Email cadence: everything you need to know

Finding the perfect email cadence is a crucial ingredient of email marketing success. It’s essential for engaging buyers, forging long-term connections and closing more deals.

Yet many SMBs struggle with inconsistent sending patterns. This inconsistency leads to missed opportunities and higher unsubscribe rates.

In this article, you’ll learn how often to send emails to your audience based on what you want to achieve and where they are in the buying journey.

Key takeaways about email cadence

• Email cadence is the planned timing and frequency of emails you send to guide leads and prospects through the buying journey.

• The right cadence boosts engagement, builds trust and increases conversions without overwhelming your audience.

• Many SMBs struggle with inconsistent sending, but segmentation, testing and content variety help balance frequency while reducing unsubscribes.

• Pipedrive makes mastering email cadence easier with built-in segmentation, automation and analytics – sign up for the free 14-day trial to optimize your email campaigns.

What is email cadence?

Email cadence is the frequency and timing of marketing emails you send to prospects and customers.

Say an e-commerce company wants to promote a new product to its email list. Inspired by engagement levels in previous email marketing campaigns (like high open rates on Monday and Thursday mornings), it settles on the following email cadence:

• Day 1 (Tuesday, 10:00 AM PT) – Send a promotional email announcing the new product to all existing customers on the subscriber list

• Day 3 (Thursday, 10:00 AM PT) – Follow up with a reminder email highlighting the key features and benefits of the new product

• Day 7 (Monday, 10:00 AM PT) – Send a customer testimonial email showcasing how the new product has benefited existing customers

• Day 10 (Thursday, 10:00 AM PT) – Send a limited-time offer email with a discount code for the new product

• Day 14 (Monday, 10:00 AM PT) – Send a final reminder email about the limited-time offer before it expires

This email cadence ensures the audience gets relevant product information at a time when they’re most likely to engage, increasing the likelihood of conversions.

The right email cadence also prevents audience fatigue.

Audience fatigue happens when subscribers receive too many repetitive, irrelevant or poorly timed messages. Over time, they become less engaged, leading to lower open rates, fewer clicks and more unsubscribes.

The more effective your email cadence is (and the more relevant your emails are), the less likely subscribers are to experience fatigue.

Why does email cadence matter?

Effective email cadence engages prospects and steadily moves them closer to a buying decision.

Unless you consider cadence part of your email marketing strategy, you risk:

• Reaching out to prospects too often

• Not reaching out to prospects enough

• Sending poorly timed emails that lead to low engagement and open rates

Smart Insights data shows that timing and frequency affect engagement. Open rates typically peak early in the morning and early to mid evening before tailing off late at night.

Here are the figures from this research:

Here are some of the other email marketing metrics influenced by cadence:

• Click-through rates. The more people who see and read your email content, the more traffic you’re likely to get to your website.

• Unsubscribe rates. Not overwhelming subscribers and only providing helpful information when needed means subscribers are less likely to unsubscribe.

• Conversion rates. When you provide valuable information at the right time, prospects are more likely to convert.

Ultimately, finding the right cadence for each campaign improves your email marketing ROI and makes your business more profitable.

Email cadence vs. email frequency: what’s the difference?

Email cadence covers timing and sequence. Email frequency is how often a marketer or sales rep sends emails.

In other words, email frequency only determines the number of emails subscribers get in a given period. It doesn’t involve when they arrive.

Another related term is sales cadence, which describes the planned sequence and timing of all interactions between a salesperson and a prospect, not just emails. Sales cadence includes phone calls, social media contact, meetings and sales demos.

A real email cadence example: Way2Connect Solutions + a SaaS Startup

Way2Connect Solutions worked with a mid-market SaaS company to overhaul its cold and nurture email outreach by building a structured email cadence.

Over 90 days, the company implemented a sequence of follow-up emails that turned inconsistent results into predictable engagement.

Here’s a simplified breakdown of the email cadence:

Instead of sending one email and then stopping, the sequence maintained timing and consistent value across multiple touches.

The results:

• Reply rates increased from ~2 % to ~15 %

• Positive replies (like booking meetings, pricing talks, demos) increased by ~8 %

• Weekly qualified meetings more than tripled

• A predictable pipeline replaced random spikes in engagement

These results show how a planned cadence improved outcomes for the SaaS company.

7 email cadence best practices: how to strike the perfect balance

Finding the correct email cadence almost always involves some trial and error.

The more campaigns you run, the greater your understanding of what each subscriber segment expects and responds to will be.

Here are seven email cadence best practices to help you hit your marketing goals sooner.

1. Choose clear objectives

Determine what you want to achieve from your email marketing campaign to ensure your email cadence supports business objectives.

For example, if your goal is to build authority in your industry, a regular newsletter packed with valuable updates and thought-leadership content is ideal.

Consistency helps newsletters become a familiar part of recipients’ weeks, so sending weekly emails at the same time on the same days is a logical cadence to encourage prospects through your sales funnel.

If you aim to build hype and drive website traffic around an imminent product launch, sending daily emails over a much shorter period (i.e., less than a week) may help you close deals. For a higher sending frequency like this, vary the types of content you send to keep your list engaged.

2. Segment your audience

Segmenting your audience allows you to apply different cadences to the same email campaign to increase effectiveness.

Segmenting means breaking your email list into smaller groups based on factors like customer demographics, behaviors and location.

In Pipedrive, for example, you can group contacts by behavior, stage or deal status. You can then assign each segment its own tailored email sequence.

Here’s an example of customer segmentation in Pipedrive, where labels categorize leads based on their willingness to buy:

By segmenting leads in this way, you can deliver more relevant messages across your email campaigns.

For instance, you might send time-sensitive offers or product demos to hot leads but educational content or nurture emails to cold leads.

There’s little reason to vary the frequency of your emails across two similar audience segments (because you’ll likely still want to get the same message across). However, you can tweak the timing to suit people in different time zones.

3. Put content quality and engagement first

A well-planned email cadence ensures that personalized emails reach leads at the right time of day, boosting open rates and engagement

If people won’t open or read your messages, regardless of when you send them, one or both of the following will happen:

• Your time spent choosing a cadence will go to waste

• You won’t have any accurate data on cadence performance

The simplest and most effective way to make email content more engaging is to personalize it. Make recipients feel like your messages are for them so they’re more likely to open and value your efforts. You can then confidently work on the cadence.

Here are a few ways to personalize your emails:

• Incorporating recipients’ names and other personal data

• Including product recommendations based on previous purchases

• Referencing local events

Personalization is another reason to segment your audience with an email marketing tool.

The right software will make sending relevant content to the right people much easier and faster, maximizing engagement. Manually achieving the same level of personalization can eat up hours every week.

4. Experiment with different content formats

Varying the format of your emails helps your cadence stay engaging, prevents fatigue and increases the chances that each touchpoint adds value.

For example, if you send three similar plain-text emails every week to the same subscriber group, recipients may get bored and start ignoring some messages. Worse still, they could unsubscribe or report your content as spam, damaging your email deliverability.

Alternatively, you could use the same cadence but vary your content formats to include:

• One plain-text newsletter

• One image-based product promotion

• One interactive survey

Your audience will likely stay engaged for longer with a variety of content hitting their inboxes. This tactic also allows you to keep a higher cadence without losing subscribers or interest.

Like cadence, choosing the right content types involves trial and error. Experiment with a few of the following formats to see which delivers the best results:

• Welcome emails

• Testimonials and user reviews

• How-to guides and tutorials

• Case studies and customer stories

• Seasonal sales promotions

• Event invitations and reminders

• Event and transaction follow-up emails

• Company and product updates

• Curated industry news roundups

• Behind-the-scenes content

Mixing content formats keeps your audience engaged and maximizes the impact of every message.

5. A/B test a range of cadences

A/B testing (or split testing) involves comparing two versions of something to see which performs better, like two different email cadences.

It’s a definitive way to determine which timings, frequencies and content formats maximize engagement and minimize unsubscribes.

Here’s a breakdown of how A/B testing works:

A/B testing takes some careful configuration at first. Fortunately, you can use specialist email marketing tools to help.

Here’s a basic A/B testing process to get you up and running:

1. Identify the test variable. Decide what aspect of your email cadence to test (e.g., weekly versus bi-weekly).

2. Create variations. Develop two versions of your email campaign, differing only in the email cadence (e.g., weekly and bi-weekly, or changing the call to action).

3. Segment your audience. Divide your email list into two random but equal segments.

4. Send the emails. Send version A (weekly) to one segment and version B (bi-weekly) to the other.

5. Monitor and analyze. Track open, click-through and unsubscribe rates for each segment.

6. Choose the winner. Identify the cadence that performed better based on your predefined metrics.

7. Implement changes. Adjust your email cadence according to the results of the A/B test and continue to optimize over time.

The more A/B tests you run, the better you’ll understand what your audience wants from your marketing campaigns and when they want it. These insights help you build trust and boost engagement.

6. Let subscribers choose email frequency (and unsubscribe)

Giving subscribers control over their email cadence can increase long-term subscriptions and improve the subscriber experience.

Imagine that most of your audience is happy to receive two emails per week. However, some feel that’s too often.

Without a frequency setting, their only options are to:

• Keep receiving too many messages and ignoring or deleting those they don’t want to read, which may give them an unfavorable experience with your brand

• Unsubscribe and end their relationship with your brand (43% of respondents to a Zero Bounce survey cited receiving too many messages as the main reason they unsubscribe from email lists)

Adding a third option – to switch to weekly emails – encourages people to stay subscribed (and connected to your brand) on their terms.

This process involves adding a link at the bottom of every message with text reading something like “manage my email preferences”. Direct this link to a page where subscribers can change settings regarding what they receive and how often.

Take a look at the example from a Livestorm webinar invite below:

Some email cadence software can automate the process of letting subscribers change their frequency settings.

If your software doesn’t offer this feature, give recipients a form to express their opinions. You can then change their subscription settings manually and gauge consensus across your email list.

7. Invest in intuitive email marketing tools for support

The best email marketing software removes the stress of running email campaigns so you can focus on finer details, like finding the right frequency and timing.

For example, here are four ways Pipedrive’s Campaigns add-on helps users find the perfect email cadences:

An email marketing tool that connects to your customer relationship management (CRM) software lets you unify sales and marketing data. You can source prospects’ information when building campaigns and effortlessly funnel your most engaged subscribers into your sales pipeline.

For instance, you could use your CRM to spot patterns between email cadence and sentiment. If you increase your cadence of after-sales emails and CRM data suggests potential customers are becoming happier, you’ll know they value the extra information you provide.

If customer sentiment suffers, it’s time to revisit your cadence.

Email Cadence FAQs

Final thoughts

There’s no one-size-fits-all approach to email cadence. However, continual testing and tweaking help you understand audience preferences. As a result, you can build winning campaigns faster and more consistently.

Pipedrive’s segmentation, campaign automation and analytics help fine-tune your email delivery for better results. Sign up for the free 14-day trial to optimize your email cadence and convert more customers.