Two channels on one list
is not a multichannel cadence
It becomes one when both channels run off a single calendar with a single stop condition. Until then you have two campaigns aimed at the same people on separate clocks, and the collisions cost more conversations than the second channel wins.
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The number this site owns,
with the flaw in it
From the Outbound Pros fleet snapshot dated 2026-07-06. It is an observation across a live client fleet over one window, not a controlled test, and the way it is measured helps it. Both of those belong next to the figure rather than in a footnote under it.
Positive rate, multichannel motion
Positive replies over 8,714 emails sent, cumulative to the snapshot date.
Against that snapshot fleet baseline
The follower sourced motion in the same snapshot ran 52,786 sends at 0.14%, 2.85x that baseline.
LinkedIn touches in the denominator
A positive reply arriving on LinkedIn still counts against emails sent. That inflates the multichannel rate, and this data cannot tell us by how much.
Four decisions that sit
above the copy
Cadence is the third most important thing about a campaign, behind targeting and offer. It is also the one nobody writes down, which is why it fails quietly instead of loudly.
Sequence architecture
Which channel opens, which one escalates, and why that is settled by dividing your prospect count by your daily LinkedIn ceiling rather than by preference or by whichever tool was configured first.
Timing and spacing
Tighten early, widen late. How far apart consecutive touches sit, when a same day cross channel pairing reads as one person trying twice rather than a vendor blitz, and when to break the thread.
Reply handling
One suppression state per prospect, shared across channels, updated on any reply anywhere. If your two tools cannot see each other's replies, you do not have a cadence yet, you have two campaigns and a risk.
Cross channel attribution
What channel of reply can and cannot tell you, why last touch reporting quietly defunds the touches doing the work, and which attribution questions have no honest answer at all.
Arithmetic first,
calendar second
The first two steps finish before anyone writes a subject line. Most bad cadences are bad because those two were skipped, and the damage does not surface until week two, when the tool is silently running your third touch four days late.
Count the capacity
Prospect count, mailboxes, LinkedIn seats, and the window you want the sequence to run in. Divide daily send capacity by the number of email touches and you get the intake ceiling, which is how many new prospects a day the sequence can absorb once follow ups start stacking.
Let the arithmetic pick the entry channel
Prospect count divided by your daily LinkedIn ceiling gives the coverage window. If that is longer than your sequence window, LinkedIn cannot be touch one on this list. It becomes the escalation on the slice that already showed signal.
Lay the calendar day by day
Every touch gets a date, a channel, an angle and a personalization budget. Personalization goes on the opener and on the touch immediately after an engagement signal. Spread evenly across six touches, it gets spent on the ones nobody reads.
Wire the stop before you launch
One suppression state per prospect across every channel, deduped on a canonical prospect record rather than on an email address, because LinkedIn tooling keys on profile URLs and email tooling keys on addresses. The same human otherwise enters both sequences as two people.
Grade the sequence, not the touch
Report by sequence and by segment, and treat channel of reply as a descriptive fact rather than a causal one. A cadence is a unit. Scoring its parts separately is how teams cut the four emails that made the name familiar.
Most published cadences
were never actually sent
A template describes what happens to one prospect. Your infrastructure carries every prospect at once, and the one who entered on Monday is still consuming a send slot the week after. Nobody publishing templates does that division for you, because they are not the ones who have to run it.
We run what we publish
The figures here come off live client campaigns, reported by the same standing monitoring that decides what we kill and what we scale. No neutral party holds this data, because a neutral party does not run the campaigns.
The confound is printed at the size of the claim
Our headline number is measured against a denominator that flatters it, the segment is derived from sequence names rather than from channel logs, and one single sequence in the fleet beat the multichannel segment average. All three are on the site because omitting them would make the number worth less, not more.
Part of the Outbound Pros group
The agency behind this site sells managed outbound, and this site sells nothing. That relationship is disclosed on every page and in the schema, so you can weigh any recommendation here knowing whose fleet the data came from.
The questions that arrive
before every sequence ships
Should I send the email or the connection request first?
Email first when your list is larger than your LinkedIn account can touch inside your sequence window, which is true for most lists above a few thousand names. Connection request first on small, high value, signal triggered lists, because an accepted connection and a profile view make the email that follows read as a second contact rather than a first. The deciding number is prospect count divided by daily LinkedIn ceiling, and it is arithmetic, not preference.
Is it bad to email and message the same person on the same day?
It depends entirely on whether both touches obviously come from the same person. Same name, same face, one message in the inbox and one on LinkedIn reads as someone trying twice, and that performs fine. Two different sender identities from one company on the same day reads as a machine and costs you the account, not just the reply. Our default is at most one deliberate same day pairing per sequence, never as the general pattern.
Does adding LinkedIn to an email sequence actually increase replies?
Our data says probably, and cannot say how much. In the 2026-07-06 fleet snapshot the multichannel motion ran 8,714 sends at a 0.37% positive rate, 7.36x that baseline, while the follower sourced motion ran 52,786 sends at 0.14%. That is one fleet over one window and not a controlled test, and the denominator is emails sent while the numerator includes positives that arrived on LinkedIn, which structurally favours the multichannel row. The test that would separate lift from artefact is a split on one list with one set of copy, and we have not run it.
How many days should sit between follow ups?
Tighten early and widen late. The first follow up catches the group who meant to reply and did not, and that group decays fast, so a short gap works. Later touches are testing a new angle at a different moment in the quarter, so longer gaps perform better. The interval matters less than whether the touch has a genuine new reason to exist. Five identical bumps at a uniform interval is a metronome, not a cadence.
How do I know which channel booked the meeting?
You do not, and no tool will give you that. You can measure which channel the reply arrived on, how many touches preceded it and which sequence the prospect sat in. You cannot measure whether the LinkedIn profile view is what got the email opened, because no join key exists between a profile impression and an email open. Anyone handing you a clean channel split is reporting last touch and calling it causation.
Who should not be reading this site?
Anyone whose three genuinely different angles have already returned close to nothing across a few thousand sends, because no arrangement of days fixes an offer the market does not want. Anyone at a deal size where a designed multichannel motion cannot clear its own cost, and anyone selling to consumers, where the channel, the regulation and the buying behaviour are all wrong. Anyone who needs cold calling in the cadence, which we do not run and do not design around. And anyone whose booked meetings are not being attended, since that is a downstream problem and cadence is not the layer that fixes it.
Divide the template
by your own capacity
The Sequence Cadence Builder takes your prospect count, your available channels and your window, and returns a day by day interleaved email and LinkedIn touch plan you can export and run in whatever tool you already pay for.
Free, no signup, no email required for the result.