How to get the best response rate to your emails

The way in which a sender concludes their email could have a direct correlation to their response rate, according to new research.

Analysis from Boomerang has demonstrated that different email sign-offs elicit different response rates from receivers.

The study used messages from mailing list archives of over 20 different online communities and discovered that those signing off with some variation of ‘thank you’ had a response rate of 62%.

This was compared with a response rate of 46% for emails that did not include ‘thanks’ in the closing.

“After doing some sleuthing, we realised our findings actually reaffirm a 2010 study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology titled ‘A Little Thanks Goes a Long Way’,” Boomerang’s Brendan Greenley wrote in a blog post.

“In this Grant and Gino study, 69 college student participants got one of two emails asking for help with a cover letter. Half received an email that [ended] with a line that included ‘Thank you so much!’ The other half got a similar email, sans an expression of gratitude. The study found that recipients were more than twice as likely to offer assistance when they received the email that included ‘thank you’.”

Among the sign-offs in the study, ‘thanks in advance’ ended up correlating with the highest response rate.

On the other hand, generic email sign-offs such as ‘regards’ received a lower response rate, while ending an email with ‘best’ had the lowest average response rate.

Image credit: ©FreeImages.com/Legends Web Design

Follow us on Twitter and Facebook