What is sending cadence?
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Think about your favorite newsletter. You know roughly when it shows up. You've come to expect it. When it lands on time, you open it. When it goes quiet for weeks and then suddenly floods your inbox, something feels off. That rhythm you notice as a reader? That's sending cadence.
Sending cadence is the pattern your email program follows over time. It covers how often you send, what days and times you send, and how consistent that schedule is. It's not just frequency. Five emails a week sent predictably every morning is a very different experience from five emails dumped randomly across a few days.
Consistency matters for two reasons. First, subscribers build expectations. A predictable schedule means they're more likely to look for your email (and open it) rather than be surprised by it. Second, mailbox providers like Gmail and Outlook pay attention to your sending patterns over time. They learn what "normal" looks like for you. A sudden spike in volume after weeks of silence can look suspicious, and that can hurt your sender reputation before a single recipient even makes a judgment call.
Good cadence isn't about sending as often as possible. It's about sending often enough to stay relevant, consistently enough to build trust, and thoughtfully enough that neither your subscribers nor the inbox algorithms are caught off guard. (Finding that balance is genuinely the hard part.)
If you're not sure whether your current schedule is working for or against you, the next step is figuring out what your audience actually responds to. That's where the real optimization happens.
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