Be a little careful with ‘Kind regards’ – cringingly, ‘Kind retards’ is one of the most popular typos in the English language. But still, it takes a second of your time to add ‘Best wishes’ and your name, and people do appreciate it. Yes, you probably have an email signature already programmed in along with your contact details, and yes, the recipient knows who you are from your email address. That’s fine if it’s an order, but if you’re asking for a favour, take care. And in that case, a sign-off of ‘Many thanks’, or, worse, ‘Thanks in advance’, can come across as presumption that it will be done. But more often the point of your email is to ask someone to do something. Of course, if the point of your email is to thank someone, then ‘thanks’ is a safe thing to say. By signing off at the end with your first name, you give the recipient permission to move to a first-name basis in their response.Īs for whether or not to put a comma after your salutation or sign-off, that’s a matter for personal taste – unless your company has a preferred style. ‘Dear Mr Smith’ does feel rather old-fashioned these days, but it’s still a good starting point, if you’re making the initial written contact. When we asked people how they felt about it, their responses included ‘rude and abrupt’, ‘one up from “oi”’, and ‘like I’m back in the 70s and in trouble with my father’. But if you start your email with simply ‘Bob’, you’d better be pretty sure Bob is down with that kind of thing. If you know Bob well, there’s nothing wrong with ‘Hi Bob’ or ‘Morning, Bob’. Even with someone you know, use a salutation To start and end on the right foot, follow this five-step guide:ġ. But is the time you save in omitting those three or four letters worth it, or does it cost you more elsewhere? ‘Best wishes’ and ‘Kind regards’ are giving way to abbreviations such as ‘Best’, ‘KR’ and ‘Rgds’.
And then there’s the increasingly popular no-salutation-at-all approach, the email equivalent of shouting someone’s name across a busy street.ĭown at the bottom of the email, things aren’t much clearer. ‘Dear’ sounds too formal in some cases, while ‘Hi’ seems too chummy in others. ‘Dear Mr/Mrs/Ms’ went with ‘Yours sincerely’, while ‘Dear Sir or Madam’ was paired with ‘Yours faithfully’, and ‘Yours truly’ hovered somewhere in between.īut since emails took over, the etiquette has all gone a bit off-piste. This article will get your salutations and sign-offs sorted in five easy steps.īack in the days of paper and envelopes, we had salutations and sign-offs drummed into us at school.
So ensuring that you start and finish warmly and politely can make all the difference.
Messages sent by email lack the visual and auditory cues of real-life conversation, making them particularly vulnerable to being misread or misunderstood.