How to End a Professional Email: Sign-Offs and Closing Phrases That Work

Mikhail Konkov · Founder, Limato

Non-native English speaker. Spent a decade writing client email in a second language before building a tool to fix it.

Most advice on ending an email is a list of fifty sign-offs with no guidance on which one to pick. This is the version for people writing English as a second language: what each closing signals to a native reader, and where it goes wrong.

The reason this trips up non-native writers is that the mistakes are invisible from the inside. "Awaiting your kind response" is grammatically perfect. It also tells the reader you learned English from a 1985 business correspondence textbook. Nobody replies to say so.

The four registers of a professional email sign-off

Every sign-off sits somewhere on a formality scale. Pick the wrong band and the email still gets read, but it lands slightly off: too stiff for a teammate, too casual for a client, too warm for someone you've never met.

Formal: Sincerely, Yours sincerely, Respectfully

Use when: cover letters, job applications, legal or regulatory correspondence, a complaint, or a first email to a government office. Anywhere the message is closer to a letter than a conversation.

Backfires when: you use it in ordinary business email. "Sincerely" on a message to a project manager you speak with weekly reads as either cold or oddly ceremonial. Native colleagues notice it the way you'd notice someone wearing a suit to a video call.

"Respectfully" is narrower still. In US usage it's mostly military, government, and legal. Outside those contexts it can read as passive-aggressive, as in respectfully, I disagree.

Neutral-professional: Best regards, Regards, Best, Kind regards, Thanks

This is the default band, and where most of your email should land. "Best regards" is the closest thing English has to a universal professional email sign off. It works with clients, vendors, strangers, and executives. It has no wrong context.

Different closings carry different temperatures. "Best" is the same thing, slightly lighter, common in tech and startups. "Regards" by itself reads cooler than "Best regards", and shows up in curt or corrective notes, so skip it when you're already delivering bad news. "Kind regards" is standard across the UK and EU and sounds mildly formal to Americans, which is fine.

Backfires when: nothing much. That's the point. The only real trap is "Regards" on a message that's already blunt, where the coolness compounds.

Warm: All the best, Take care, Cheers, Talk soon

Use when: you have an actual relationship. Someone you've worked with for months, a recruiter you've spoken to twice, a client who signs off with "Cheers" first.

Backfires when: the warmth isn't earned. Using "Warm regards" with a stranger in a cold outreach email signals a closeness that doesn't exist; to a native reader it often reads like a sales trick. "Cheers" works naturally from a British or Australian writer, but from someone without that background it can feel a bit costume-y.

One rule that saves a lot of guessing: mirror, don't lead. If they signed off "Cheers", you can use "Cheers." If they used "Best regards", stay there.

Internal-casual: Thanks, first name only, or nothing

Use when: you're on message four of a team thread. Native speakers often drop the sign-off, leave just a first name, or even an initial. It's not laziness. In a quick internal thread, a full "Best regards, Ana Ruiz, Product Lead" block on every reply feels oddly formal.

Backfires when: you carry it outside the team. No sign-off in a first-contact email reads as abrupt, and to someone senior at another company it can read as dismissive.

Professional email closing phrases for business: the line before the sign-off

The sign-off is one word. The line above it does the actual work, and it's where most professional emails fall apart.

A good closing line does one of four things: names the next step, makes a specific ask, removes pressure, or thanks the reader for something that already happened. If your last line does none of those, it's decoration.

Closing lines that work, by function:

Notice what's missing: "kind", "esteemed", "at your earliest convenience", "should you require." Formality in modern business English comes from precision, not from vocabulary. A closing line with a date in it sounds more professional than one with three courtesy phrases.

ESL mistakes in email closings

These are the ones I've made, and the ones I still see weekly in email from non-native colleagues. None are grammar errors. All of them change how the writer is read.

1. Victorian formality

"Yours faithfully" survives in formal British letters to an unnamed recipient, and it is half of a pair: if you opened with "Dear Sir or Madam", you close "Yours faithfully"; if you opened with a name, you close "Yours sincerely." Outside that narrow case — in a US business email, to a named person — it reads as a costume. Same for "Yours truly" and "Yours" alone, which in American usage carries a personal, almost romantic tone and lands very strangely from a vendor.

2. "Awaiting your kind reply"

Taught as courteous, received as demanding. "Awaiting" puts you in a posture of waiting on the reader, and "kind" asks them to be generous before they've decided anything. The combination reads as pressure wrapped in politeness, which is worse than plain pressure.

3. "Thanks in advance"

This one needs its own entry because the case against it is not the obvious one. It works: in Boomerang's analysis of over 350,000 email threads, messages closing with "Thanks in advance" pulled a 65.7% reply rate — the highest of any sign-off tested, against 51.2% for "Best" and a 47.5% baseline. In Preply's survey of 1,005 Americans, the same phrase came out the least-liked closing on the list (5%) while ranking fourth-most-used (41%). Both results are true, and they are the same fact: it lifts replies by manufacturing an obligation the reader never agreed to.

So this isn't an ESL error; plenty of native writers lean on it. It's a trade: one extra reply in exchange for how you're read. To a peer it's mildly irritating. To someone senior, or to anyone who owes you nothing yet, it reads as I have decided you will do this.

The fix is small. Put the thanks after the request without the "in advance": "Could you take a look before Thursday? Thanks." Or thank them for something real: "Thanks for making time for this."

4. Stacked sign-offs

"Thanks and regards." "Best regards and thanks in advance." "Warm regards, Thanks, Ana." One sign-off is the convention. Stacking two reads as uncertainty about which is correct, which is exactly what it is.

5. Apologizing on the way out

"Sorry for the disturbance." "Sorry to bother you again." "Apologies for the trouble caused." A single "sorry for the delay" is fine when you actually caused a delay. Habitual closing apologies make normal professional requests sound like impositions, and over a few months they lower how seriously your email gets read.

6. The signature that outranks the email

Four lines of title, department, division and three phone numbers under a two-sentence email — common where writers come from more hierarchical business cultures. In US and UK email a name, role and one contact method is standard. Anything longer starts to read as insecure rather than important.

If you want more of this pattern, the 12 ESL patterns natives rarely use covers the same problem in the body of the email — "kindly", "revert back", "do the needful" — where it does at least as much damage.

How to end an email in five common situations

Asking for something

State the ask, give a date, and stop. "Could you approve the invoice by Wednesday? Thanks." The politeness lives in the question form and in the fact that you gave them a real deadline instead of "at the earliest."

Following up on silence

Assume nothing went wrong. The native default is light and short, but it still has to carry something: "Checking in on this one — no rush if you're heads-down." / "Circling back on the scope question — do you need the budget number before you can sign off?" Then close with "Thanks" or "Best." Two things to avoid: "As per my previous email", which reads as an accusation in English no matter how neutral it feels in translation, and the empty nudge — "Just bumping this to the top of your inbox" adds no information and hands the whole decision back to the reader, which is why native writers have started mocking it.

Declining

Say no clearly, then close warm. "We're not going to be able to take this on this quarter. If the timeline shifts, I'd be glad to look again. Best regards." A firm no with a warm sign-off is normal. A soft no with a formal sign-off is what reads as cold.

Apologizing

One apology, one remedy, one sign-off. "Sorry about the missed deadline — the corrected file is attached, and I'll build in a buffer next time. Thanks for your patience." Do not apologize again in the closing line. Repeating it moves the focus from the fix back to your discomfort.

First contact with a stranger

Neutral-professional band, no exceptions. "Best regards" or "Thanks." Not "Warm regards", not "Cheers", not nothing. The closing line should make the ask small and easy to refuse: "If this isn't relevant, no problem at all — just let me know."

Professional business email closing phrases: quick reference

1. Best regards — the safe default. Any professional context.
2. Best — same register, lighter. Tech, startups, ongoing threads.
3. Kind regards — UK/EU standard, mildly formal in the US.
4. Regards — slightly cool. Not for bad news.
5. Thanks — best when the email contains a request or real gratitude.
6. Sincerely — applications, formal letters, complaints. Not daily email.
7. All the best — warm, for established relationships and goodbyes.
8. Take care — warm, personal edge. Colleagues you know.
9. Cheers — casual, UK/AU-flavored. Mirror it, don't lead with it.
10. Nothing at all — internal threads only, after the first message.

And the ones to retire: "Yours faithfully" (outside formal UK letters), "Yours truly", "Warm regards" to strangers, "Thanks in advance", "Awaiting your kind response", "Thanking you", "Respectfully" outside legal and government contexts.

The part that's hard to self-check

Register is the last thing you learn in a second language and the first thing native readers notice. You can know that "Warm regards" is warmer than "Best regards" and still not feel which one fits a client who's emailed you twice. That sense usually comes from years of reading other people's email.

This is the specific gap Limato was built for. Select the closing you drafted, pick a tone, and it rewrites in place — in Gmail, LinkedIn, Notion, or Slack — instead of sending you to another tab to paste it into a chatbot. The Native tone strips the textbook formality; Formal and Casual move the whole message up or down a register when you've guessed wrong.

For the patterns that show up earlier in the email — the opener, the hedging, the sentence rhythm — see how to make your English sound more natural.