The 80/15/5 Content Mix: Why Your Campaign Calendar Needs More Than Promotions

Open a Shopify brand's Klaviyo campaign history and you'll see a pattern: sale, product launch, sale, flash deal, product launch, sale. Every email is a transaction. Every subject line is a price or an offer. Every CTA is "Shop Now."

This works for a while. Then open rates start declining. Unsubscribes creep up. Subscribers stop seeing your emails as valuable and start seeing them as noise. The revenue per email sends plateaus even as the list grows. The brand wonders why email "stopped working." Email didn't stop working. The audience got tired of being sold to in every single message.

The 80/15/5 content mix is the framework we use to prevent this fatigue while keeping email as a revenue channel. The ratios: 80% revenue-driving content, 15% relationship-building content, 5% experimental content.

The 80% is your commercial engine. Product launches, promotions, seasonal offers, bestseller highlights, new arrivals, bundle deals, flash sales. These emails have a direct path to a purchase. They include product imagery, pricing, and clear CTAs that take subscribers to product pages or collections. This is the bread and butter of e-commerce email. It belongs in the majority because email's primary job is generating revenue.

But 80% is not 100%. The difference matters.

The 15% is relationship content. Behind-the-scenes looks at how products are made. Founder stories about why the brand exists. Customer stories and UGC features. Education and value — how to use the product better, care instructions, styling guides. Community-oriented content that makes subscribers feel like they belong to something, not just a mailing list.

Relationship content does something critical that promotional emails can't: it builds the trust and emotional connection that makes the promotional emails convert. A subscriber who knows the founder's story, has seen the product being crafted, and has read reviews from people like them is significantly more likely to buy when the promotional email arrives. The 15% makes the 80% work harder.

We saw this clearly with one client. Their promotional campaigns were converting at a consistent 1.2% click-to-purchase rate. After introducing bi-weekly founder story and customer feature emails for two months, promotional campaign conversion rose to 1.8%. Same products, same offers, same audience — but a warmer, more trusting audience.

The 5% is experimentation. These are the emails that break the pattern intentionally. A plain-text email from the founder instead of a designed template. An interactive quiz. A campaign sent at an unusual time. A subject line that's wildly different from your norm. A content format you've never tried.

Most experimental emails won't outperform your standard campaigns. That's expected. The purpose is learning. A plain-text email that gets 40% open rates tells you that your audience responds to personal, unpolished communication. A quiz that gets low clicks tells you that interactive content isn't what your subscribers want. Both are valuable data points that inform your broader strategy.

In practice, if you're sending 3 campaigns per week (12 per month), the 80/15/5 split looks like this: 9-10 campaigns are revenue-focused, 1-2 are relationship/value content, and 1 is experimental. If you're sending 2 campaigns per week (8 per month), it's 6 revenue, 1 relationship, and 1 experimental roughly every other month.

The scheduling matters too. Don't cluster all relationship content together. Spread it through the month. A rhythm that works well: revenue campaign, revenue campaign, relationship content, revenue campaign, revenue campaign, experimental, revenue campaign, relationship content. This keeps the mix feeling natural rather than formulaic.

Common pushback from brands is that they can't "afford" to send non-promotional emails because every send needs to drive revenue. This is short-term thinking. The unsubscribes and engagement decline from all-promotion-all-the-time cost more in lost future revenue than the occasional non-promotional send.

The content mix also affects deliverability. Inbox providers track engagement patterns. A consistent stream of high-engagement emails (which relationship content tends to generate — people open founder stories even if they don't click) keeps your overall engagement metrics healthy. This improves inbox placement for your promotional sends.

Tracking the content mix is simple. In your campaign planning spreadsheet or Notion database, tag each campaign by type: Revenue, Relationship, or Experimental. At the end of each month, check the ratio. If you're at 95/5/0, you're over-indexing on promotion and under-investing in the content that makes promotions convert.

The 80/15/5 framework isn't rigid. Some months — Black Friday, holiday season, a major product launch — will skew toward 90% revenue. That's fine if it's intentional and temporary. The mistake is letting every month become 100% promotional by default.