This email closing gets the most replies

Isn’t it frustrating when you send an email and never get a response? Well, how you close your message may be to blame! 

The folks at the email productivity app Boomerang reviewed the closings in more than 350,000 email threads and found that certain closings resulted in higher response rates.

Read more: How to ‘unsend’ an email from your Gmail account

Use this email closing to get a reply

Boomerang used messages from mailing list archives of over 20 different online communities. In many of the emails reviewed, someone was asking for help or advice, hoping for a reply.

Eight common email sign-offs were used at least 1,000 times, but some were far more effective than others. 

The study found that gratitude is the way to go. Emails that closed with a variation of “Thank you” had more responses than emails that ended with other popular closings.

In fact, “Thanks in advance” had the highest response rate at 65.7%.

“Closing with an expression of gratitude thus correlated with a whopping 36% relative increase in average response rate compared to signing off another way,” according to the study.

Generic sign-offs like “Regards” and “Best” had lower response rates.

Closing an email: 3 things to know

Etiquette expert Diane Gottsman shared on her blog a few tips to select an email sign-off that will get a response: 

1. Reflect the relationship: Choosing an email sign-off will depend on your relationship with the person you’re writing. ‘Smiles’ may be appropriate when emailing a friend, but it’s too casual for a boss.

2. Once is plenty: A formal close is only necessary in the first email of a thread, not with every reply.

3. Don’t skip it: With all this talk about email closes, you don’t want to forget to include one altogether because that may come across as rude or abrupt.

“Thanks in advance” for sharing this story on Facebook and Twitter!

Never start an email with this greeting