Email Cadence Guide: How Many Emails Should be Sent per Week or Month

Email MarketingNataly Birch • August 23, 2024 • 14 minutes READ

Humans are creatures of habit. We develop behaviors that will stay for a lifetime. We find it comfortable and stress-free to do the same thing. In this article, we’ll explore what email cadence is, why it’s essential, and how you can fine-tune it to maximize your marketing efforts and strengthen your connection with subscribers, who like you, like habits.

But what does that have to do with email marketing and building a solid brand identity through one of the most popular means of digital communication? The success of your email campaigns heavily depend on how well you know and understand your subscribers’ habits, including behavior, patterns, and preferences. In marketing, this means understanding the perfect timing, frequency, and sequence when reaching subscribers with a brand message.

Here’s the proof. Do you know that one of the most common reasons people unsubscribe is because they receive too many emails? On the other hand, too few emails from a brand results in low engagement and a decline in the subscription list.

Brands should have the right email cadence to avoid sending too many or too few emails. The latter describes the ideal circumstances for companies to get high open rates, engagement, conversions, and leads. Perfecting this factor of an email campaign means sending the right email to the right subscriber at the right time.

What is email cadence? Why is it important? How do you determine the right one for your business? Let’s dive deeper into this topic and define the core principles of structuring a perfect email cadence.

What Is Email Cadence?

Email cadence is the pulse of your email marketing campaign, strategy, and presence in the channel. It describes the rhythm of companies communicating with their clients. It consists of several factors: the number of emails a company sends, the order in which it sends them, timing, and frequency.

Email cadence aims to help companies conduct email campaigns tailored to customers’ interests and daily patterns, meeting their preferences and relevant needs. When neglected, it may easily ruin all the efforts, as emails received at the most inconvenient time are regularly left without proper attention. Conversely, when it is perfect, even the primitive informative blast may drive engagement.

To understand whether email cadence works for your company, you need to check out analytics. Email cadence is perfect if you constantly get high-key email performance metrics and low unsubscribe rates and complaints.

Determining the right email cadence is a challenge. This aspect differs for every niche, company, product, marketing goal, target audience, and segment. There is no one-size-fits-all solution, but there are time-proven steps that companies may take to define it correctly.

Difference Between Email Cadence and Email Frequency

Email cadence and frequency are often used interchangeably. Although closely related and refer to similar concepts, they are not the same. It is important to understand their distinctions to see how they positively or negatively affect email campaign performance and correlate with each other.

Email frequency determines how often a company sends emails to its subscribers. It might also refer to sending windows when a company’s emails are sent. On the other hand, it determines the number of emails subscribers get in a given period, so it covers not only promo emails but transactional ones like abandoned cart notifications, follow-ups, thank-you notes, and others.

Email cadence is a general term that describes the rhythm of strategic patterns with which a company sends emails to its subscribers. It reflects all tiny details of customer behavior patterns and preferences, including timing, number of emails, sequence, and frequency. It characterizes when emails arrive, how often, and in what order.

Email cadence influences email frequency as it provides an informative base for companies to plan their email marketing strategy and content so as not to overwhelm readers.

Databox study (visual snippet)

 

Importance of Email Cadence

Different surveys demonstrate the importance of determining the right email cadence for a business and its particular campaign, target audience, and goal. Here are a few stats to consider:

• Over 80% of subscribers prefer to receive promotional newsletters from their beloved brands at least once a month, whereas 15% of respondents said they would be glad to receive them daily, Campaign Monitor
• Email campaigns conducted during weekdays, especially in the first half of the day, garner the most responses and secure the highest opens, engagement, and conversions, Databox
• Almost 65% of email marketers agree that they adjust their send frequency for less engaged subscribers.

Customers within the same target audience have different preferences, needs, behavior patterns, and expectations. These subtle distinctions impact the email cadence for each subscriber segment, influencing the email campaign’s performance.

For instance, if you send emails monthly, but subscribers want to receive them weekly or daily, they become less engaged with your brand. Conversely, if you bombard your subscribers with emails daily, but your recipients cannot tolerate the volume of information, they will unsubscribe.

Email cadence is important because of the diverse subscribers’ preferences, needs, and behavior patterns. Catering to these tiny yet crucial factors allows the company to find the right amount of emails, timing, order, and frequency to reach subscribers with the message so that it feels meaningful, valuable, and, most importantly, welcoming and anticipated.

The right email cadence stands behind customer satisfaction as well. It directly impacts your customer relationship and overall brand image and reputation. Suppose you constantly cater to subscribers’ needs and respect their desires. In that case, you might live up to their expectations, instill trust in communication, and reinforce the brand’s identity and positioning in the market. Strong relationships benefit the company in many ways: boost engagement, enlarge the subscription list, increase credibility, and give a competitive advantage.

As email marketing is a two-way road, email cadence also influences email marketing strategy. It determines how often, in what order, and how many emails subscribers want to receive from the brand during a given period. Companies may adjust their email marketing plan and schedule based on this data.

For example, suppose subscribers feel comfortable receiving only one email per month. In that case, you may introduce event email marketing, as every month has a holiday or festivity perfect for tapping into the subscriber’s emotional state and engaging through meaningful and valuable messages.

Finally, the perfect email cadence helps to optimize key metrics.

• It ensures high open rates. Even if you fail with good inbox placement, subscribers still have time and desire to open and read digital correspondence from you.
• It increases click-through rates. Again, if your email arrives when your recipients have time or are ready to open and read it, they will likely engage with the content and links.
• It boosts conversions and leads. The right message, delivered at the right moment during the buyer’s journey, may easily push subscribers to act.
• It decreases the unsubscribe rate as your email correspondence does not look intrusive, annoying, or overwhelming.

Databox (visual snippet)

Email Cadence Examples

The simplest example of email cadence is one that caters to subscribers’ preferences in timing. For instance, take stats provided by Databox. The team has discovered that Tuesday is the best day of the week to send marketing emails, as it sees the highest positive engagement. So, if your subscribers feel comfortable receiving emails from your brand once a week, you should craft email campaigns and send them every Tuesday. This way, your email cadence will be four emails per month or 48 emails per week.

Another good example of email cadence considers subscribers’ demographics, particularly age. According to studies done by Moosend, older subscribers who work usually respond well to email from 8 to 9 a.m., as they prefer to check their digital correspondence before work. In contrast, undergraduates and high school students prefer to check their emails at noon or afternoon.

So, if your company sells school inventory, you might divide your target audience into two segments: parents of K-12 children and college students, and cater to their specific preferences. You might email the first group in the morning and the second in the afternoon.

Email cadence can also be triggered and include transactional emails. A good case in point is an email strategy that keeps customers engaged after a purchase. Companies constantly nurture and lead their subscribers to build loyalty and ensure repeat purchases by reaching them with informative and promotional emails skillfully scattered over a certain period.

Challenges to Determine the Perfect Email Cadence

There are many email cadence examples. However, it is getting tricky to determine the one that is right for your company and email campaign. No one-size-fits solutions exist; even statistics discovered by other brands or ESPs might not work for you as intended. The reasons for that are simple:

First, individual habits differ based on multiple factors, such as demographics, gender, location, needs, preferences, professional setting, and mood.

Second, email cadence depends on the type of product. Is it seasonal or general? Physical or virtual?

Third, email cadence may differ from market niche to market niche. For example, if you sell seasonal products like inflatables, beach toys, and swimwear, your email cadence may vary depending on the time of the year, as late spring and summer are your most active periods. Companies selling products with a steady demand may have a stable email cadence during the year.

Fourth, email cadence may depend on brand identity, mission, and vision. If you want to establish yourself as a serious company, you might practice occasional email communication with the audience. Conversely, brands with amicable, friendly, and joyful personalities may often reach their subscribers with positive or heartwarming e-blasts.

Finally, email cadence may vary because of email marketing goals. Suppose you want to promote and sell products. You may benefit from more aggressive email sequences and ipso facto energetic email cadence in that case. At the same time, building relationships and turning subscribers into fans requires companies to go slow and establish themselves as unobtrusive partners through a calm email cadence.

Therefore, what works great for one company may not work for another. The only way to find the perfect email marketing stride is to analyze market segments and email performance to define patterns and preferences. It is also crucial to track email campaign metrics and subscribers’ trends to adjust accordingly.

Let’s consider the basic steps of determining the perfect email cadence for your brand, email campaign, and subscribers.

How to Determine Perfect Email Cadence for Your Subscribers, Company, and Email Marketing Strategy

How many emails should be sent per week or month? In what order should you send your newsletters? What time of the day is the best to reach your subscribers and ensure a high open rate? There is no exact answer since every situation requires a unique email cadence. How do you determine the right one? Follow these basic steps and best practices as they underlie the foundation for finding your email marketing rhythm.

Start with a Thorough Understanding of Your Brand Identity

Everything begins with self-discovery and self-knowledge. A company’s branded interactions with its consumers influence their behavior by aligning with their self-perceptions. Digital newsletters with branded messages that arrive at the right moment to the right person develop trust and instill confidence. Providing value with each outreach, they build on a positive moment and secure much-needed positive reactions to achieve marketing goals.

Therefore, understanding the psychology behind a company’s identity is crucial to defining the right email cadence, image, and reputation for the business. Start by digging deep into your brand identity. Thoroughly examine its personality, mission, vision, value, philosophy, and unique selling proposition.

Ask yourself, how do you want to be perceived by your consumers? Do you want to look like a guy next door who shares valuable information every week or day? Or do you want to play cool and exude elegance, refinement, or sophistication by emailing monthly?

Brand positioning and personality will dictate what email cadence best suits your company’s image, identity, reputation, and market positioning.

Databox study (visual snippet)

Set Clear Email Marketing Objectives

Email cadence largely depends on your current email marketing strategy and goals. After you decide how your company wants to be perceived by consumers, setting the correct targets for email marketing is crucial to ensure you move in the right direction.

Goal setting is perhaps one of the most critical steps in determining the right email cadence. It gives a company a clear focus, channels efforts in the right direction, provides criteria for assessing your solutions’ effectiveness, and helps employees make informed decisions.

Regarding email cadence, clear email marketing objectives allow the email marketing team to create a roadmap that identifies risks, weaknesses, and strengths. It gives direction on how to handle and manage successful and failed situations.

Traditionally, setting email marketing goals requires the company to do these two steps:

• Define long-term aims. They should reflect the company’s prime mission and vision and set the course for the next 3 to 5 years.
• Determine short-term aims. They might differ from long-term objectives, but they should assist in achieving them. As a rule, they are so-called SMART goals achievable within a month, season, or calendar year.

Focus on short-term goals as they dictate the strategy behind email cadence for your current email marketing campaign. Here are typical questions you might ask yourself to determine the right targets:

• Do you want to increase traffic to your landing page?
• Do you want to increase overall engagement?
• Do you want to expand your subscription base?
• Do you want to nurture your subscribers?
• Do you want to turn subscribers into brand advocates?
• Do you want to promote a new product or a new seasonal collection?
• Do you want to get rid of products?
• Do you want to reinforce brand identity?
• Do you want to re-engage lapsed customers?

Clarifying your goal is crucial to finding the right email cadence aligned with your business goals.

Analyze Your Target Audience

The target audience is another vital part of the equation. Thoroughly analyzing and tracking customers’ preferences, needs, demands, behavior patterns, and every other trend underlies the success of determining the right email cadence. After all, your subscribers will ultimately decide whether the frequency of your email interactions is tolerable for them.

Understanding subscribers’ minds allows companies to deliver relevant and valuable messages at the right time and secure a positive reaction that might help achieve short-term goals like encouraging users to visit the landing page or purchase.

So, what can you do here? Analyzing and tracking the target audience is a multi-step process. Depending on your current goal, you might need a knowledgeable base about customers’ purchase history, behavior patterns, and seasonal preferences.

Collecting data about their age, gender, income, location, occupation, marital status, professional setting, and education would also help. Customer psychographics (which cover behaviors, attitudes, opinions, and preferences) may also provide useful information for adjusting email cadence.

In addition, companies should be perfectly aware of where their customers are in their buyer’s journey. Every stage (Awareness, Consideration, and Decision) defines what types of emails should be sent.

This step typically entails a combination of qualitative and quantitative research methods. These include everything from conducting surveys through interactive emails to understanding the audience’s motivations, challenges, and decision-making processes through professional software.

SimilarWeb (visual snippet)

Personalize Email Cadence through Segmentation

Deep analysis of your target audience’s minds and behaviors underlies a solid foundation for the next step, which is segmenting your subscription list. This stage is vital in defining the perfect email cadence.

Companies may break subscription lists into groups with shared preferences in timing and frequency. That makes it much easier to create targeted goal-specific email sequences that deliver the right content to the right people at the right time. In addition, they can create relevant and valuable content for each segment.

Last but not least, wholly-grained segmentation is the basis of effective tracking and analyzing the performance of your email cadence for each specific group. It gives valuable insights into what is working well and what is not, helping you make an informed decision about improving your email cadence for specific groups.

Do A/B Tests to Find the Best Email Cadence for Specific Market Segments

Testing various email cadences for different individual groups is not only for companies starting and lacking information but also for well-established brands with a wealth of data and experience.

This stage generally involves companies defining at least two email cadences for each group and testing their efficiency. You might get a positive result immediately or gradually move towards the perfect option. Either way, split testing gives you a better idea of what your audience prefers and what email cadence might work at this given period.

The basic routine includes these steps:

• Choose one aspect of your email cadence to test: timing, frequency, or sequence.
• Create two options. For instance, you might want to test timing by sending emails early in the morning or afternoon, or you might want to test frequency by crafting email campaigns weekly or bi-weekly.
• Decide what segment you will probe.
• Create corresponding digital newsletters. Use Postcards, one of the most popular email builders to lessen the burden. Craft professionally-looking email designs within minutes and test your subscribers’ reactions to your timing, frequency, and sequence.
• Send emails.
• Monitor and analyze the performance.
• Choose the best option for your brand, campaign, and individual group.

Track Metrics and Review Analytics

As subscribers’ preferences constantly change, your winning email cadence may become irrelevant or obsolete. The way out is to track key email campaign performance metrics, like open rates, click-through rates, unsubscribe rates, and overall engagement. These factors determine whether your email cadence is helping or hurting your campaign.

Companies would also benefit from discovering and inspecting crucial information, such as what day of the week customers engage with the email and brand the most. What time of day has the highest open rate? What order of emails generates the most engagement? What number of emails do subscribers tolerate?

Regular tracking metrics and analytics save the company from stagnation and degradation of email cadence. It offers crucial insight into what should be done to improve and reinforce it.

4 Best Practices for Perfecting Email Cadence

Here are four best practices to reinforce email cadence and ensure it does its job perfectly.

Use Professional Software

Professional email marketing software is the driving force of all successful email campaigns. Automation, analytics, tracking, personalization, segmentation, email creation – everything could be done with the help of specialized email marketing tools. They assist companies in every effort, including determining the right email cadence.

There are many tools, but at a minimum, you need a reliable campaign automation platform, email segmentation tool, and email marketing analytics with AI tools. It is also crucial to have a drag-and-drop email design builder like Postcards.

Postcards comes with multiple hand-crafted, fully responsive blocks easily managed through a hyper-intuitive drag-and-drop interface. It lets you create a library of email templates to test different aspects of email cadences, just what you need for the A/B testing stage.

Furthermore, it is a lifesaver for those who practice high email frequency. Within minutes, you can create modern, personalized, conversion-focused digital newsletters or use a template from a library that works consistently across all mail providers and devices. You can download or export the code to your email marketing platform with several clicks.

Postcards Email Builder

Personalize Emails

As email cadence largely depends on engagement and customer satisfaction, one of the best ways to reinforce it is to practice hyper-personalized approaches. Putting your customers first is one of the most effective strategies for securing positive reactions and building strong customer relationships.

Therefore, customize email content according to the subscriber’s specific needs. Start by addressing customers by name and adding offers or discounts relevant to their purchase history. It would also help to craft specific subject lines and email preheaders, align messages with the buyer’s journey, build automated email sequences for each stage, customize transactional emails, and trigger personalized emails at important moments.

Send Surveys

People love to be heard. They are eager to give their opinions about a brand, its products, its experience, and, most importantly, its interactions through email channels. Therefore, sending survey emails is one of the simplest, easiest, and most reliable ways to gather data on how your customers tolerate your email cadence.

With an interactive approach, dynamic quizzes, and gamified experiences, you might ask your subscribers to review sending frequency, email sequence, and timing, leaving quite a positive impression. You may even amplify the effect by sending a thank-you note with a discount or a gift right after the survey email. Not only will you please your subscribers, but you will also reinforce the brand’s reputation as a company that appreciates customers’ time.

Conduct this sort of campaign once a season or half-year to track trends and gain valuable insight into adjusting your current email cadence.

Let Subscribers Choose their Email Cadence

If survey emails are insufficient to determine the best email cadence, you should go big and give your subscribers total control of the situation. Giving subscribers the freedom to choose the best timing and frequency for their needs and preferences builds strong relationships, keeps them from unsubscribing, and ensures your email cadence works at full power.

To realize this, you may email your subscribers to set their preferences. Ideally, it should be done right after the welcome message triggered by the subscriber’s consent to receive emails from your company.

It would also help to direct your subscribers to the preference center on your website and let them change their preferences whenever they want. This flexibility benefits customers and reinforces the brand’s positioning by increasing customer satisfaction.

Conclusion

Mastering your email cadence is the key to a successful email marketing strategy. By carefully balancing the frequency and timing of your messages, you can keep your audience engaged without overwhelming them. Remember, the right cadence will vary depending on your audience and goals, so don’t hesitate to experiment and refine your approach. With a well-optimized email cadence, you’ll boost engagement and build lasting relationships with your subscribers, driving long-term success for your brand.

Your subscribers are your company’s lifeblood and one of the most valuable possessions and resources in your marketing toolset. They generate much-needed revenue, give the company a competitive advantage, and reinforce the brand’s image and positioning in the market. Therefore, it is crucial to ensure your subscribers are happy with your communication in the email channel.

Customer satisfaction is tricky, but it can be achieved by crafting valuable content and, most importantly, delivering it to the right person at the right moment. In marketing terms, this means companies must have the right email cadence.

Email cadence is the rhythm of strategic patterns a company uses to send emails to subscribers. It helps build strong customer relationships, meet their needs and expectations, and achieve email marketing goals.

Companies should take various steps to determine it right, from analyzing the target audience’s behavior patterns to setting short-term email marketing goals to tracking and analyzing key email campaign performance metrics. This process is daunting, challenging, and time-consuming but yields great results.