I came across this article by Niklas Goke from The Next Web and it had some data in there that I had already come across but it has an interesting comment on it.
It’s about email signature sign offs; what you say when you close out an email. A quote from the article:
“Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman found evidence across several studies for something he dubbed The Peak End Rule [PDF]” which maintains that “we judge and remember experiences mostly based on how they feel at their most intense moments and right before the end.”
So, when you sign off. Then it also cites this Boomerang plug-in for Gmail that analyzed 350,000 email closings in 2017 and found that the likelihood of someone responding went up from 22 to 38% for three phrases compared to the baseline.
Those phrases are:
- “Thanks in Advance,” which had a 65.7 absolute response rate.
- “Thanks” had a 63% response rate and
- “Thank You” had a 57.9% response rate.
Conversely, though, the ones that didn’t perform so well were:
- “Cheers,”
- “Kind Regards,”
- “Regards,”
- “Best Regards,” and
- “Best.”
I use “Best” and “Best Regards” a lot when I don’t expect anything from people. I use “Thanks” if they’ve done something for me, and I use “Thanks In Advance” when I expect them to do something for me.
While this data is not new, the Peak End Rule provides a psychological framing for why thanks closings work.
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