Sequencers ship with an eight-day interval and a five-touch default. The specialist desks in our cohort run something completely different, and their reply rates are three to five times higher off the same source list.
The pattern
Day 0. The initial message. Two specific references, one clear reason, one soft ask.
Day 4. Follow-up with a genuinely new specific reference, not a "just following up". Something you found after the first send that adds to the case.
Day 11. Graceful close. Three lines. Acknowledges the silence, offers to close the loop, invites a future re-open.
That is it. Three touches. Eleven days. No more.
Why the intervals
Day 4 because a corporate recipient who opened the first message has already made a soft decision. If they wanted to reply, they would have. A four-day nudge with new information reopens the decision while it is still the same thought. Day 8 lands after the mental filing has happened; it reads as a new pitch and gets ignored accordingly.
Day 11 because the graceful close is a decision-forcing message dressed as a courtesy. In our cohort, day-11 closes get replies at roughly the rate of day-0 initials, often with the exact information you needed. "Not now, but ping me in April when the fiscal year starts" is a reply worth having.
Why three, not five
Because touches four and five in a sequencer are what get you flagged as spam, land you in a promotions folder for the rest of that recipient's inbox life, and cost you the ability to reach them later when the actual right role appears. Three touches, in the right shape, preserve the relationship.
How Holi applies this per-recipient
Holi's outreach layer runs the three-touch cadence by default, but every touch is conditional. If the recipient replied to touch one, touches two and three do not send. If they opened touch one twice, touch two runs slightly earlier. If they did not open touch one at all, touch two is a different message aimed at re-engaging, not adding.
You do not draw the diagram. Capture and repurpose already have the context. Outreach applies it, then reports back on what worked in Monday's learning loop digest. The cadence gets sharper every week, off signals from your own inbox rather than a sequencer's defaults.