Emails are an intractable part of modern life. Something like 200 billion of them are sent every day, one estimate says, with office workers churning through 120 sent and received messages daily.
If you want any of the ones you send to get responded to, Quartz reporter Sarah Kessler has some advice for you: Please, don’t trip over your grammar.
The data comes care of the email management service Boomerang. After analyzing 250,000 emails, the company found that making an error in a subject line translated into a 5 percent decline in the likelihood a message would be opened, down from 34 percent to 29 percent in response rate. The most heavily punished mistake was messing up capitalization in a subject line, good for a 15 percent drop.
While this is a corporate data point and not a neutral, peer-reviewed study, it’s more evidence that if you want to be taken seriously, professional presentation is key.
Predictably, Mondays had more errors than any other day.
