Executive Summary

Email is one of today’s foremost means of communication. Nowhere is this truer than in the workplace.
 
Well-crafted emails can make you look professional and competent, yet also warm and personable. They can engage your audience, helping you both achieve your goals. All of this makes a critical difference when pursuing a coveted job, raise, or promotion, strengthening relationships with friends and coworkers, and building your long-term career.
 
But after sending emails for years, where do you turn for the latest tips? The internet is awash with superficial advice, most of which is anecdotal at best.
 
Email science can help. Through rigorously designed studies, it’s possible to ascertain what works, for whom, and in what contexts. That’s where we come in. The Lyngo Lab team has conducted 10 randomized controlled trials to test how modern email practices affect your audiences’ perceptions.
 
These practices include choosing an email address, avoiding typos, using slang, formatting text with bold font, all caps, and bulleted lists to improve recall, expanding vocabulary, selectively using exclamation marks, adding emojis, starting sentences with “I,” and including supplemental information with parentheses.
 
Below, we provide a summary of how these email practices influence audience outcomes. Each study is covered more in depth in the report. Links to the full version of each study are available on the last page of the report.

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