An estimated 330 billion emails are sent every single day and getting people to read or click your email is not easy at is it may sound in the business world. So crafting the best emails is necessary to boost your chances, and this guide will teach you how to format formal emails.

How to format formal emails

There are a few things you should do to format a formal email or a formal email for business.

1. Subject line

The subject line shows up first on emails, so it’s important to get this right.

Title case (Your Email Subject) seems more formal than sentence case (Your email subject) so you should use it more to craft your email.

Informal emails can use a subject line like “Your meeting,” on the other hand, formal emails should be more informative. For instance, “Your Meeting with Company CEO – 8/2/22, 1 pm.”

2. Greeting

Note the use of a comma after the recipient’s name, which is important in formal email writing. it’s also common to use a title like Mr., Mrs., or Dr., and the last name in certain business emails, e.g., “Dear Mr. Smith,”.

Greetings such as “hey,” “hi,” and “hello” are considered informal, so they are best for casual emails. The go-to formal salutation is Dear, as in “Dear John,”.

If you don’t know exactly who will receive your email, you may use the salutation “To whom it may concern,”.

3. Email body

There are no hard and fast rules around email length, but the best practice is to say what you need to say in as little space as possible.

• Keeping your paragraphs short
• Introducing what the email is for in the first paragraph
• Avoiding slang and abbreviations

4. Greeting

Close off your email with a short remark such as “Yours sincerely,”. There are many formal email closings that are good for professional emails:

• Regards
• Best regards
• Warm regards
• Kind regards
• All the best
• Sincerely
• Yours faithfully
• Cordially

You may also include an email signature with your relevant contact information.

The majority of emails won’t need to follow this structure. Casual conversations between friends and even emails to colleagues often don’t need to be so formal.