Outreach
Automatic follow-ups: how the cadence works
Whali follows up on every outreach email until the person replies. Set the cadence, gaps, tones and send conditions, and manage the queue. Follow-ups are free.
Last updated 26 July 2026
Whali follows up on every outreach email you send until the person replies. The Follow-ups page holds two things: the cadence canvas, where you design the chain of steps, and the Queue, where every scheduled, sent, stopped and failed follow-up is listed and can be edited one by one.
How does a follow-up chain start?
Sending starts a chain, not writing. Every outreach email you send (instantly, scheduled, or in a batch) creates its own chain, built from the cadence exactly as it stands the moment you press send. Generating a draft schedules nothing on its own.
Two consequences worth remembering. Edits on this page apply only to emails sent afterwards, so existing chains keep the cadence they were created with and are managed individually in the queue. Setting the cadence to Off stops new chains being created, but does not touch chains that already exist.
How do I set the cadence?
Pick a preset (Off, Gentle, Standard or Persistent), or adjust the canvas and it becomes Custom. Each step has a wait, given as a range of days, and a send window. The actual day is picked at random inside the range and the actual minute at random inside the window, which reads more human than clockwork spacing.
- Click a step on the canvas to open its panel.
- Set the minimum and maximum gap before that follow-up (1 to 30 days).
- Set the earliest and latest send time for it.
- Turn on Skip weekends to count gaps in business days and never send on a Saturday or Sunday.
- Set the Timezone in the toolbar, then press Shuffle to re-roll the preview strip under the canvas.
More than 3 follow-ups tends to hurt reply rates with recruiters, and most replies come from the first two. You can also save a chain as a named cadence and apply it to individual emails from the follow-ups chip in the compose bar, without changing your default.
What do tones, delivery and send conditions do?
| Setting | Options | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Tone | Gentle nudge, Add value, Direct ask, Closing the loop | Steers how the AI writes that step |
| Delivery | Same thread, New thread | A threaded Re: reply, or a fresh email with its own subject |
| Send condition | Always send, Only if not opened, Only if opened | Checked when the step is due, using the tracking pixel |
A new thread is useful late in a chain: if the original landed in spam, threaded follow-ups are invisible, while a fresh thread gets another chance at the inbox. Leave its subject empty and it falls back to "Following up:" plus the original subject, which varies per lead. A custom subject is one fixed line used for every conversation, so keep it generic.
Open tracking is approximate: image blocking hides real opens and some inboxes register opens no human made, so treat conditions as a bias rather than a guarantee. A failed condition skips only that step; later steps still fire.
When do follow-ups stop?
A reply stops the rest of that conversation's chain. Outlook and Microsoft accounts detect replies automatically, and an out-of-office reply with a return date pushes the chain past the return instead of emailing an empty desk. Gmail accounts cannot be read for incoming mail, so open the conversation and press Mark as replied yourself (see the Inbox guide).
Deleting the lead or disconnecting the mailbox also stops that conversation's pending follow-ups.
How do I manage the queue?
The queue groups follow-ups into Due now, Today, Tomorrow, This week and Later, and filters by Pending, Sent, Stopped, Failed or All. Each row has Edit draft, a pause control for that thread, and Cancel this follow-up. Pause all stops everything at once until you press Resume all.
Due follow-ups leave in sweeps roughly every 15 minutes rather than all together, and each mailbox has a shared daily sending budget, so a follow-up can slip to the next day after a busy send. A follow-up that fails to send is retried up to 5 times before it is marked failed.
Do follow-ups cost credits?
No. Follow-ups are free, including the AI that writes each draft and the sending itself. The only credit charge on the outreach path is AI generation of an initial email or a reply, at 3 credits each, covered in Sending and scheduling.
FAQ
- I changed my cadence. Why are old follow-ups unchanged?
- A chain is built from the cadence at the moment its email was sent, so existing chains keep their original timing. New sends use the new cadence. To change an existing one, edit or cancel its steps individually in the queue.
- Can I read a follow-up before it goes out?
- Usually yes. For single and small bulk sends the drafts are written at send time, so you can open them from the queue and edit them any time before they fire. For large spread batches each draft is written just before it sends, so the queue may list a follow-up before its text exists.
- How do I turn off follow-ups for just one email?
- Use the follow-ups chip in the compose bar before sending. It can switch that single email to a saved cadence, a custom number of steps, or off entirely, and your default cadence keeps handling everything else.
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