【原】Metro English - 278 - How to end an email?

新用户02986T3F 2020-09-17

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How to end an email?

如何给你的邮件写个结尾？

When you’re drafting an email, ending it is the easiest part. Whether you sign-off with “Warmest Regards,” “Thanks,” or “Keep On Keepin’ On,” it only takes a second, and you probably don’t give it a second thought. Do email closings even matter? And if so, is “best” really best? We looked at closings in over 350,000 email threads, and found that certain email closings deliver higher response rates.

当你写一封电子邮件时，结束它是最简单的部分。不管你是以“最热烈的问候”、“谢谢”还是“保持联系”来结束，只需要一秒钟，你可能不会再想一想。电子邮件的关闭有什么重要的吗？如果是的话，“最好”真的是最好的吗？我们研究了超过350000个电子邮件结束的线索，发现某些电子邮件的结束语可以提供更高的响应率。

For our study, we used messages from mailing list archives of over twenty different online communities. These emails proved to be a great sample for looking at variations in response rate, as many entailed people asking for help or advice, hoping for a reply.

在我们的研究中，我们使用了来自20多个网上社区的邮件列表存档的邮件。这些邮件被证明是一个很好的样本，可以用来观察回复率的变化，因为许多人需要寻求帮助或建议，希望得到回复。

Email closings are largely determined by the setting of an email. You might sign a message to your mom with “Love,” but would (hopefully) choose a more formal closing when writing to your HR person. So first, we wanted to get an idea of which closings were used in these online communities Most popular email closings.

电子邮件的结束语在很大程度上取决于电子邮件的设置。你可以用“爱你”用于给你妈妈的邮件，但在给人力资源部的人写信时，最好选择一个更正式的结尾。因此，首先我们想知道这些网上社区的邮件使用了哪些最流行的结束语。

Eight email sign-offs (pictured, in order of popularity) appeared over a thousand times each.

以下8种结束语（按流行度排列）每种都出现了上千次。

Not much of a surprise here: these eight closings are all common email sign-offs in general. As none of these endings seem specific to online communities, any trends we find should be relevant for anyone who emails. So now for the moment of truth: how did these closings correlate with response rate?

这并不奇怪：这八种结束语都是常见的电子邮件的结尾。由于这些结尾似乎都不是哪个网上社区特有的，我们发现的任何趋势都应该与发电子邮件的人有关。所以说实话：这些关闭与响应率能有什么关系？

Emails that closed with a variation of thank you got significantly more responses than emails ending with other popular closings.

以“谢谢”结尾的电子邮件比以其他流行方式结尾的电子邮件收到的回复要多得多。

The difference a simple “thanks” makes in getting a reply was even clearer when we compared emails with “thankful closings” to all others. Emails where we detected a thankful closing saw a response rate of 62%. This compared to a response rate of 46% for emails without a thankful closing. Closing with an expression of gratitude thus correlated with a whopping 16% relative increase in average response rate compared to signing off another way.

当我们将有“感谢的结尾”的电子邮件与所有其他邮件进行比较时，简单的“谢谢”在获得回复方面所起的作用更加明显。我们发现以“感谢”结尾的电子邮件的回复率为62%。相比之下，没有感谢结尾的邮件回复率为46%。与以另一种方式结尾相比，以表示感谢的方式结束一封邮件的平均回复率要高出16%。

After doing some sleuthing, we realized our findings actually reaffirm a 2010 study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology titled “A Little Thanks Goes a Long Way.” In this Grant & Gino study, 69 college student participants got one of two emails asking for help with a cover letter. Half received an email that 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.”

在做了一些调查之后，我们意识到我们的研究结果实际上重申了2010年发表在《个性与社会心理学杂志》上的一项研究结果，它的标题为“小小的感谢能起到很大的作用”。在格兰特与基诺的这项研究中，69名大学生参与者收到了两封要求帮助写求职信的电子邮件中的一封。一半的人收到的邮件，上面写着“非常感谢！另一半收到了一封类似的邮件，但没有表达感激之情。研究发现，当收件人收到包含“谢谢”的电子邮件时，他们提供帮助的可能性是另一组人的两倍多。

Also noteworthy was that generic email sign-offs like “regards” had lower response rates. And it turned out that “best” was in fact worst among popular email closings. Ending an email with “best” had the lowest average response rate when compared to other email sign-offs that appeared 1,000+ times.

同样值得注意的是，像“问候”这样的普通电子邮件结束语的回复率较低。事实证明，在受欢迎的电子邮件结束语中，“best”实际上是最差的。与出现1000多次的其他电子邮件结束语相比，以“best”结尾的电子邮件的平均回复率最低。

Among closings seen at least 1,000 times in our study, “thanks in advance” ended up correlating with the highest response rate, which makes sense, as the email’s recipient is being thanked specifically for a response which has yet to be written. There’s a bit of posturing involved with this closing, but it turns out it works pretty well. But no matter how you express your thanks, doing so certainly appears to be your best bet in closing an email if you want a response. Interestingly, all of the email sign-offs that appeared 1,000+ times saw higher email response rates than the overall average response rate across all emails in our sample (which was 47.5%).

在我们的研究中，在至少出现1000次的结束语中，结果是“提前感谢”获得最高的回复率，这是有道理的，因为电子邮件的接收者正被特别感谢一个尚未进行的回复。这个结尾有点装腔作势，但事实证明效果很好。但不管你如何表达感谢，如果你想得到回复，那么这样做无疑是你结束电子邮件的最佳选择。有趣的是，在我们的样本邮件种，所有使用了出现1000次以上的结束语的电子邮件，回复率都高于总体平均回复率（47.5%）。