Email Cadence: How Often Should You Email Customers?

Ever feel like you’re annoying customers with too many emails—or losing sales by not sending enough? That balance is what marketers call your optimal email cadence. While it’s not an exact science, there are factors you can take into account to improve your results.

What is email cadence?

Email cadence is the frequency with which you send emails to your subscribers, along with the sequencing of those emails. 

In email marketing, determining the right cadence can be a balancing act. You want to send enough emails that you stay top of mind for customers, maximize your opportunities to boost engagement and increase sales, and guide shoppers along the customer journey. 

On the other hand, if you send too many emails too often, you risk annoying recipients to the point that they begin ignoring your emails or unsubscribe altogether. Sending too many emails or inconsistent emails could also trigger spam filters or lower your reputation as a sender, which hurts your email deliverability and skews your performance metrics.

What is the best email cadence?

The correct email cadence for your brand will balance three crucial metrics: 

• Open rate. Percentage of recipients who open your email. 

• Click-through rate (CTR). Percentage of recipients who click on a link in your email.

• Unsubscribe rate. Percentage of recipients who opt out (i.e., ask to be removed) from your mailing list after receiving your email.

The right email cadence will be the one that results in the highest possible open rates and CTRs while keeping unread emails or unsubscribes low. 

Marketing agency MailerLite analyzed more than one million of its 2024 email campaigns to determine how email frequency impacted these metrics. It found that open rates remained around 34% for monthly or twice-weekly emails and dropped only when email marketing campaigns involved daily emails, averaging an open rate closer to 31%. 

MailerLite also found that daily emails earned a higher CTR (5.3%) than weekly (5%) or monthly emails (4.6%). The sweetest spot, however, turned out to be twice-per-week email marketing campaigns, with a CTR of 5.8%. 

Consistency also mattered. MailerLite found that the unsubscribe rate was 125% higher when brands sent emails irregularly (0.9%) compared to brands that sent daily, weekly, or twice-weekly emails (all around 0.4%). Both of these numbers were higher than the average unsubscribe rate Mailchimp found for ecommerce, which is 0.19%. As such, it could make sense to target an unsubscribe rate of 0.1% to 0.5%.

Note that transactional emails or messages triggered by specific behaviors, like an abandoned cart, should be sent right away.

Email cadence examples

Different scenarios call for different email cadences. For example, you may employ a more aggressive schedule when targeting new leads or promoting a shopping event than when communicating with loyal customers. Here are three examples of different marketing email cadences.

Immediately post-purchase

Imagine your brand sells premium outdoor gear for dogs. A brand-new customer orders a dog harness. From the moment a customer places an order until a week or two after they’ve received it, you have a window to use a more aggressive cadence. Daily emails might consist of not only updates on the order’s status but also follow-up offers and product guides.

This is also an ideal time to share your brand’s history and values. The idea is to get customers emotionally invested in your brand from the start, so that they prefer you over your competitors. 

Ongoing engagement

One to two weeks after the customer receives their new dog harness, your brand may choose to settle into a twice-weekly email cadence. Your goal is to strengthen the relationship with the buyer and encourage a second purchase.

These emails might consist of company or product news, or personalized emails based on the previous purchase. For instance, you might send offers for dog raincoats as winter approaches or hiking gear in spring.

Promoting a shopping event

One or twice a year, you may choose to push your email cadence into hyperdrive—for example, during the Black Friday to Cyber Monday weekend. During this annual kickoff to the holiday shopping season, people are actively looking for gifts and bargains. This presents an opportunity for your business to send multiple emails in a single day, boosting your brand’s overall engagement and driving shoppers to your online storefront.

Jacob Sappington, director of email strategy at growth agency Homestead Studio, echoes this strategy on an episode of the Shopify Masters podcast. “We’re recommending for all of our brands to send three emails on Black Friday, multiple emails on Cyber Monday,” he says. “We don’t recommend that brands double up on multiple emails a day to the same people [during the rest of the year]. But during this timeframe, we’re ramping up.”

Tips for optimizing your email cadence

• Take the type of email into consideration
• Use powerful email marketing software
• Get to know your customer
• Perform A/B testing

These best practices can help you optimize your email cadence for your next successful email marketing campaign:

Take the type of email into consideration

The type of email you send plays a big role in your optimal cadence. For example, transaction emails (such as purchase and shipping confirmations) should go out immediately. Welcome emails should follow their own email sequence—perhaps several emails within the first week, but tapering off after that.

You might choose to send abandoned cart recovery emails two or three times within 48 hours, and other kinds of reengagement emails (expiring offers, for example) may work best once or twice a week.

Use cutting-edge email marketing software

An email marketing software tool will help you with email list management, email content design using pre-built templates, email personalization, campaign scheduling, and data analysis. It can help you analyze your email engagement metrics after every campaign, with some tools even able to “learn” from this data and suggest the best days and times for your next send. Over time, you may learn that your optimal cadence is something like a Tuesday morning newsletter paired with a Friday afternoon promotional email—because that’s when your open rates and CTRs are strongest.

But beware the false data that email privacy features can cause. “If a user has Apple privacy features enabled effectively, what happens when the email comes into their inbox?” Jacob asks. “It’s automatically opened, and currently, we don’t have the ability to distinguish a bot open from a real open with 100% accuracy.” 

According to Jacob, bots can inflate open rates by up to 80%. Some software programs have started to account for this by marking opens that occur mere seconds after receipt as “bot opens.” If this is of concern to you, look for a software program that can distinguish between the two open types.

Get to know your customer

The type of communication your audience prefers will factor into your correct email cadence. If you’re selling an item that your audience uses for a hobby—for example, hand-dyed yarn—you may choose to send high-frequency newsletters and offers multiple times a week, as your subscribers are likely to repurchase fairly often and, therefore, engage more with your content. “There are real humans on the other side of that who will eventually click and purchase if we give them the opportunity,” Jacob explains.

However, if you’re selling high-value items or a “one per household” type of product—for example, an expensive juicer—then you are better off employing a lower-frequency cadence.

Also, it’s worthwhile to break your audience into subscriber segments. Targeted campaigns let you communicate more frequently with potential customers, first-time buyers, and lapsed customers than you do with repeat buyers, tailoring your different messages to elicit engagement from those specific subscriber segments.

Perform A/B testing

Using A/B testing to test the cadence and schedule (i.e., specific days and send times) of your email marketing campaigns can help you determine the right frequency. A/B testing involves comparing the performance of two similar versions of the same email.

Imagine you have identified a group of customers who purchased today. You could send a follow-up offer to half of them 24 hours later and to the other half 48 hours later. Comparing which follow-up received the most engagement will help you to replicate that level of engagement among your email subscribers in the future.