Starting and finishing emails
Here are some important points to consider when starting and finishing an email.
Formal or informal?
We write a formal email when we want to be polite, or when we do not know the reader very well. A lot of work emails are formal. We write informal emails when we want to be friendly, or when we know the reader well. A lot of social emails are informal. Here are some examples of formal and informal messages:
| Formal | Informal |
|---|---|
| An email to a customer A job application An email to your manager A complaint to a shop An email from one company to another company |
A birthday greeting to a colleague |
Before you start writing an email, decide if you want to write a formal email or an informal one.
Layout and punctuation
Starting an email: We normally write a comma after the opening phrase. We start a new line after the name of the person we’re writing to.
Finishing an email: We normally write a comma after the closing phrase. We start a new line to write our name at the end.
| Formal | Informal |
|---|---|
|
Dear Mr Piper, |
Hi Tim, |
Phrases for starting and finishing
Here are some phrases which we use for starting and finishing emails. We use these in formal and informal emails:
| Starting phrases | Dear Tim, Good morning Tim, |
| Ending phrases | Regards, With best wishes, With many thanks and best wishes, |
You also need to know which phrases to use only in a formal email or an informal one:
| Formal | Informal | |
|---|---|---|
| Starting phrases | Dear Mr Piper, Dear Sir or Madam, |
Hi Tim, Hi there Tim, Morning/Afternoon/Evening Tim, Hello again Tim, |
| Ending phrases | Yours sincerely, Yours faithfully, Yours truly, |
Rgds, Cheers, Bye for now, See you soon, |
Comments
when we start a formal mail by introducing my self & my comp to market my product as :
Dear Sir,
iam karima sales coordinator in .......
is it right or not ?
Hello kokisaoudy
That is grammatically correct, though please note that spelling and punctuation are very important in English, particularly formal English. So what you wrote needs to be formatted like this: 'I am Karima, Sales Coordinator at XYZ Company'.
That is not particularly formal, though. I'm afraid I can't write your letter for you, but, for example, saying 'My name is Karima and I am a Sales Coordinator at ...' would be better here.
There aren't any emails like this one in our Writing skills section, but I'd recommend you have a look at some of the emails there to practise more.
All the best
Kirk
The LearnEnglish Team
Hello Team,
Good Day to you,
Hope your are doing well.
I would like know, how to start the new email communication with new customers and he also unknown person, Subject: Just we would like to start as introduction of my company
How to finished email and thanks
Hello prabhakaran729,
There is no single way to do this. It really depends on the culture of the company and the tone you wish to aim at. Some companies prefer a very formal approach (Dear Sir/Madam, > Yours faithfully,), while others use a more relaxed style. We can't guess what style your company prefers and so we can't really give you any detailed help here.
Peter
The LearnEnglish Team
Hello,
Hope your doing well.
I would like to know how to start new email communication with new customers and he also unknown person.
how to finished email and thanks to them
we spend more time to learn and we have better results
It's really fabulous.
Dear LearningEnglish Team
You wrote "We normally write a comma after the opening phrase" .... I learned it the other way round. So I write no comma after both, starting and ending phrase. Am I doing right though?
Thanks
David
Hello _SENDavid_,
That sounds fine. As it says above, we use commas after the opening phrase ("Dear Joe,") and after the closing phrase ("Best Regards,").
Peter
The LearnEnglish Team
I got a good teaching for my result I had already done.
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