Decide how often to email, and to whom
Frequency is decided per person, not per program. The question is never “how often do we send” but “how many emails did this person get this week, from every program at once”. Most B2B teams land on a cap of one to two marketing emails a week per person, a newsletter that is genuinely monthly, and nurtures that pause while a salesperson is talking to someone. This article gives the standard cadence, the fatigue signs, and how to set a cap in your tool. For your own fatigue signs, open the Email analysis.
A cadence that holds up
| Kind of email | How often | To whom |
|---|---|---|
| Newsletter | Monthly, same week each month | Everyone who opted in to it — and only them |
| Nurture (new lead) | Every 3 to 5 days for the first month, then every 2 weeks | New leads, until they reply, book or go quiet for 90 days |
| Win-back | Three emails over two weeks, then stop | People with no open or click in 6 months |
| Webinar or event | Invite, reminder, last call, recording — four in three weeks | Fit audience for that topic, not the whole list |
| Product or launch | One announcement, one follow-up | Customers and warm leads |
| Sales sequence | Up to five over three weeks, then a graceful close | One account at a time, by hand |
The cap sits across all of these: no person receives more than two marketing emails in a week, whichever programs they are in.
The signs you are sending too much
- Unsubscribes above 0.5% on a send, or climbing month on month while list size is flat.
- Click rate falling send by send within one program — the third nurture email doing half of the first is normal; a quarter is fatigue.
- Spam complaints appearing at all. Gmail throttles a sender at 0.3%.
- The same people in three programs at once. Pull the list of contacts in more than one active nurture; that is where the complaints come from.
Set the cap in your tool
Turn on the tool’s frequency cap.
HubSpot: Marketing → Email → Settings → Frequency cap. Marketo: Communication Limits (per day and per week) in Admin. Salesforce Marketing Cloud: send-frequency settings on the sender profile. Pipedrive Campaigns has no cap; keep programs from overlapping by hand.
Make nurtures pause when sales is talking to someone.
A goal or exit rule on the program: reply, meeting booked, deal open, or owner changed.
Give the newsletter its own opt-in.
A person who filled in a demo form did not ask for a newsletter. Subscription types or preference centres keep the two apart.
Suppress the quiet before you add the new.
People with no open or click in 6 months get the win-back series; after it, they leave the sending list. Sending to them costs deliverability for everyone else.
How MarqIQ checks it
The Email analysis reports whether your list is showing fatigue — unsubscribes and bounces rising, clicks falling within programs — and which day and subject style worked for your list. The Audience health analysis counts how many people have stopped opening and are candidates for the win-back series. The email plan Ask builds (“build the email plan for the next 3 months”) already respects these cadences.
Next steps
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