Emails rule modern life—from friendly check-ins to serious business. But when you hit “send,” what makes someone actually write back?
Scientists have long studied what helps a request succeed, like being polite or respectful. But most research looked at individual factors in isolation, missing the bigger picture: how those elements interact in real-world settings.
Now, researchers want to zoom out. They’re using real email data over time, applying clever techniques (like causal inference) to explore what truly drives a successful request. They’ll dig into patterns shaped by things like writing style, tone, and where someone sits in a social or professional network.
Researchers at the University of Michigan looked into what makes someone more likely to respond to an email. Their approach used new methods to spot the hidden cues behind why some emails succeed and others vanish into the void.
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Their findings?
It’s not just what you ask—it’s how you ask it and who you are to the person.
They discovered that people are more likely to reply when the writing style is clear and persuasive, there’s a strong connection between sender and receiver, and the tone feels thoughtful and engaging.
Email success isn’t one-size-fits-all. If you’re reaching out to a big group for the first time, your response rate goes up if you’re already well-connected. Think of it like throwing a party—people are more likely to show up if they’ve heard of you before.
But don’t get too personal too soon. Using overly emotional or intimate language in mass emails might backfire and make people pull away.
Once someone replies and a conversation starts, the rules change: now it’s about crafting responses that feel direct and personal, because you’re no longer speaking to a crowd—you’re connecting with an individual or a small, focused group.
“Here, people with a respected reputation are more likely to keep getting replies, and being too formal or overly polite might not help maintain the conversation, surprisingly,” said study co-author David Jurgens, associate professor of information and of electrical engineering and computer science.
A massive study of over 11 million emails reveals a key insight: emails that express emotion—yes, even in technical contexts—tend to get more responses than dry, factual ones.
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Good grammar and avoiding text-like shortcuts (think “u” instead of “you”) also raise your odds of hearing back.
Researchers dug deep, filtering out emails that weren’t meant to get replies and looking at how tone, intent, and relationships affect engagement.
Researchers are further planning to investigate if the factors influencing email responses generalize across different platforms, languages, and cultural contexts.
The findings were presented at the recent Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies.
Journal Reference:
- Yinuo Xu, Hong Chen, Sushrita Rakshit, Aparna Ananthasubramaniam, Omkar Yadav, Mingqian Zheng, Michael Jiang, Lechen Zhang, Bowen Yi, Kenan Alkiek, Abraham Israeli, Bangzhao Shu, Hua Shen, Jiaxin Pei, Haotian Zhang, Miriam Schirmer, David Jurgens. Causally Modeling the Linguistic and Social Factors that Predict Email Response. DOI: 10.18653/v1/2025.naacl-long.594
