Finding the correct email cadence for your target audience is the key to improving email marketing results. 

Designing beautiful email campaigns isn’t enough. You need to pay attention to the patterns and timings you use to send emails to your target audience. 

After all, customers unsubscribe if they receive too many emails. Therefore, you need to find the right cadence to ensure they don’t unsubscribe to your emails. 

Let’s understand what is email cadence and why it matters. 

What is EmailAn email (or electronic mail) is a method of exchanging communications through the internet. It is one of the most used features on the web and the number one mean... Cadence?

Email cadence is the process of finding the best email sending frequency that increases engagement from your subscribers.

Campaignmonitor.com

In addition, getting the right frequency means fewer people will unsubscribe. It’ll also increase your emails open rates.

However, there’s no universal rule that applies to email cadence. Therefore, you need to understand what’s the best time to send a follow-up email for your brand. This entirely depends on the type of email list you have and how active your subscribers are. 

Therefore, to create a successful email campaign, every subscriber on your list will have a slightly varied difference in preference. This determines when and how they choose to engage with the content they’re receiving. 

15% of email subscribers prefer receiving promo emails every day while 86% prefer to receive them monthly.

Marketingsherpa.com

This means you need to provide your subscribers with an easy method to control the frequency of emails. 

If your subscribers wish to receive daily content but you’re sending content monthly, your list will shrink. On the other hand, your list will shrink if you send emails very often and it starts to annoy your subscribers. 

How to Measure Email Cadence

Finding the right balance takes time. Therefore, you need to constantly monitor your click-through rates and unsubscribers. 

In addition, you should test different types of content in different sending patterns. Good levels of engagement mean a good email cadence and vice versa. 

While content is the primary determining factor for recipient engagement and list growth, the email cadence is just as likely to influence unsubscribe rates.

The worst mistake most email marketers make is to get the sending and timing patterns for the campaign wrong. 

Therefore, it’s best to make small tweaks to your existing campaign and monitor the progress. 

A Step-by-Step Guide to Email Cadence

You can easily make the most of your email cadence if you design the correct email cadence. Here’s a step-by-step guide to help you create an optimal email cadence for your brand:

1. Understand Your Goals. Take a few minutes to define your goals before you start designing your email campaign. Do you want to boost website traffic? Or do you want to generate more leads? Understand your goal clearly.
2. Get to Know Your Prospects. Personalized emails are one of the best ways to boost engagement. Research your subscribers’ preferences and pain points. Understand what they want so that you can send them relevant newsletters and promotions.
3. Segment Your Audience. Relevance is the key to designing a winning email strategy. Therefore, send emails to people who’re genuinely interested in your products and services. 
4. Monitor the Frequency of Sending Emails. The frequency of sending emails differs based on your brand’s niche. Research your competitors and understand what they’re doing. This will give you an idea of what email cadence works in your industry. 
5. Measure Results. As an email marketer, it’s important that you regularly measure results. This helps you understand what’s working and what’s not. Use an email marketing or CRM tool such as MailSenpai. It will help you understand and monitor vital metrics such as bounce rate, click rate, open rate, etc. 

6 Email Cadence Best Practices

The goal of these 6 email cadence best practices is to provide you with tricks and tools to figure out the best email cadence. It’s best to start by understanding your email marketing goals and metrics that matter the most to you. Experiment and test until you know which sending frequencies work for your campaigns.

1. Determine Your Goals. Don’t send emails just for the sake of sending them. It’s going to be haphazard and aimless. You’ll waste valuable resources on email campaigns that will give no results. Understand your goals to be able to create a killer strategy.
2. Understand Subscriber’s Mindset. Your email should resonate with each subscriber. This means you need to send highly personalized emails. Take time to understand what your subscriber wants before flooding their inbox with emails.
3. Don’t Be Afraid. Understand the difference between being professionally persistent and being pushy. You will lose a few leads initially when you experiment. But, don’t let that fear stop you.
4. Don’t Be Aggressive. It’s wise not to bombard your subscribers with daily emails (unless they’ve requested that). Customers easily get irritated and unsubscribe if you send them emails too frequently. 
5. Offer Subscribers Autonomy. It’s best to give your subscribers the option to control their email frequency. It stops them from unsubscribing and marking your emails as spam.
6. Keep Experimenting. It takes time to get the right email cadence. Study your industry average for email frequency as they provide an excellent place to start. Stick to the email cadence that works for your brand as well as your customers’ interests. 

11 Email Cadence Tips

Here are a few email cadence tips to consider to find the schedule that’s right for you and your audience. 

1. Personalize emails as much as possible. Reach out to customers at the right time with the right message to increase engagement and sales. 
2. Send 1-2 emails every week to keep your subscribers engaged. If you send them emails too frequently, you’ll annoy your customers. On the other hand, if you don’t keep them engaged, they’ll lose interest. 
3. It’s okay to send 4-8 bulk emails every month. Start slow to avoid scaring the subscribers early on. Increase the frequency of emails based on the open rates of your emails. 
4. Be consistent with your email volume. Your ISP will flag you if you send 50 emails one day and 5000 the next. Slowly build the list and use an email automation tool to help you streamline the process. 
5. Send emails at “Off Times”. Keep your subscriber in mind when deciding the time of delivery of your emails. Therefore, it’s best to send emails at times such as 09:47 a.m. or 11:11 a.m. 
6. Pay attention to what your audience is trying to tell you. Pay attention to metrics such as spam, conversion, click and open rates. Optimize your results and understand what your audience is trying to tell you. Through the analysis of metrics, you can easily determine the kind of content, timings and email cadence they prefer. 
7. A/B Test and optimize. Experiment with different images, colours, content, subject lines and CTAs. Therefore, it’s best to maintain a document where you can write down the goals and results of each test. This will help you gather valuable insights about your performance and optimize your campaign.

Bonus Tips: 

• Clean your list regularly. Some people ignore emails rather than unsubscribing. They’re not interested and never will be. Therefore, it’s best to remove people from your list who haven’t interacted with your emails for over six months. 
• Always Deliver Value. Email cadence isn’t everything. Therefore, it’s your duty to deliver relevant and informative content to your audience. Follow email cadence best practices but remember to deliver high-quality, unique emails to your subscribers. 
• Add a survey to your newsletter. Include a quick survey to ask people what they think of your current frequency. In addition, ask them if they prefer receiving more or fewer emails. 
• Focus on VIP recipients. These are people who always open and read your emails. In addition, they even share content with their network. Reward sich recipients with special offers to maintain their interest and show that you value them.

Email Cadence Examples

Looking for a better idea to plan your email cadence? Take inspiration from these email cadence examples.

Sales Hub

This sales email cadence example is from CEO Max Altschuler. It’s an excellent example especially if you’re just starting out.

• Day 1: InMail/Email.
• Day 3: Email in the morning and call in the afternoon.
• Day 5: Call in the morning and call with a voicemail in the afternoon.
• Day 7: Email in the morning and call with a voicemail in the afternoon.
• Day 10: Email and call in the morning.

As you can see, it consists of 10 touchpoints that are spread over 10 days. It’s simple and has the following strengths:

• Utilizes all three main channels i.e. social media, email and phone;
• Leverages the law of immediacy;
• It uses both phone calls and voicemails.

InsideSales.com

This is a lengthier but effective sales process. 

• Day 1: First Email 
• Day 2: First Call, First Voice mail, Second Email 
• Day 7: Second Call 2, Second Voice mail, Third Email
• Day 14: Third Call, Third Voice mail, Fourth Email
• Day 21: Fourth Call, Fourth Voice mail, Fifth Email
• Day 35: Fifth Call, Fifth Voice mail, Sixth Email
• Day 49: Sixth Call, Sixth Voice mail, Seventh Email
• Day 63: Seventh Call, Seventh Voice mail, Eighth Email
• Day 77: Eighth Call, Eighth Voice mail, Ninth Email 

It uses 25 touchpoints that are spread over 77 days (i.e. about two and a half months). It’s one of our favourite email cadence examples because:

• Starts off right with an email on the first day and follow up with a call the following day.
• In addition, it combines voice messages with live phone conversations.

Yotpo

Brandan Juang, the SDR at Yotpo shared his 22-day sales cadence idea that helps him produce consistent results.

• Day 1: Email
• Day 3: Phone
• Day 4: Email
• Day 7: Phone
• Day 7 Email
• Day 10: Phone
• Day 12: Email
• Day 14: Phone
• Day 16: Email
• Day 19: Phone
• Day 21: Phone and Email
• Day 22: Nurture or Repeat

It touches 13 touchpoints over 22 days and we like it because:

• It spreads over 3 weeks. 
• It’s not aggressive but still leverages immediacy.

In Conclusion

By 2022, it’s estimated that 330 billion emails will be sent and received every day. Therefore, it’s important to understand how to leverage one of the largest digital communication channels to your advantage.

Email cadence is one of the most crucial components of an email campaign. In fact, email cadence is the playbook, pace and pulse of the email campaign. 

Therefore, find out the right frequency of emails to boost subscriber engagement and grow your email list. In addition, it will also help you boost sales and develop long-term relations with your subscribers.