Hey

Can one word change how often people reply to you? Also, 7 other things worth your time.

For obvious reasons, I’ve spent some time over the last year or two trying to figure out what little stylistic tricks prompt people to open and read emails.

Here’s a tactic I learned along the way; maybe more applicable to individual emails than an email newsletter, but interesting nonetheless. What if simply changing the initial word you use in your emails could significantly improve the odds that people will be prompted to reply?

The folks at Boomerang, in a report reprinted on Quartz, combed through more than 300,000 publicly available emails (most of which had been included in threads on various online forums over the years) then pulled out the most commonly used opening words and studied the response rates.

They found five words that started at least 1,000 of the messages in the trove:

• Hey

• Hello

• Hi

• Greetings

• Dear

Across all emails, it turns out that simply using the informal, three letter opening "hey," prompted more responses: Exactly 64 percent of emails that opened with that word rece…