How to sign off an email: 70 email sign offs, and when each one works

What an email sign off is, and what it decides

An email sign off is three things in this order: the closing formula, your name, and the signature block underneath. If you are looking for how to sign off an email in one line, the neutral that works on almost every business message is "Best regards", followed by your first name. The longer answer, and the reason the block underneath matters more than the formula, is what the rest of this page is for. Most guides treat only the first part, which is why so many emails end politely and still land badly.

An email sign off does three jobs at once. It sets the temperature of the relationship, it tells the reader whether a reply is expected, and, in a first contact, it gives them the evidence they need to decide you are a real person at a real company. On a warm thread, only the first job matters. On a message to someone who has never heard of you, the other two decide whether the email gets an answer or a delete.

That is the reason this page exists. Plenty of pages will hand you a list of email sign offs ranked by politeness. Very few are written for the message you send to a stranger, where the last five lines are also a deliverability decision and an identity check. We cover both: the formula, and the block underneath it.

If you are here because a campaign is underperforming, read this alongside the email deliverability checklist, which covers the mechanical layer. A closing line cannot rescue a message that never reached an inbox.

The four rules for choosing an email sign off

Choose on four things, in this order: how well you know the person, what you are asking them to do, the temperature of the thread so far, and where they work. Everything else, including your personal taste, comes after those four.

Rule one: the relationship sets the ceiling. Being slightly more formal than the relationship justifies is always forgiven. The reverse is not. "Cheers" to someone you met once claims a familiarity you have not earned; "Yours sincerely" to a daily colleague lands as sarcasm. In doubt on a first contact, land neutral: "Best regards" or "Thanks".

Rule two: the ask sets the register. Asking for a favour, a meeting or an introduction calls for a small amount of gratitude, because you are spending someone's time. Delivering something they asked for does not: a plain "Best" is better. Delivering bad news calls for warmth without cheerfulness: "With thanks for your patience" works, "Cheers" does not.

Rule three: mirror the thread, one step behind. On an ongoing exchange, copy the register the other person is using rather than the one you opened with. If they have dropped to "Thanks, J", you can drop too. Let them lead. The common mistake is warming up faster than they do, which the other side feels as pressure.

Rule four: the culture of the recipient outranks yours. A German counterpart will not read "Cheers" the way a British one does, and a French counterpart expects something closer to a full sentence. Specifics are further down; the principle is simple: when the two cultures disagree, follow theirs.

Those four rules cover almost every real case. The catalogue below exists so that once you know the register you need, you are not stuck between the same three words you always use.

Ways to end an email: pick yours in ten seconds

If you want one answer rather than a catalogue: on a first contact to someone senior you have never met, use "Best regards" and a four line plain text signature. For everything else, three questions and the picker returns three email sign offs that fit plus the shape of the block to paste underneath. It runs in your browser and calls nothing.

Email sign off examples by tone: the 70 closings

Seven registers cover every business case: formal, professional neutral, warm, grateful, apologetic, internal, and the distinctive closings you can only use on a thread that already carries them. Sorted most formal first. The table gives the shape, the lists give enough options that you are not repeating yourself across a sequence.

Formal. Signals distance and correctness, right for legal, public sector and first contact with a senior stranger. Yours sincerely. Yours faithfully. Respectfully. With respect. Sincerely. Sincerely yours. Yours truly. Cordially. With kind regards. Most sincerely.

Professional neutral. Says nothing at all, which is the point: it is the email closing that never costs you anything. Best regards. Kind regards. Regards. Best. Warm regards. With regards. Best wishes. All the best. Many thanks. Thank you.

Warm. Claims a relationship that already exists, so it reads as a claim if it does not. With warm wishes. Warmly. Take care. Speak soon. Looking forward. Until next time. Have a good week. Enjoy the weekend. Talk soon. Best of luck.

Grateful. Acknowledges that you are spending someone's time, which is only true if you asked for something small. Thanks in advance. Thanks so much. Thank you kindly. With thanks. Thank you for your time. Grateful for your help. Appreciate it. Thanks for considering. With appreciation. Thanks again.

Apologetic or delivering bad news. Warmth without cheerfulness, the hardest register to get right. With apologies. Sorry again. Apologies for the delay. With thanks for your patience. Thanks for bearing with me. Sorry to be the bearer of this. Regretfully. With regret. My apologies. Thanks for understanding.

Internal and casual. Reads as speed, and is normal inside a company and out of place leaving one. Thanks. Cheers. Thanks a lot. Nice one, thanks. Shout if anything. Any questions, ping me. Over to you. Onwards. Speak Monday. Your name alone.

Distinctive, for threads that can carry it. Shows personality, and only works once the other person has replied to you at least once. Looking forward to what you decide. Happy to be told I am wrong. No reply needed. Whenever suits. Take your time. More soon. Excited about this one. Fingers crossed. Here when you need it. Good luck with the launch.

That is seventy options, more than anyone needs. The point is not volume: across a five step sequence you should not send the same word five times.

Email sign offs by situation, including follow-ups and break-ups

The register changes with the moment in the sequence, not just with the person. A first contact, a third follow-up and a break-up message are three different conversations, and they should not end the same way.

First contact with a stranger. Neutral and short. "Best regards" or "Thanks" followed by your first name. Avoid gratitude that has not been earned yet: "Thanks in advance" works when there is a specific small ask in the line above, and sounds presumptuous when there is not. Templates for the message itself are in our cold email templates guide.

Follow-up, second or third message. Keep the same closing you used the first time. Changing it draws attention to the fact that you are following up, and warming up mid-sequence applies pressure you did not intend. If anything, get shorter.

The break-up message. The last email in a sequence is the one people over-write. Close it with something that costs the reader nothing to ignore: "No reply needed", "Here if it ever becomes relevant", "Closing the loop, all the best". Leaving the door open without asking for anything is also the version most likely to get an answer.

After a call or a meeting. Warmth is earned now: "Speak soon", "Looking forward", "Thanks again for your time". This is the moment to move one step up the register, not before.

Delivering something they asked for. Plain and short: "Best", "Here you go", "Thanks". Gratitude here is backwards.

Saying no. Warm, not cheerful. "With thanks for thinking of us", "Sorry it is not this time", "Best of luck with it". Never end a refusal with "Cheers".

Best regards vs kind regards: which email closing to use

They differ by distance, not by politeness: "Regards" is the coolest, "Best regards" is the neutral standard, "Kind regards" is slightly warmer and reads as British, "Warm regards" is warmer still and is out of place in a first contact. None of them is wrong. They just place you at a different distance from the reader.

• Regards. Cool, efficient, slightly clipped. Fine when the thread is transactional. Can read as annoyed if the message itself is tense.
• Best regards. The default of business email in English. Nobody has ever been offended by it, which is exactly what you want on a first contact.
• Kind regards. Common in the United Kingdom and in Commonwealth business mail, less so in the United States. Slightly warmer than "Best regards" without becoming familiar.
• Warm regards. Genuinely warm. Right after a call, wrong on a first contact where the warmth is not backed by anything.
• Best. The clipped form. Comes across as busy and senior in American business mail, and as curt in some European ones.

Two mechanical points people ask about constantly. Capitalisation: capitalise the first word only. "Best regards", not "Best Regards". Punctuation: a comma after the closing, then your name on the next line. "Best regards," then "Marie". No comma after your name.

Nobody is deciding whether to reply to you based on which of these five you picked. The gap between them is real, and small. The gap between an email sign off that fits the thread and one that does not is the one that shows.

Which closings get replies, and what the number actually measures

The caveat comes first: the numbers below were measured on public discussion threads, not on business outreach. That analysis, published in 2017 on a corpus of 350,000 threads from an open online community, found that email sign offs containing a form of thanks were followed by a reply more often than neutral ones: "Thanks in advance" at 65.7 percent, "Thanks" at 63 percent, "Thank you" at 57.9 percent, against "Best" at 51 percent and "Regards" at 53.5 percent, on a corpus average of 47.5 percent. Those numbers get quoted everywhere. They are worth knowing, and they are worth reading carefully.

The corpus was public discussion threads, not business cold outreach. People who write "Thanks in advance" are usually people asking a specific, small, answerable question, and a specific small question is the thing that gets answered. The closing is a marker of the kind of email it is attached to, not an independent cause. Swapping "Best" for "Thanks in advance" on a message with no clear ask will not move your reply rate.

What survives from the study is the direction: an email that ends by acknowledging that you are spending someone's time tends to be an email that asked for a small amount of it. Write the small ask, and the grateful closing follows. Put it on top of a vague message and you have decorated the problem.

Reply rate on cold outreach is dominated by upstream factors anyway: whether the list was verified, whether the domain is authenticated, whether the message was relevant. Our cold email subject lines guide makes the same point at the other end of the message.

Email sign offs to avoid, and why

Six categories cause almost all the damage: passive aggression, false familiarity, religious closings on a first contact, automated device signatures, abbreviations, and anything that implies an obligation to answer.

• Passive aggressive. "Per my last email", "As previously stated", "Looking forward to your prompt response". Every one of these tells the reader you are keeping score. If you need to chase, chase in the body, plainly, and close neutrally.
• Fake warmth. "Warmly" and "Hugs" to someone you have never spoken to. "Cheers" outside the United Kingdom and Australia on a first contact, where it reads as a stranger being chummy.
• Religious or personal-belief closings. "Blessings", "God bless". Appropriate in some contexts, presumptuous in a business first contact.
• "Sent from my iPhone" and other device lines. On a cold email it is worse than lazy: it announces that the message was fired off, and in an outreach sequence it is often the only thing that differs from a template.
• Abbreviations. "Thx", "Rgds", "BR", "TY". These save four characters and cost you the impression of care.
• Obligation language. "Awaiting your reply", "Let me know either way", "I look forward to hearing from you at your earliest convenience". Asking for a reply is fine. Implying you are owed one is not.

One more, specific to outreach: do not put a question in the closing line. "Thanks, and what do you think?" buries the ask. The question belongs on its own line above, and the closing comes after it.

Cultural and generational differences

The safe formula changes by country more than most English-language guides admit, and the safest move on an international list is to stay neutral rather than to localise badly.

United States. "Best", "Best regards", "Thanks". Short is normal, and a first name alone on a warm thread is unremarkable. "Kind regards" is understood but sounds imported.

United Kingdom and Ireland. "Kind regards" is the workhorse, and "Cheers" is genuinely normal in business mail, including from senior people. "Yours sincerely" and "Yours faithfully" keep their old letter-writing rule: sincerely when you named the person, faithfully when you did not.

France. The closing is a full sentence, not a word. "Cordialement" is the neutral standard, "Bien cordialement" is slightly warmer, and the long formulas beginning "Je vous prie d'agréer" survive in formal and administrative mail. Ending a French business email with the English "Best" reads as careless.

Germany. "Mit freundlichen Grüßen" is the standard and is more formal than its English equivalents. Shortening it too early is noticed.

Netherlands and Nordics. Short and direct is the norm, and warmth is not expected from a stranger. Neutral formulas travel well here.

Generations. The visible split is about medium, not age. People who grew up on chat treat the closing as optional on short internal messages, and keep it on anything that leaves the company. The practical rule: keep one on every external email, and relax internally if your team does.

If your list spans several countries, the location column is worth filling before you decide any of this, and it is the same column that decides your send time. Our guide on the best time to send cold emails covers that side.

The signature block, and what to strip out of a first cold email

In a first cold email, the signature block should be plain text, three or four lines, with no image, no banner, no tracked link and no social icons. This is the part the guides to closing formulas leave out, and it is the part that decides whether the message arrives at all.

Here is what happens when you attach a designed signature to cold outreach. The image is a remote asset, so the message becomes a multipart HTML email with external references. The banner is usually served from a third party domain, and the "book a call" button is a redirect through a tracking domain. Individually, none of these is fatal. Together, on a new sending domain with no reputation, they are a pattern filters recognise.

The version that works on a first contact:

• Your full name. First and last. A first name alone gives the reader nothing to verify.
• Your role and company. The role matters more than the company for credibility: it tells the reader why you are the one writing.
• One way to reach you that is not email. A phone number is the strongest signal of a real person. It is also the line that most templates drop.
• Your company domain, as plain text. Not a tracked link. If the domain you are writing from matches the domain in the signature, that consistency is doing quiet work.

That last point connects to the technical layer. The domain in your signature should be the domain you send from, and that domain should be authenticated before the first send. Three records do that: SPF lists the servers allowed to send for your domain, DKIM signs each message so the receiver can confirm it was not altered, and DMARC tells receivers what to do when either check fails. Since February 2024, Gmail and Yahoo require all three from anyone sending at volume, and ask that spam complaints stay below 0.3 percent. Our SPF record check guide walks through the first of those, and the deliverability checklist covers the rest in the order they matter.

Once the thread is warm, add the rest back. Logos, links and booking buttons are fine on a message to someone who has already replied, because the reputation question is settled.

There is a symmetry worth naming. You ask the reader to trust that you are a real person at a real company, and you back it with a plain, checkable block. The reverse side of the same question is whether the address you are writing to belongs to a real person who still works there. That is what Email Verification does, at 1 credit per email and billed only when a result comes back, and what Email Finder does at 5 credits per email found. Both sit on the paid plans. Both run from the Derrick sidebar in Google Sheets, which is the surface the free plan gives you, and from an AI assistant over MCP or the REST API on the Standard plan and above. A web app is arriving soon. The free plan and its 100 credits per month cover importing and enriching records, which is enough to see the shape of a real list before committing to the paid finding and verification side.

How to end a professional email: the line before your closing

The line above the closing does more work than the closing itself, and it should contain one question, closed, answerable in a sentence. Most of what people blame on a weak email sign off is actually a weak final ask.

Three shapes work. A closed question: "Is this something your team handles internally, or do you outsource it?" A dated proposal: "Would Thursday morning work for fifteen minutes?" A permission request: "Happy to send the two-page version if that is useful. Want it?" All three are answerable in one line, which is the only property that matters.

Three shapes do not work. "Let me know what you think" gives the reader nothing to do. "Looking forward to hearing from you" is not a question. And a request for a call with no duration attached asks the reader to commit to an unknown quantity.

Put the ask on its own line, leave a blank line, then the closing, then your name, then the block. Four short lines at the bottom of the message. If that structure is in place, the choice of email sign off becomes what it should be: a small decision that you make quickly and stop thinking about.

If your bounce rate is above 2 percent, none of this matters yet, because the messages are not arriving. Start with the list, then the domain, then the copy. Derrick works on the list from the Google Sheet where it already lives: importing and enriching records runs in the Sheets sidebar on the free plan and its 100 credits per month, while Email Finder at 5 credits per email found and Email Verification at 1 credit per email sit on the paid plans from 9 euros a month, both billed only on a result. The REST API and the MCP server for an AI assistant open at the Standard plan, at 20 euros a month. Start with the free plan, or read the rest of the cold email cluster first.

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