Cadence and timing

Send too often and you're spam. Send too slowly and they forget. Good cadence is respectful enough to feel human and frequent enough to stay top of mind. The defaults below work in B2B.

The standard cadence

For a 5-touch sequence over 22-25 days:

Day of week

Best days (by open and reply rate)

Worst days

For high-volume sequences, spread sends across Tuesday/Wednesday/Thursday to avoid your entire campaign competing with itself in the inbox.

Time of day

Best times (recipient local time)

Worst times

The local-time trap

Sending from Pacific time to Eastern prospects at 8am PT = 11am ET. Late morning for the recipient, fine. Sending from Pacific at 8am ET = 5am PT. You're awake at 5am? It looks automated.

Good cold email tools (Instantly, Smartlead) support recipient-timezone sending. Use it. Every email hits at the recipient's 9am regardless of where you are.

Daily volume per mailbox

Covered in detail on multi-inbox rotation. Limits:

Frequency caps

The prospect should never get two emails from you in one day. The sequence automatically handles this, but if you run multiple campaigns, ensure global frequency caps so one prospect doesn't receive email 3 of Campaign A and email 1 of Campaign B on the same day.

Weekly volume distribution

For a 1,500 email/week operation:

Holidays and slow weeks

Emails sent in these periods either get buried or land when your prospect returns to a backed-up inbox. Pause, resume when attention returns.

The A/B test on cadence

Default cadences (3-5 day gaps) work. But for your specific audience, test:

Enterprise buyers with long decision cycles often tolerate and respond better to slower cadences. SMB impulse buyers often respond better to faster.