Sending cadence is the pace and timing of outbound sends, spread across the day and spaced between sequence steps rather than dumped all at once, which is the pattern spam filters are built to flag regardless of how good the copy is.
Sending cadence covers two different timing decisions that both matter for the same reason: how sends are spread across a single day, and how much time sits between one sequence step and the next for a given contact. Real engagement looks spread out, replies and opens landing across the day rather than a batch dumped all at once first thing in the morning. A cadence that mimics that pattern reads as a real person sending mail. One that doesn't reads as a script.
The same principle applies between steps. A follow-up that fires the same hour as the first touch looks automated in a way a follow-up spaced a few days out doesn't, independent of whether a human or a template wrote either message.
Volume ramp is about how much total mail a domain sends, increasing gradually over weeks as warmup progresses. Cadence is about the shape of sending within whatever volume a domain is currently cleared for: spread through the day, spaced between steps, rather than fired in a burst. A domain can be fully warmed up to a high volume and still trip filters if that volume goes out in one dense burst instead of a spread-out cadence.
Most sequencers let a team set sending windows and inter-step delays directly, rather than firing every message the moment a sequence step becomes due. Setting both is part of the same discipline as warmup: it's what makes a domain's sending pattern look like a person working through a day, not a job running on a timer.
Teams that get warmup and volume ramp right sometimes still trip filters because they ignore cadence specifically, sending a whole day's volume in one morning burst because nothing technically capped it. The domain was cleared for that volume. It just wasn't cleared to send it all at once.
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