What Is Email Cadence?

If you are trying to improve the effectiveness of your emails and you are confident about the content and deliverability of your emails, you might want to check out the frequency & timings of your emails.

Just like you would not take any meetings after a certain time of the day or won't entertain any sales calls, your customers also have timings for checking their emails. There is no single time that works for everyone. You need to find an email cadence that works for your business.

Email Cadence is the frequency and timing of your emails that suit your audience and business goals. The aim of following an email cadence is to stay on top of your customers mind and reach them at the right time when they are more likely to take an action.

Your business, strategy and audience are unique to you so a cadence that works for someone else might not work for you. However, here are a few best practices to take full advantage of following an email cadence.

Email Cadence Best Practices

Identify your email marketing goals

Find out what you are trying to achieve by sending emails to your audience. Is it traffic to your blog where you publish weekly? Or is it to provide value so you can sell your products once in a while? Or is it to nurture your B2B leads?

Match your cadence with your email marketing goals. If the cadence is not working to get closer to the goal, test out another hypothesis.

For example, if your goal is to convert trial users to paid users of your app, it might make sense to send them an email everyday talking about how to use the app, benefits and something valuable they can take away.

Identify your customer journey & behaviours

Understand the steps or milestones your customer might go through from being aware of your brand to becoming a paid customer.

For example, if you are interacting with another business, via email marketing, for them emails on sunday or outside work hours might not work as they are not active during that time. Business owners are quick to make a decision so if they haven't been convinced after 7-8 emails, it's probably best to not send another email until next month.

Individual customers on the other hand might be much more actively checking their inbox during weekends or scrolling through personal inbox just after work. If your customers are impulsive shoppers, it might be good to stay on top of mind by sending frequent emails.

Let your subscribers know what to expect

Once you have set your email frequency and timings, let your subscribers know in the welcome email on when to expect your emails. This is especially effective if you are running a newsletter. Tell them they will receive your emails on X day of the week at X time. It will keep your super fans motivated to check out your newsletter and will form a habit for others.

You may deviate from your normal frequency based on a campaign you are running or anything going on in the world. For example, if you are launching an online course you can increase the frequency of emails to 2 per day for the last few days of the launch. Or if you know there is an important event happening such as an election or important celebrations, you might want to reduce the frequency for a few days.

Let your audience choose a frequency

If you are sending emails too frequently or not at suitable times for a certain set of audience, it's possible that they will unsubscribe. But another way to keep those still on your list is to give the control in their hands and let them choose from a set of frequency & even kind of emails they would prefer.

For example, some people might like a weekly digest instead of daily updates. Or some people might like to receive emails only about certain topics and unsubscribe from promo emails.

You can do this at three places:

• At the time of subscription
• Provide a 'update email preferences' link in the footer of your emails
• Let them make a choice to receive less emails on unsubscription page

How To Measure Email Cadence?

To determine whether your email cadence is working or not, you will have to look at key metrics provided by your email marketing software on your campaigns.

Depending upon your goal, you can choose to give more weightage to one metric vs the others. For example, if your goal is to reduce churn from your list, then keep the number of unsubscribers as the key metric to focus on when deciding about cadence.

Let's look at different metrics that are related to email cadence:

• Open Rates: What day of the week and time of the day do you receive more openings? Does it reduce when you send more emails? Or does it help you stay on top of your customers' mind and lead to more sales/clicks?
• Click-through Rates: If driving traffic to a blog or website is your primary motive, then keep this as a key metric when deciding cadence. Open rates might be low or unsubscribers might be high, but if this is helping your drive more traffic that means it resonates with your ideal audience.
• Unsubscribes: If your unsubscribers are increasing you might be missing on contacting them at the right time and thus they will unsubscribe from your email after a while.

Wrap Up

Email cadence is just one of the many factors that influence your  email marketing ROI. it's certainly important but should not be prioritised above the value, content and experience you provide to your subscribers.

So many factors should not complicate email marketing for you. And that's why you need a tool such as SendX to help you manage everything from content, design, list, scheduling from one platform.

The best part about SendX is that you will be able to send unlimited emails and avail all the features, irrespective of the pricing tier. So you will be able to find out the best cadence for your emails. Before you commit, you can try it for free for 14 days. To sign up, you don't need a credit card.