What is an email cadence?

The four decisions that define a cadence

Touch count. How many times one lead hears from you before the sequence ends. This is the decision with the largest hidden cost, covered below.

Spacing. The gap between touches. Ours is two to three days between the first email and the follow-up: long enough that the second message is a fresh moment, short enough that the first is still findable in the inbox. Spacing measured in hours reads as pestering; spacing measured in weeks makes each touch a cold start.

Send window. The hours and days sends go out. This matters less than the industry pretends and more than zero - the evidence, including what our own send-time data does and does not support, is on best time to send cold emails.

Stop rules. What removes a lead from the cadence immediately: any human reply (positive or negative), an opt-out, a hard bounce, or an out-of-office that names a better contact or a return date worth waiting for. A cadence without hard stop rules is an irritation machine - continuing to sequence someone who already answered is how a mild no becomes a spam complaint.

Cadence, sequence, campaign: the terms, untangled

The words get used interchangeably and should not be. The sequence is the ordered set of messages - first touch, follow-up, break-up. The cadence is the timing those messages run on. The campaign is a sequence plus a cadence pointed at a specific segment. Keeping them separate matters practically: when results disappoint, the fix is usually in one layer, and diagnosing which layer saves you from rewriting good copy to solve a timing problem, or re-timing a sequence whose real problem is the copy itself.

Why our cadence is two touches, not seven

The long-cadence orthodoxy - five to nine touches over a month - quietly assumes sending capacity is free. It is not. Per-mailbox volume in serious cold outbound is deliberately small, which makes total monthly sends a fixed budget, and every touch spends from it. At a fixed 50,000 sends a month, a 2-touch cadence contacts 25,000 unique leads; a 5-touch cadence contacts 10,000. The extra touches must therefore out-produce 15,000 first impressions - and in our measured sending they do not come close. The full arithmetic, the two-to-three-day spacing, the angle change and the break-up note are on cold email follow-up.

The second touch does earn its place: a first email is a coin flip on timing - the recipient is in a meeting, travelling, or simply not thinking about the problem that morning. The follow-up is a second draw at that coin flip. What it is not is a second copy of the same message: the follow-up changes the angle, because the first angle has already had its chance.

Cadence and the reputation budget

Cadence design is also deliverability design. Touch count multiplies against your infrastructure's daily capacity, so an inflated cadence forces either fewer unique leads or more volume per mailbox - and the second option spends reputation you cannot easily buy back. Stop rules are complaint prevention: the fastest route to a spam complaint is sequencing someone past their no. And spacing interacts with warmup - a mailbox still inside its two to two and a half week ramp has no business carrying an aggressive cadence at all.

Reading cadence results honestly

Judge each touch on its own contribution: what share of total replies did touch two add, and what did it cost in coverage? Judge changes on the sends made after the change, not on cumulative averages that dilute the effect. And judge replies per contacted lead, the denominator our benchmarks use - per-email rates flatter long cadences, because the same human reply gets divided over more messages. The numbers that matter and the ones that mislead are collected in cold email metrics.

Common questions

What is a good email cadence for cold outreach?

The one whose cost you have actually counted. Ours is 2 touches, two to three days apart, stop on any reply, close with a break-up note - because at fixed sending capacity that maximises unique-lead coverage, and coverage is where replies come from.

How many follow-ups should you send?

We send one, and the reasoning is arithmetic rather than taste: each additional touch is paid for in never-contacted leads. The worked numbers are on cold email follow-up.

How long should you wait between cold email touches?

Two to three days between first email and follow-up, in our operation. Hours is pestering; weeks resets the context the follow-up depends on.

Is cadence the same as a sequence?

No - the sequence is the messages, the cadence is the schedule they run on, and a campaign is both pointed at a segment. Diagnosing problems layer by layer is most of the craft.