What is Email sequence?

An email sequence is a planned series of messages to one prospect, sent on a schedule and stopped automatically when they reply.

Also called: cadence, follow-up sequence, drip.

Most cold email replies do not come from the first message. A sequence gives a busy prospect several chances to see and answer: typically a first email and a few short follow-ups spaced days apart, each adding something (a case, a question, a different angle) rather than repeating "just bumping this".

The automatic stop is what makes it a sequence rather than a mail-merge: a reply, a bounce or an opt-out ends it. Without that, a prospect who already said no keeps receiving mail, which raises the spam complaint rate and breaks CAN-SPAM if they opted out.

Steps multiply volume. A list of 1,000 leads in a four-step sequence is up to 4,000 emails, and that number decides how many inboxes and domains you need and how long warm-up must run; see warm-up.

The cold email calculator multiplies leads by sequence steps to give emails, inboxes and domains for a target number of meetings.