By Phillip Laskaris

“Best regards” and other email sign offs

As our term progresses here at the ole School of Communication Arts 2.0, we’re reaching out to agencies. Little feelers to let them know another arrogant class of SCA students are coming to “revolutionise” and “takeover” the ad industry. 

A large part of going on book crits and visiting agencies is the email. Sometimes that’s even the first contact you have with someone in this digital age. 

My last job was at the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME). Most famous for it’s work on boiler regulations in the US (ASME saved countless lives in the late 19th century when they stopped boilers from exploding.) I had a few responsibilities at my job that I won’t get into, but one of them was emailing authors that submitted to our scientific journals. I sent thousands of emails in the span of 15 months. I’m not exaggerating either. One day I was bored at work and instead of responding to an email I decided to figure out my ESPD – Emails Sent Per Day. After about an hour of calculations I figured I sent 73 emails a day. I just did a few more calculations and find out that over my 303 days employed (not including weekends and public holidays) at ASME I sent 22,119 emails. 

As such I got pretty familiar with email lingo and etiquette. When to use a CC, when to use a BCC (you sneaky fox), when to forward, and when you could stop saying “Hello” at the beginning of the email. The intricacies of sending an email can be extensive if you’re really bored or you’re just really boring. I grew to love some aspects of emailing and by far my favourite was the email Sign off. 

Email sign offs can be the absolute funniest part of an email if played correctly. To the benefit of my fellow students I’ve decided to share some of the basics to email sign offs.

The Classic:

Best (regards), _______

This is like wearing blue in your outfits. It will always work and, even though it’s widely used, still has class. I would use this on the daily and was particularly good for starter emails to co-workers. (A starter email is a term I use for an email that begins the email chain.)

Looking forward to hearing from you, _______

This is a crucial one to have in your pocket as a student. It’s always important to express excitement over the mere thought they might read your email and respond to it. However, I believe there are more interesting ways of saying this and I encourage any emailer to do their best to put their own personality in this phrase. I like to say: “Can’t wait to fill my eyes with your words”.

My favourite:

Continued Success, _______________

I received this in an email within my first week at ASME and it blew my mind. Continued Success. After reading that, I had more confidence. This stranger had given me a better send off than my friends did when I left for London. However, you can’t go throwing this around willy nilly. If I said I love you to every person on the street, at some point, I’m a freaking psycho. This sign off has great power and my rule was I would only use it as the closer. Once I knew an email chain was finished, I would chuck a little CS at the end so we all knew our business was done and that the next endeavour will be even better than the last. 

That does it for this weeks Email Sign Offs. If you want more, tweet me at @laskarisphillip

The last thing I’ll say is always use the appropriate sign off, looks weird if your too formal or too informal. 

Until I breakout of this man’s basement,

Phillip Laskaris