An email sign-off may determine whether whom you wrote to will reply or not. With the frist article pointing out the most accepted email sign-offs, here we look at email-sign-offs that you should avoid at all cost,
Love
Signing, accidentally or knowingly, office email and sending them signed-off love may cost you your career or job. Save this one for family, close friends, and your significant other. The same applies to hugs or XOXO.
Thx or Rgrds
Avoid immature sign-offs. You’re not thirteen, and this isn’t a conversation happening in a messaging app. Use your words.
Take care
On the surface, take care sounds pleasant, but on closer examination it seems to imply that the recipient should be wary of potential dangers.
Looking forward to hearing from you
This one also sounds nice at first, but it’s ultimately passive-aggressive. Your recipient is likely to hear an implied “You’d better write back.”
Yours truly
Do you really, truly belong to the recipient? Nope. This sounds insincere and hokey . . . unless you’re writing a letter home to your parents from summer camp.
Respectfully / Respectfully yours
This one’s okay if you’re sending a formal missive to your boss, but it’s too formal for anything else. In fact, according to Business Insider, respectfully yours is the standard close for addressing government officials and clergy.
[Nothing at all]
We live in a world where people frequently email from mobile devices, so excluding a signature certainly isn’t a no-no as an email chain progresses, particularly if your recipient also drops the more formal sign-off. But not signing an initial email or using only the formal signature you’ve created to append to your outgoing emails comes off as impersonal. (Bloomberg disagrees, stating that email has become more like instant messaging than true correspondence these days, but we’re sticking to our convictions.)
[Name] or -[Initial]
While this sort of sign-off may work for very brief, informal emails, it’s too cold and detached for most, particularly when you’re connecting with the recipient for the first time.
Have a blessed day
It’s best to keep anything with religious overtones out of your professional correspondence, although this one’s fine if you’re emailing an acquaintance about what you’re bringing to the church potluck.
Bonus Bad Sign-off
Although this sign-off tends to happen more by default when the sender forgets to add an actual signature, we thought it was worth mentioning the ubiquitous . . .
Sent from my iPhone
This may be the most common sign-off of them all. It has merits, of course. It explains away brevity and typos—who’s at their best when typing on a phone? But it also conveys that you don’t care enough to do away with the default email signature that came stock with your device’s email app.