Open your last 30 days of campaigns in Klaviyo. Scroll the list. What do you see?
For most DTC brands, the answer is: promo, promo, promo, promo, restock, promo, promo, sale, promo. Maybe a "we're hiring" thrown in. Maybe a holiday card.
That's not an email program. That's a discount feed with branding on it.
If your unsubscribe rateis creeping up and your engagement is sliding, this is usually why. Your list doesn't have a relationship with you. They have a coupon subscription. And when they stop needing coupons, they stop opening.
What's actually missing
Every healthy DTC email program runs on three campaign types, not one. They each do a different job. They each get a different reaction from your list. And when you mix them right, your promotional emails actually convert better, because your list still trusts that you have something to say.
The three types are: promotional, educational, and connection. Most brands send the first one constantly and the other two almost never.
Let's go through what each one actually is, and why your calendar needs all three.
Type 1: Promotional
This is the one you already know. Sale starting Friday. New drop tomorrow. Last chance for free shipping. Bundle deal ends tonight.
The job is direct. Drive a click, drive a purchase, drive revenue this week. The metrics are clean. Revenue per recipient, click rate, conversion rate. Nobody's confused about whether it worked.
Promotional emails are the workhorse. They pay the bills. They're also the only kind most brands send, and that's the problem.
When promotional is the only flavor, your list learns one pattern: this brand emails me when they want money. So they only open when they want to spend money. Which means most of your sends get ignored, and the few people who do open are price-shopping.
You need promotional emails. You probably need them more often than you think. But they can't be your entire program.
Type 2: Educational
This is the one most brands skip. Educational emails teach the subscriber something useful, related to your product but not directly selling it.
If you sell coffee gear, an educational email might be how to dial in a grind for a new bean. If you sell skincare, it might be why your morning and evening routines should differ. If you sell apparel, it might be how to wash and store a specific fabric so it lasts.
The job here is different. You're not driving a click today. You're building trust and authority. You're giving the subscriber a reason to open your emails even when there's no sale.
The hard part is the metric. Educational emails won't show big revenue numbers on the day they go out. Your team might look at them and call them a waste. They're not. They're the reason your next promo gets opened.
A useful way to measure them: look at the cohort of people who opened an educational email this month, then look at their behavior on your next three promotional sends. They open more. They click more. They convert at a higher rate. That's the lift, and it's real, but it only shows up if you actually track it.
Type 3: Connection
This is the one almost nobody does well. Connection emails are about the brand itself. The people behind it. Why you do what you do. What you're working on. What you got wrong last quarter and what you're fixing.
A founder note about a supply problem you ran into. A behind-the-scenes look at how a product gets made. A short story about why this color or this fabric or this flavor exists. A genuine apology when a launch goes sideways.
The job is relationship. You're reminding the subscriber that there's a human company on the other end of the inbox, not a marketing automation system.
Connection emails feel risky to a lot of brands. There's no sale tied to them. The CTA is often just "reply and tell us what you think." And the metrics look weird at first. Lower click rates, sometimes higher unsubscribes from people who only wanted coupons, but much higher reply rates and much stickier long-term engagement from the people who stay.
When done right, these are the emails subscribers actually forward to friends. When was the last time anyone forwarded one of your sale emails?
The mix that works
So how do you balance them?
There's no universal ratio, but a starting point that works for most DTC brands looks like this: roughly 60% promotional, 25% educational, 15% connection. Your specific mix will depend on your sending frequency and list behavior.
If you're sending 12 campaigns a month, that's about seven promotional, three educational, and two connection sends. If your engagement is currently in the tank, flip closer to 50/30/20 for a few months and watch what happens.
The biggest mistake is treating educational and connection emails as filler between promos. They're not filler. They're the reason your promos still work.
Why this is hard to actually plan
Here's the honest part. The reason most brands send only promotional emails isn't that they don't know better. It's that planning the other two types is harder.
A promotional calendar is easy. You know the launches. You know the seasonal sales. You can map a year on a spreadsheet in an afternoon. Educational and connection content needs ideas, and ideas need a place to live so they don't get lost between the promo deadlines that are screaming for attention.
This is where most teams fall apart. The educational email idea gets jotted in a Slack thread, then buried under three new launch emergencies, then forgotten. Three months later you realize you sent 38 promos and zero educational emails, and your unsubscribe rate is up 40%.
A real campaign calendarneeds to show all three types side by side. Not just "what are we sending this week" but "what's the mix looking like this month, and where are the gaps." If your calendar tool can't show you that at a glance, you'll default back to promo-only without realizing it.
This is one of the things Cadento was built to fix. You tag every campaign by type, and the calendar shows you the actual mix over any time window. When your mix gets too promo-heavy, you can see it before your unsubscribe rate tells you.
The takeaway
Open your last 60 days. Count how many promotional, educational, and connection emails you sent.
If the answer is "almost all promotional," your engagement decline isn't a mystery. It's the predictable result of a one-dimensional email program.
Pick one educational topic and one connection topic for next week. Send them. Then do it again the week after. Three months from now, look at your open rates and your unsubscribe rate.
The brands with the healthiest email lists aren't the ones with the cleverest subject lines. They're the ones whose subscribers actually want to hear from them between sales.