What Is Email Cadence?
TL;DR
Email cadence is the timing pattern of an outreach sequence: how many messages a contact receives and how much time sits between them. It describes the schedule rather than the content, and it is the part of a sequence most often inherited from a template without anyone asking whether it suits the audience.
How do you choose the gaps between touches?
From the buying cycle and the recipient calendar rather than the tool default. A purchase that gets decided in a week tolerates a tight cadence, and one that gets decided in a budget cycle does not, because the second reader is not undecided but simply not in a position to act yet.
Counting in business days rather than calendar days matters more than the exact numbers. A cadence measured in calendar days drifts across weekends until several touches land on Monday mornings, which is the busiest inbox of the week and the one where a queued message is cleared without being read.
How does cadence affect deliverability?
Through volume per mailbox and consistency, not through sequence length. A long sequence sent steadily is easier on a domain than a short one sent to a large list in two days, because the second pattern concentrates both the volume and any complaints into a narrow window.
The receiving side reads that concentration as a change in behaviour. A mailbox that sends a similar amount every working day looks like a person doing a job, which is the pattern warmup is meant to establish and a compressed cadence undoes.
When should a cadence end?
At a defined point, decided before the campaign starts. An open-ended cadence keeps contacting people who have made a decision by not replying, and those contacts supply the complaints that damage the sending domain.
Ending the cadence is not the same as discarding the contact. A contact who never replied can move to a slower nurture track or be revisited when something changes, and a contact who asked to stop goes to suppression permanently.
Frequently asked questions
No. The sequence is the whole structure, including the messages, the channels and the branching, and the cadence is only its timing. Two sequences with identical copy and different cadences are different campaigns, which is why the timing is worth deciding rather than accepting.