A study has revealed the key to getting your emails answered: give the "thanks in advance"

It has all happened to us at some point: you write an important email, you send it and the only response you get is absolute silence. You review the text, the subject, the recipient, and everything seems correct. According to science, the problem with that email may be in the last two words that close the body of the email, that space that the majority fills in as a formality with a “regards” or “sincerely”, without devoting a second of reflection to it. how it should be worded an email so that don’t fall into oblivion.

A study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychologyanalyzed hundreds of thousands of email conversations and came to conclusions strong enough to reconsider a habit that almost no one questions, but improves the chances of receiving a response.

The experiment that changed everything. In 2017, Boomerang examined over 350,000 email threads extracted from mailing list archives of over twenty different online communities. The goal was to determine whether the way one says goodbye at the end of an email has any real effect on the probability of get responsesomething that until then no one had measured on that scale. The study of these data returned a resounding yes.

Closings with expressions of gratitude obtained notably higher response rates than the rest of the usual formalisms, with a difference that can exceed fourteen percentage points compared to the more neutral farewell formulas. The average response rate for all the emails analyzed was 47.5%, a reference figure that allows the real impact of each type of closure to be measured.

The formula that prevails over all others. Among all the closings studied, the farewell with a “thank you in advance” turned out to be the most effective formula, with a response rate of 65.7%. This was followed by a brief “thank you” with 63% and “thank you very much” with 57.9%. At the opposite extreme, closer farewell formulas such as “kind regards” (53.9%), “regards” (53.5%) or “regards” (52.9%) were well below. On the other hand, the “best” formula, the Anglo-Saxon equivalent of “the best”, recorded the worst data of all those analyzed, with 51.2%.

The logic behind the most successful terms is simple: writing “thank you in advance” thanks the recipient in advance for a response that has not yet occurred, which creates an implicit expectation of commitment that the recipient tends to fulfill. It’s not a fancy psychological trick, but rather a signal of advance politeness that, according to the data, serves as a consistent and measurable hook.

The science that explains the phenomenon. The results published by Boomerang match the investigations previous studies conducted by behavioral psychologists Adam M. Grant (Wharton School) and Francesca Gino (Harvard Business School). Their study showed that the expressions of gratitude They directly motivate prosocial behavior, that is, people’s willingness to help.

University students who participated in that experiment who received a message with an expression of gratitude closing the email were twice as likely to offer their help as those who received the same message without it. The researchers concluded that the key mechanism is not the recipient’s self-esteem or emotional state, but rather the feeling of feeling socially valued. Apparently, those two formulas that seemed like mere courtesy, activate that spring.

The numbers that justify the change. When Boomerang directly compared the emails with these thank-you closings to the rest, the difference was even clearer. Messages with some variant of thanks at the end achieved a response rate of 62%, compared to the 46% average offered by emails that did not include it, which represents a relative increase of 36% in the average response rate.

It is worth keeping in mind, however, that the analysis itself warns of its limitations and conditions. The sample comes mainly from communities linked to open source software and academic environments, so it may not reflect all professional or social contexts. Even so, the fact that these closures generated a greater tendency to respond confirms that the choice of the appropriate closure is not a minor detail, but a variable. with proven weight.

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Image | Unsplash (Stephen Phillips)

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The news

A study has revealed the key to getting your emails answered: saying “thank you in advance”

was originally published in

Xataka

by
Ruben Andres

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