Introduction

Greetings

If you do not know the name of the person you are writing to, then you may use the formal phrase “Dear Sir or Madam”. If you do know the person’s name, you can, for example, write “Dear Mr Miller” or “Dear Ms Potter”. (“Mrs” indicates that a woman is married, “Miss” that she is not. For this reason, in a modern business context, the neutral title Ms is most often used.)

In many modern workplaces, people address each other by their first names, so you might write for example: “Dear Annika”. Some workplaces are even less formal than that, so you might write “Hello Thomas”, or “Hello everyone”, if writing to a group.

How to End an Email

In British English, the most formal option to end an email is “Yours sincerely.” You might also occasionally see “Yours faithfully”, which is only used when a letter started with “Dear Sir or Madam”. In American English, the word order is different: “Sincerely yours”.

In the modern workplace, you most often see “Kind regards”, “Best regards”, which is more common in American English, or just “Regards”.

A Simple Business Email Structure

A short business email might look like this: