The Best Way to Sign Email, if You Want a Fast Response

Nora Horvath
How you close your emails might affect how often (and quickly) people respond to them. This survey finds there's a right way to sign off your emails.

The way you say goodbye could affect whether you get a response.

If you waste time agonizing over email subject lines or how to start your emails, but don’t think twice about your email sign-off? You might want to re-think your email strategy.

A 2017 study, which analyzed over 350,000 emails and their closings, found that emails ending with expressions of thanks (such as "thanks in advance" or "thank you") had an average response rate of 62 percent. On the other hand, emails without a thankful closing ("regards" or "sincerely") had a much lower response rate of 46 percent.

Which email closings garnered the worst response rates? Of the most popular signatures (appearing in the sample more than 1,000 times) people who signed off with "best" report receiving the fewest responses.

It's no surprise then that the best, most frequently replied-to ending includes a preemptive note of gratitude: "Among closings seen at least 1,000 times in our study, 'thanks in advance' ended up correlating with the highest response rate, which makes sense, as the email’s recipient is being thanked specifically for a response which has yet to be written," data scientist Brendan Greenly said in a statement. "There’s a bit of posturing involved with this closing, but it turns out it works pretty well."

The study was conducted by the company behind Boomerang, an email plugin compatible with Gmail, Outlook, and Android, that schedules emails, snoozes messages, and creates read receipts, among other features. (Not to be confused with the Instagram feature of the same name.) The company uses data like this to inform their feature “Respondable,” which analyzes email in real-time and alerts you to changes that might help you get a quicker reply.

Boomerang's findings piggyback off of a 2010 study where a sample of college students received two emails asking for advice, one with an expression of gratitude and one without. The results, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, found that the students were more than twice as likely to respond to the email that included a thank you.

No matter what you’re emailing about, a little genuine gratitude seems to go a long way. (No surprises there!)