What is email cadence? Everything marketers need to know

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Email campaigns involve much more than just writing a text and hitting send.

One of the most crucial components is email cadence – the pulse, rhythm, and actions taken to make a successful email campaign. In other words, by sending the right emails to the right customers at the right time, you can get the most out of your email marketing efforts.

Let’s dive deeper into what an email cadence is and lay out the key principles for structuring one successfully.

The success of an email campaign can depend on the effectiveness of the cadence.
If it's too intrusive, obnoxious, bahamas phone number material or lacking direction, you may miss opportunities to guide leads through the buying process.

If potential customers feel harassed or confused by constant, irrelevant newsletters and promotions, they probably won’t stick around to hear what you have to say.

Email Marketing Frequency

In a recent HubSpot Blogs survey of 300 marketers, a whopping 95% indicated that their email marketing strategy was effective in 2021. Let’s take a look at where (and when) they’re seeing success.


Email Frequency

When it comes to frequency, there are a few statistics to consider:

Emails sent on Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays get the most engagement.
Marketing emails sent on Tuesdays from 9am to 12pm have the highest engagement, followed by those sent on Mondays and Wednesdays at the same time.
The weekend is a dead zone for engagement: Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays have the lowest open and click rates.

Another study by Databox found that 33% of marketers send emails weekly, while 26% send emails “several times a month.” Additionally, 63% said they adjust their sending frequency for less engaged subscribers.


graph showing how frequently marketers send emails

Of course, some marketers send emails more than once a week, while others send less. As you'll see later, the "right" frequency isn't an exact formula, but depends on your business and your audience.

Here are some examples and best practices you can employ to ensure your next campaign's email cadence is as good as it can be.

Email Cadence Examples

An example of email cadence is tailoring the timing of your messages to appeal to a specific demographic.

For example, let's say you run a sunglasses company and you want to target an 18-25 year old demographic through an email campaign.

Your research indicates that consumers in your target demographic typically check their email first thing in the morning, between 6 and 9 am.
As a result, you send your emails at 5:45 am, so they are among the first your consumers see when they check their inboxes.

Another example is tailoring messaging frequency to a particular demographic.
Let’s say you want your sunglasses company to appeal to consumers aged 55 and older.

Your consumer research shows that shoppers in that demographic prefer to receive emails less frequently. To increase engagement, you decide to send them every two weeks.



Email Cadence Best Practices


Understand your goals and your client's mindset

What do you expect from your email cadence? You need to understand where you’re trying to drive your leads and customers. Are you looking to improve traffic to your blog? Drive e-commerce sales? Schedule meetings? Close deals?

An email cadence guides buyers from point A to point B. You can’t do that if you have no idea what “point B” is. Your end goal will dictate the strategy behind your cadence.

If you’re trying to increase traffic to your blog, you stand to lose more subscribers than you would if you were trying to court a bunch of leads to schedule demos.

If you’re sending emails just for the sake of sending them, your cadence will be aimless and random. Plus, you’ll waste a lot of time and resources on campaigns that go nowhere.

Pro tip : Create a goal sheet and design SMART objectives for your email campaign to keep yourself on track for success.

On the other hand, in addition to determining your marketing goals, you need to understand the mind of your consumers.

The goal of having an email cadence is to hone in on messages that will resonate most with a specific customer at a given time. That means impersonal emails aren’t the best option.

You need to send your recipients something relevant about who they are as customers. That often means understanding where they are in the buyer’s journey.

Also called the customer journey, it’s the process buyers go through to learn about, evaluate, and ultimately decide to purchase a new product or service. It’s broken down into three stages: awareness, consideration, and decision.

You can’t expect to target buyers at all three stages with the same message and have it reach them right away. Different stages—and engagement levels within those stages—warrant different messages.

Plus, thanks to the wonders of automation , it’s possible to coordinate this type of strategy. Different types of email and marketing automation software allow you to set up the right infrastructure to tailor email

content and timing

to fit the behavior and interests of different leads. Pro Tip: HubSpot's free email automation tool allows marketers to easily create and schedule personalized, aesthetically pleasing marketing emails.

Campaign Assistant(campaign assistant) is also available to generate email subject lines that grab the recipient's