Is Thank You in an email a differentiator ?
We all use email for communicating everyday. At work, we write emails to our superiors, colleagues, direct reports, co-workers across functional areas, customers, vendors and so on.
Hopefully, we spend enough time crafting our messages carefully to ensure that our communication is well understood. We want the message to be understood as though we are communicating live. While we spend time on the title/theme/subject and the content of the mail, we usually ignore a powerful closing.
We usually have a stock signature that has a closing line such as “with regards”, “with best wishes”, “best”, “cheers” followed by our coordinates. Every reply or new email that I send, I add the word “Regards” as a standard closing.
Is there a better way to close our emails?
Short answer to the question above is “Yes”. Especially if have to get the kind of response that we want to. Ending your email with a “thank you” is apparently a sure way to get a better response. There is research to support this.
Wharton’s famous Professor, Adam Grant did his own study on this subject. Boomerang also did a study, that clearly demonstrates the impact of using the phrase “Thanks in advance” in emails (in terms of response rates).
Please read the article in the above link. Please do bear in mind that you can’t universally use the words “Thanks in advance” as a standard closing line for all your emails. It is contextual and works well for action related emails. What is true though is expressing gratitude works.
Suggested Reading – Daily Gratitude