How you
sign off on business emails seems like a small thing, but it has a big impact
on their effect.
As any salesperson, PR rep, or entrepreneur
can tell you, the rate at which people open and respond to your emails can be
the difference between accelerating your career and the pit of despair.
No wonder we all spend so much time obsessing
about subject lines, exact phrasings, and crafting the perfect ask. But according to
research from email software company Boomerang, there's one part of your
messages you're probably not putting enough thought into -- your closing.
Most of us slap a pleasant-sounding
"Best" or "Regards" on the end of our emails and
call it a day. But when Boomerang trawled through 350,000 emails to see how
particular closings impact whether a message gets a reply, they discovered how
you sign off matters a surprising amount. In fact, simply ending your email
with an expression of gratitude can
dramatically increase the likelihood of getting a reply.
The incredible power of gratitude
How much does closing with some version of
"Thank you" matter? That depends on what you compare it with. If
you previously signed off "See you later, alligator!" then
obviously switching to "Thanks!" is going to be a massive
improvement. But even if you were going with something standard and
non-offensive like "Cheers" or "Regards," the
difference might surprise you.
"Emails where we detected a thankful
closing saw a response rate of 62 percent. This compared to a response rate of
46 percent for emails without a thankful closing. Closing with an expression of
gratitude thus correlated with a whopping 36 percent relative increase in
average response rate compared to signing off another way," reports Boomerang.
"Thanks in advance" had the
highest response rate of all the closings at 65.7 percent. While emails that
ended with a standard "Best" got answered just 51.2 percent
of the time.
That might sound like too big a jump to be
credible. But Boomerang also dug up some academic research to support its
findings. A 2010 study by
star Wharton professor Adam Grant and collaborators compared
responses rates between two sets of similar emails asking for help. One set
included a cheerful "Thank you so much!" while the other didn't. The
researchers found the grateful emails got a reply twice as often.
Signing off with gratitude isn't appropriate
for every professional email, of course. You have to gauge the situation, the
personal style of the recipient, and the particular relationship between you.
Sometimes "Thank you so much in advance!" can come across as
pushy or overly perky. But this study suggests you shouldn't be so quick just
to thoughtlessly type "Best" on the end of your emails.
Closings make a difference, and thankful
closings seem to make the biggest difference of all. Email recipients
(and, according to other research, everyone else really) like to be thanked
a lot more than you probably think.
JUN 23, 2020 The opinions expressed here by Inc.com columnists are their
own, not those of Inc.com.
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