Hello All, I've built a simply sales cadence for an email sequence. It goes like this:
- Automated email sent
- Email Reply - wait for 7 days (advance when target engages)
- If "No" to Email reply, send automated email
- Start this step 1 day after, at 10am.
The intention is that it will listen for email replies and only send a follow up email if there is no reply. I wanted it to listen for 7 days, then actually send a follow up email 1 day after that (so 8 days later). However, what happened was follow up emails were sent to the entire group 2 days after the initial email. Any ideas on what went wrong? Am I misunderstanding the cadence steps? Thank you, Clay
The issue is what "wait for 7 days (advance when target engages)" actually does. That setting is not a 7-day listening window that must fully elapse before moving on. It's a maximum wait with an early-exit on engagement. But critically, the branching logic evaluates as soon as the step's own timing conditions are met, and your next step's schedule then applies from that evaluation point, not from the end of a full 7-day window.
What you intended was: listen 7 days, then wait 1 more day, then send at day 8. What actually happened is the branch evaluated much sooner and your "1 day after at 10am" scheduling kicked in from that earlier point, landing your follow-up emails on day 2.
The specific mechanic causing the day-2 send is the interaction between the wait duration on the listener step and the start timing on the next step. Your step 3 is configured to start 1 day after at 10am. That "1 day after" is relative to when the previous step completes or branches, not relative to the full 7-day window expiring. Since the No-reply branch evaluated at the end of day 1 rather than day 7, adding your 1-day offset produced a day-2 send for everyone who hadn't replied.
Here's how to get the behavior you actually want.
The cleanest fix is to consolidate the timing into a single place rather than splitting it across the listener duration and the next step's start offset. Set your wait/listen step to the full 8 days if you want the follow-up on day 8, and set the follow-up email step to send immediately when the No branch is taken rather than adding another day offset. That way there's one number controlling the timing and no compounding or mis-anchoring between two settings.
Alternatively, keep the 7-day listen but change step 3's timing from "1 day after" to a same-day send, then verify in a test run when the branch actually fires. The reason I'd lean toward consolidating instead is that it removes the ambiguity entirely rather than relying on you correctly predicting the anchor point.
Before you rebuild, do this diagnostic: pull up one of the targets who got the follow-up on day 2 and look at their cadence step history. It'll show you the exact timestamp when the listener step completed and when the branch was taken. That timestamp tells you definitively what the "1 day after" was anchoring to, and confirms whether the wait step exited early or the offset anchored somewhere you didn't expect. That's worth doing so you're fixing the actual mechanic rather than guessing.
Also worth checking: confirm the wait step is genuinely configured for 7 days and not carrying a default that got overridden when you set the branch conditions. It's easy for the duration to not save as expected when you're also configuring the engagement-based advance on the same step.
Test the rebuilt cadence on a small group of two or three targets before running it on your full list, so you can watch the actual send timing rather than discovering it at scale again.
