In B2B outreach, your email cadence, that is, the structured sequence and timing of your cold emails, shouldn’t be just a copywriting exercise. It should be a deliverability-first system designed to sustain engagement, protect your sender reputation, and maximize inbox placement.
Unlike general marketing, where design or frequency drive results, a cold email cadence must balance precision and restraint. Engagement that decays across touches, and poor template or spacing choices can accelerate that decline, triggering spam placement, lowering your domain reputation, and hurting long-term results.
Content is one of the main factors impacting whether your cadence emails land in the spam folder or primary inbox. While writing cold emails, you need to have a different mindset compared to general marketing. This is because you have significantly fewer opportunities to receive engagement from a contact before your inbox placement declines as a result of the emails you’re sending.
We’ve analysed over 30 million emails and created guidance (top to bottom) on how to maximise the engagement you receive from prospects. This will help make sure your emails reach the primary inbox, not the spam folder.
The 6 steps we’ve outlined include guidance on optimising for two different types of spam filters:
- The Literal Spam Filter – So your email's subject line does not resemble emails that have been associated with spamming, and instead resembles emails that recipients tend to be engaged with.
- The Mental Spam Filter – So when your prospect sees your email land inside their inbox or opens it, they are more likely to actually read the entirety of it, and not report it as spam. Passing this is 100% necessary to generate engagement.
With the above in mind, it’s important to be aware of both spam filters and realise that they overlap because campaigns that have the highest engagement rates will be the least detrimental to your overall sender reputation, making your outreach more sustainable.
TL;DR: Cadence email templates impact inbox placement more than most teams realise. B2B cold outreach must pass two filters: literal spam filters that block formatting, links, or subject lines; and mental spam filters that cause prospects to ignore or report irrelevant messages. Use subject lines under 3 words, skip punctuation, and match keywords between subject and body. Use pattern breaks in preview text, trigger relevance in the intro, and a clear, non-presumptive problem statement. Add a single, interest-based CTA and keep the footer in plain text. Allegrow’s recommendations are based on 30M+ analysed emails, used by teams optimizing reply rates without harming sales cadence deliverability.
What is an email cadence (and how it affects deliverability)?
An email cadence is the structured rhythm of your outreach; it’s the number of touches, the spacing between them, and the intent behind each message. In simple terms, it’s how you organize your cold email sequence to create predictable engagement without damaging your domain reputation.
While some use email sequence and cadence interchangeably, they’re not the same. A sequence refers to the messages themselves, while a cadence includes the strategy behind timing, spacing, and deliverability that determines whether those messages ever reach the inbox. Understanding email sequence vs cadence is critical for designing outreach that drives engagement and protects sender reputation.
A well-built cold email cadence considers:
- Touch count: How many times you contact a prospect before stopping.
- Email cadence spacing: How far apart those touches are, allowing reputation systems to reset and engagement to recover.
- Message purpose: How each step builds relevance and curiosity rather than repetition or pressure.
Designing your cadence this way directly impacts sales cadence deliverability. High engagement rates signal to inbox providers that recipients find your content valuable. Low engagement - or worse, spam complaints - tell the opposite story, leading to blocked sends, junk filtering, or degraded domain trust.
A common mistake here is copying patterns from marketing campaigns - such as HTML-heavy designs, CTA buttons, or excessive links - into cold outreach. Those signals immediately trigger literal spam filters, while a “salesy” tone fails the mental spam filter. Cold outreach thrives on simplicity and authenticity; marketing-style templates often do the opposite.
Why engagement decay matters
In every cold email cadence, engagement naturally drops as the cadence progresses. This engagement decay means that each follow-up has a smaller chance of earning a reply, but a higher chance of generating negative signals (deletions, spam reports, or no engagement).
Sending more messages doesn’t automatically create more conversions. In fact, longer cadences can backfire - especially on new domains still building sender trust. The more you send without engagement, the more your domain reputation decreases. That’s why teams optimizing for deliverability-first cadences often test shorter, 3 to 5-step sequences before expanding to longer campaigns.
When engagement decays, complaint risk rises, and so does the likelihood of hitting spam triggers. Reducing that risk means controlling email cadence spacing, minimizing the cold email links limit, and keeping a plain text email footer rather than a promotional signature.
The main takeaway is that a healthy cadence balances persistence with respect for deliverability. Fewer, better-timed touches outperform longer cadences that ignore reputation signals.
Two filters to pass: literal vs. mental spam filters
Landing in the inbox means passing two distinct, but connected, filters: the literal spam filter and the mental spam filter. Both determine whether your cold email cadence drives replies or ends up damaging deliverability.
The literal spam filter handles the technical side of inboxing. Mailbox providers scan for red flags like heavy HTML formatting, too many links or images, and “marketing-style” subject lines. Even small missteps can push your message toward spam. Keeping your structure simple and mostly plain text, limiting links to one per email, and using cold email subject line best practices all help reduce that risk.
The mental spam filter lives inside your prospect’s head. It decides, in seconds, whether your message feels relevant, credible, and human, or like an automated sales pitch. Passing this filter means writing as if you’re sending a genuine 1:1 note. Use email personalization at scale that feels contextual, open with a clear problem statement, and close with one simple, interest-based CTA rather than a hard sell.
These filters overlap more than most realize. Emails that read naturally, avoid over-design, and create authentic engagement tend to perform better with both algorithms and humans. Templates that earn responses strengthen sales cadence deliverability, protect your sender reputation, and make your outreach sustainable over time.
Step-by-step on how to write cadence templates for inbox placement
Step 1: Subject line that looks like a real note
Your subject line is one of the biggest signals that determines whether your message gets filtered out or opened. The goal is to make it look like a real, one-to-one note, not a marketing campaign. Keep it to three words or fewer, use plain word choices, and avoid punctuation. These are core cold email subject line best practices proven to improve inbox placement.
Subject lines should always match the keywords in your body text to prevent misleading impressions that can lead to manual spam reports. You can also test title case, meaning The First Letter of Every Keyword is Capitalized, to see if it lifts open rates for your audience.
Above all, avoid emotive or “salesy” phrasing. Overly promotional subject lines consistently correlate with higher spam complaint rates and lower engagement. In cold outreach, boring really is better, because neutral tones perform best for cold email cadence deliverability.
Here’s an example of a good vs a bad subject line choice for cold email:
Step 2: Preview pattern break to earn the open
Your preview text or opening line has one job: to interrupt the pattern most sales emails follow. Starting your message with a pattern break (like a negative or urgent keyword) helps you stand out without relying on gimmicks. Words such as “Didn’t”, “Just”, or “Noticed” can help catch attention immediately.
Avoid starting with “Hi {{FirstName}}.” It’s overused and signals automation. Instead, use company or colleague context (“Noticed your team is expanding in data ops…”) or a timely cue (“Just saw your post on…”) to earn genuine interest.
Well-written openings help both filters, and stronger opens drive inbox placement monitoring signals upward, improving your domain reputation. Just be careful not to overdo urgency or curiosity as exaggerated phrasing can trigger the literal spam filter, even if your intent is genuine.
To help you put this into action, here’s our bullet point check-list on ways to create pattern breaks and hyper-relevance:
- Starting with negative keywords - Negative keywords at the beginning of your email can help to break the pattern of most sales emails and catch attention. This means you can experiment with words like the following to start your email; ‘Didn’t’, ‘Couldn’t’, ‘Wasn’t’, ‘Haven’t’ and ‘Shouldn’t’.
- Starting with urgent keywords - Keywords which imply urgency can also help to increase open rates if used at the start of an email. Examples of these keywords to experiment with are; ‘Just’, ‘Got to’, ‘Now’, ‘Saw’, ‘Realized’, ‘Missing’ and ‘Noticed’.
- Experiment with removing Hi {{FirstName}} - Almost every sales email starts off with a variation of ‘Hello {{FirstName}}’, this essentially makes the content redundant, so you can experiment with removing this and placing the ‘first name’ tag somewhere else in the email.
- Mention a colleague’s name - Including a prospects colleague's name in your email's opening line can help improve engagement. We’d recommend picking a colleague from the same department by selecting additional contacts from the relevant department in your data provider's system or another target job role.
Step 3: Hyper-relevance and the trigger explanation
Every prospect’s first question is the same: “Why are you emailing me?”. The best way to pass the mental spam filter is to make that answer obvious in your first line. Use hyper-relevance, that is, show real reasons you reached out, not generic personalisation.
Hyper-relevance can not simply be the prospect's job title or industry. Instead, you’ll want to customize your data set to be built on aspects such as; the content they engaged with on Linkedin or a review they left describing a challenge. Mentioning a specific trigger like this in the opening lines of your email will frame you as someone who’s done their homework and isn’t shooting spam out of a cannon.
To help you build hyper-relevance or triggers into your email campaigns, here’s a rundown with some of the potential data sources you can consider using:
- Content engagement (LinkedIn/X): Reference posts, comments, or thought leaders your prospect interacts with - especially around your niche and the problem you solve.
- Glassdoor reviews: Mention recurring themes or pain points shared by employees to show awareness of internal challenges.
- Job postings or new hires: Hiring for specific roles or recent leadership changes often signal the problem your solution addresses.
- Technology changes: Use tools like BuiltWith to identify shifts in their tech stack that may create new needs or workflows.
- G2 or product reviews: Reference feedback that reveals what the company values or struggles with to strengthen context.
These trigger explanations prove you’ve done your homework and aren’t “shooting spam out of a cannon”. Avoid shallow personalization (like job title mentions) that doesn’t tie to the reason for your outreach. True relevance lowers complaint risk, increases replies, and improves long-term inbox placement.
This example shows how referring to a target account's Glassdoor reviews creates ‘Hyper Relevance’:
Step 4: Craft a clear, compelling problem statement
Framing the pain point you can help resolve correctly is a must-have inside your cadence. This will help to make sure your prospect can quickly understand what value they might receive if they choose to engage with you.
This example shows how the same problem statement can be explained in two different ways. Removing jargon/exaggeration and not using the term ‘challenge’ to avoid being as presumptuous in the second version is better optimized:
Your problem statement should be short, clear, and written with humility. The goal is to make prospects think that’s relevant to them, instead of “They’re guessing”. Keep it factual, use plain language, and avoid jargon or exaggeration.
Never assume the challenge applies directly to them. Frame it as something you’ve seen with similar teams or roles. This non-presumptive tone helps you pass the mental spam filter, reduces friction, and encourages honest replies. A few lines are enough; clarity beats cleverness every time in cold outreach.
Step 5: One interest-based CTA
The specific call to action you use is one of the core areas that will impact your cadence's success. Keeping this clear and low commitment for the prospect to respond is critical to increasing your campaign's reply rate.
The example below compares a poorly optimized call to action and one that is likely to receive a far higher reply rate:
Your CTA should focus on curiosity, not commitment. Use a single, interest-based question rather than asking for time or a meeting in the first email. Research shows that meeting requests in first-touch cold emails can reduce reply rates by up to 50%, compared to asking for interest or another CTA, which isn’t based around a meeting.
Keep the CTA to one short line, ideally a standalone sentence. Fewer questions mean more answers, so pick one, emphasize it with a question mark, and track your reply lift vs. meeting-ask baseline over time.
Step 6: Plain-text footer that supports deliverability
Your footer isn’t a design opportunity; it’s a deliverability safeguard. A plain text email footer consistently performs better than HTML-heavy signatures because it minimizes spam triggers and keeps your total link count low.
The example below compares one of the fancy footers in question with one that is plain text and optimized for deliverability:
Include only the essentials: name, role, company, website, and HQ address. Limit the total number of links in the email (including the footer) to two or fewer, and remove any extra images and banners.
Also, don't include any keywords that are heavily associated with marketing and sales or cold emails. For example, if your job title has the keywords ‘sales’ or ‘marketing’ inside it, you might want to experiment with dropping that from the footer.
Your footer should transparently show who you are, not try to sell. A minimal, authentic sign-off reinforces trust signals and helps your cold email cadence sustain strong inbox placement across campaigns.
Cadence guardrails that protect deliverability
Even the best-written templates can underperform if your email cadence lacks guardrails. Consistent inbox placement depends not just on what you say, but how frequently, how richly formatted, and how personally it feels. The following best practices help protect sender reputation and sustain deliverability over time.
Touch count and spacing
A healthy cadence typically includes 3–5 touches, spaced 2–4 days apart. This range balances visibility with respect for your prospect’s attention, and helps limit engagement decay. Beyond the fifth touch, reply rates drop sharply while complaint risk rises, signalling to mailbox providers that your outreach may be unwanted.
If you’re working from a new domain or one with low sender reputation, shorten the sequence or extend the spacing between sends. A slower rollout allows positive engagement signals (opens, clicks, replies) to accumulate before increasing volume, improving your sender trust with ISPs.
Link and image budget
Each link and image in your email adds “marketing-like” signals that spam filters notice. A cold outreach email should look and feel like a 1:1 message, not a newsletter. Keep links to one or two per email, including those in your footer, and use plain text where possible.
If you must include a logo, ensure it’s small and hosted on a trusted domain. Excessive visual elements, tracking pixels, or CTA buttons can all push your message toward promotional classification, hurting inbox placement. Always review total links across your template and footer together to stay within your link budget.
Personalization depth vs. scale
When it comes to personalization, depth beats quantity. A single, contextually relevant line that references a true trigger - like a recent hire, a product review, or a LinkedIn post - drives far stronger engagement than multiple surface-level tags.
Avoid overusing first-name or company-name tokens without substance behind them; they often make emails feel mass-produced and trigger the mental spam filter. Instead, focus on high-signal, low-token personalization that proves your outreach is intentional and relevant. This approach not only increases replies but also reinforces your domain reputation through healthier engagement metrics.
Allegrow’s role in safer cadences
Allegrow helps teams build deliverability systems for sales cadences that prevent issues before they happen. Here are some of our key features:
Advanced risk filtering
Allegrow’s pre-send risk filtering flags hidden deliverability threats like spam trap detection, manual reporters, and valid/invalid catch-all statuses. By removing these risky contacts before you even send anything, your emails avoid hard bounces and spam complaints that can degrade your domain reputation. This proactive filtering ensures that every touch in your cold email cadence contributes positively to your sender score, rather than harming it.
This level of filtering also helps teams stabilize performance across multistep sequences. Instead of seeing reply rates slowly erode due to cumulative reputation damage, you maintain a clean baseline of safe, validated contacts throughout the entire cadence. In practical terms, this reduces list fatigue, protects your domain from sudden deliverability drops, and ensures your messaging is being evaluated by real, active recipients.
Safety Net inside your SEP for pre-send verifications
The Safety Net feature integrates directly inside tools like Outreach, Salesloft, and HubSpot to enforce policy-based pre-send verification. By automatically blocking risky sends in real time, Safety Net prevents deliverability damage before it happens. This means fewer complaints, fewer blocked emails, and higher overall sales cadence deliverability, keeping your multitouch campaigns safe and sustainable. Prevention, not post-cleanup, keeps cadences healthy long term.
Because this protection happens automatically inside your existing workflow, reps don’t have to constantly check lists, export data, or rerun verifications before launching a sequence. Every email that leaves your SEP is validated in the background, ensuring you're only reaching real, safe, and active mailboxes. This creates a level of operational confidence that simply isn’t possible with manual verification tools. That means your sending infrastructure stays consistent, predictable, and insulated from human error across large teams.
Ongoing domain health checks
Deliverability isn’t static, and even trusted domains can drift over time. Allegrow continuously monitors SPF, DKIM, and DMARC alignment and runs inbox placement monitoring to catch domain drift mid-cadence. If problems are detected - like misaligned authentication, failed DMARC checks, or ISP-specific placement drops - teams can adjust email cadence spacing, template design, or sending volume proactively. This ensures your domain remains trusted, your emails reach the primary inbox, and each touch in your cold email cadence continues to generate engagement rather than risk.
These continuous checks also help teams scale safely. When you add new senders, increase daily volume, or launch multiple concurrent sequences, deliverability strain shows up first in authentication failures or inbox placement fluctuations. Allegrow’s monitoring exposes these early signals before they turn into full-blown blocks or spam-folder routing. As a result, you can expand outbound confidently, knowing that your domain posture is being corrected in real time rather than after deliverability has already dropped.
Measurement: knowing if your cadence helps or harms inboxing
Sustainable inboxing requires measurement beyond opens. To understand whether your cold email cadence is strengthening or damaging your sender reputation, you need to evaluate how both recipients and mailbox providers respond to every touch. Positive signals like replies help reinforce trust, while negative signals accumulate quietly and reduce placement over time.
By monitoring performance throughout the full cadence, not just the first email, you can identify early warning signs before they become systemic issues. This helps ensure your outreach adapts to real-world engagement instead of relying on assumptions or misleading vanity metrics.
What to track on each iteration
On every iteration, focus on the metrics that influence inboxing directly: reply rates, soft and hard bounces, spam complaints, and inbox placement monitoring across major providers. Replies are your strongest positive signal, while bounces and complaints immediately harm reputation and should be treated as leading indicators of deeper issues.
Review performance over several sends rather than reacting to individual anomalies. Whether engagement is improving or declining, patterns across touches show where prospects disengage. Monitoring these metrics consistently gives you a clear view into how well your email cadence is performing from a deliverability standpoint.
When to stop or pivot
Set clear stop-loss rules. If bounces exceed 3%, pause sending and investigate data quality. If spam complaints exceed ~0.1%, immediately halt the cadence, since this level of negative feedback can cause long-term inboxing damage. Both thresholds signal that continuing to send will only accelerate reputation decline.
Once paused, adjust your templates, tighten your targeting, widen email cadence spacing, or reduce total touches. If needed, refresh your list inputs or rewarm your domain gradually. For more detailed guidance on safe scaling, refer to your sending limits and throttling processes to ensure your reboot doesn’t repeat the same risks.
Conclusion
Cold outreach deliverability depends on passing two filters: the literal spam filter, which judges your technical signals, and the mental spam filter, which decides whether a human engages. The six steps you’ve seen, from crafting realistic subject lines to maintaining a plain text email footer, work together to help you pass both. Ultimately, prevention wins. Clean inputs, validated lists, and pre-send risk filtering do more to protect deliverability than endless copy tweaks.
Allegrow’s platform combines advanced B2B verification, inbox placement monitoring, and automated warm up, which gives every team a safer foundation for cold outreach. Start a free 14-day trial with Allegrow to get access to advanced email verification that surfaces threats most legacy validators are blind to, like hidden spam traps, manual reporters, and risky behind catch-all mailboxes.
Running your list through this verification gives you a clearer picture of real deliverability risk. You remove more bad contacts, cut bounces, avoid complaint-driven reputation issues, and ensure that every email in your next email cadence is far more likely to reach an actual human instead of a trap, filter, or dead inbox.
FAQs
How long should a cold email cadence be?
A good starting point for a cold email cadence is 3 to 5 touches, spaced 2 to 4 days apart. Shorter cadences protect sender reputation and limit complaint risk. If you notice declining engagement or rising spam reports, test fewer touches or longer email cadence spacing to improve deliverability.
Do images or HTML hurt deliverability?
Yes, especially for cold outreach. Plain text looks more authentic and reduces spam risk. Use minimal HTML only if needed, and skip image banners altogether. Keeping your plain text email footer simple also improves sales cadence deliverability.
How many links are safe per email?
Stick to two links or fewer in total, including body and footer. A lower cold email links limit helps your emails appear more human and prevents triggering literal spam filters. Track results as you reduce link count to see how inbox placement responds.
Title case or sentence case for subject lines?
Both work, but test which resonates with your audience. Many B2B cold email cadence campaigns see a small lift using Title Case, though plain, neutral language matters more. Following cold email subject line best practices (≤3 words, no punctuation, matching body keywords) is what truly protects deliverability.
How do I measure if my cadence is harming inbox placement?
Watch bounce rates, reply rates, spam complaints, and inbox placement monitoring data by provider. Drops in placement or reply rate often trace back to risky contacts or template issues.
Should I change cadence length for new domains?
Yes. New or low-reputation domains need shorter cadences and slower scaling to build trust. New domains should always go through an warm up period.
