

Once you've been doing this for sixty to ninety days, the questions you can answer get much sharper:

What's our actual promotional-to-educational ratio month over month?
Which ctx: campaigns drove the most revenue per send?
Are we sending more type:list-care emails to our most engaged segment, when we should be sending them to the disengaged one?
When we doubled the cadence in March, did we just send more type:promo or did we keep the mix balanced?

You can answer all of these by exporting your Klaviyo campaign data and filtering on tag prefixes. No new tools, no custom dashboards, just a clean pivot table.

Of course, if you'd rather not export and pivot every time you want to look, this is exactly the kind of view a visual email calendar makes obvious. Color-code by type: tag and you can see your send mix at a glance, week by week, without doing math.

The one-line takeaway

Pick five content-type tags, prefix them so they sort together, tag every new send, and stop pretending you'll fix the backlog. In three months you'll have data you can actually use.

If you want to see what your tagged campaigns look like on a real calendar, start a free trial of Cadento. Sync your Klaviyo account and we'll show you your send mix laid out the way your subscribers experience it: in time.

How to tag promotional vs educational emails in Klaviyo (without losing your mind)