Forget “Best” or “Sincerely,” This Email Closing Gets the Most Replies
When you’re drafting an email, ending it is the easiest part. Whether you sign-off with “Warmest Regards,” “Thanks,” or “Keep On Keepin’ On,” it only takes a second, and you probably don’t give it a second thought. Do email closings even matter? And if so, is “best” really best? We looked at closings in over 350,000 email threads, and found that certain email closings deliver higher response rates.
For our study, we used messages from mailing list archives of over twenty different online communities.1 These emails proved to be a great sample for looking at variations in response rate, as many entailed people asking for help or advice, hoping for a reply.
Email closings are largely determined by the setting of an email. You might sign a message to your mom with “Love,” but would (hopefully) choose a more formal closing when writing to your HR person. So first, we wanted to get an idea of which closings were used in these online communities.
Not much of a surprise here: these eight closings are all common email sign-offs in general. As none of these endings seem specific to online communities, any trends we find should be relevant for anyone who emails. So now for the moment of truth: how did these closings correlate with response rate?
