Warm regards vs best regards vs kind regards is really a question about one thing: how much history you share with the person reading it. Best regards is the safe default for anyone you haven't met. Kind regards adds a little deference, which helps when you're asking for something. Warm regards only works once you've actually built something with this person.
That's the ten second version. But there's a wrinkle in the data that almost nobody writing about this covers, and it changes which one I'd pick.
The short answer, in one table
Three things worth pulling out of that:
- Kind regards and best regards are separated by one percentage point. Statistically, that's a coin flip.
- Warm regards never showed up often enough to measure. In a study of 350,000 threads, it didn't clear the threshold. People barely use it at work.
- All three beat the average email. The baseline reply rate across the whole sample was 47.5%, so any of them beats signing off with nothing.
What each one actually means to the person reading it
Every closing carries a temperature. The trick is matching it to the thread you're actually in, not the one your email template defaults to.
1. "Best regards" means polite distance
Definition: best regards signals professional respect with no claim to a relationship. You value their time. You're not pretending to know them.
Picture an SDR emailing a VP of Engineering she found on LinkedIn ninety minutes ago. Best regards is correct. It asks nothing of the reader emotionally.
Use it when:
- You've never spoken to this person
- You're writing to a prospect, vendor, or recruiter for the first time
- The email is routine and the stakes are low
- You genuinely cannot decide
Skip it when:
- You're four messages deep and the thread has loosened up
- You just got off a call with them
- You're writing to a teammate
The weakness of best regards is also its strength. Everyone uses it, so nobody notices it. Think of it as a plain white wall. Nothing wrong with it, nothing memorable about it either.
And that invisibility is the point. A closing that draws attention to itself has already failed, because now the reader is thinking about your farewell instead of your offer. Spend the memorable budget on your cold email subject lines instead, where it buys you something.
2. "Kind regards" means polite distance with a softer edge
Definition: kind regards carries the same professional distance as best regards, plus a small amount of goodwill. The word "kind" does work that "best" doesn't.
I reach for it when I'm asking somebody for something they don't owe me. Forwarding my email to the right internal person. Making an introduction. Chasing a document. It reads as deferential without tipping into grovelling.
Use it when:
- You're writing to the UK, Ireland, Australia, or continental Europe
- The recipient outranks you by two levels or more
- Your email contains an ask
- You want to sound polished rather than friendly
Skip it when:
- You're emailing someone you have lunch with
- The thread is already casual
- You're trying to sound approachable rather than correct
Here's the catch, and it's a real one. American readers tend to file kind regards as more formal than best regards. British readers treat it as the plain everyday default. Same two words, two different readings, and nobody tells you which audience you've got.
So I check the domain before I commit. A .co.uk address and a .com address get different closings from me, even when the body copy is identical. Costs me two seconds.
3. "Warm regards" means we have history
Definition: warm regards claims an existing relationship. That's the whole signal, and it's the reason the phrase gets misused so often.
Use it when:
- You've met in person or been on a call together
- They've replied to you more than once, in a friendly tone
- You're sending a recap after a demo that went well
- You've worked with this customer for months
Skip it when:
- It's a cold first touch (this is the big one)
- You're writing to anyone in a formal culture
- The email delivers bad news or a contract
Drop warm regards on a stranger and it reads as manufactured intimacy. I've watched reps do this in a cold email and it lands the way a stranger hugging you at a conference lands. The warmth isn't earned, so the reader files it as technique rather than feeling.
My honest opinion: warm regards is the most over-recommended closing in B2B. Most articles tell you it's friendly and professional. In practice, it's a signal of familiarity, and if the familiarity isn't there, you've just told the reader you're running a script.
The data nobody on page one is using
Two studies exist on this. They disagree, and the disagreement is the most useful thing in this article.
Study one: what gets replies
Boomerang analysed over 350,000 email threads and ranked the eight closings that appeared more than a thousand times each.
The headline finding isn't about regards at all. Gratitude closings beat everything. Emails with a thankful ending pulled 62% against 46% for everything else, a 36% relative lift.
Within the regards family, the spread between first and last is three points. If you've spent longer than four seconds agonising between kind and best, you've spent three seconds too many.
Study two: what people actually think of you
Then there's perception, which is a different animal. Preply surveyed 1,005 Americans in December 2022 and asked which closings felt warm and which felt stiff.
Kind regards came back as one of the most uptight sign-offs in the language, grouped with "Respectfully" and "Dear." Meanwhile:
- "Thank you" was both the most used (80%) and the most preferred (38%)
- "Thanks in advance" was used by 41% but preferred by only 5%, the lowest score in the set
- No sign-off at all was rated the single most savage way to end an email
- Your name alone came second
Read those two studies together and something interesting falls out. "Thanks in advance" gets the most replies and the least affection. It works and people resent it. That's not a contradiction so much as a trade: you're spending a little goodwill to buy a response.
So what do I actually do with this?
I run it as a split. Gratitude closings for anything with an ask inside it. Regards closings for anything formal, senior, or international. And I stopped treating the choice between kind and best as a decision worth making.
Actually, let me sharpen that, because it's the thing I'd push back on hardest if someone handed me this article: the sign-off is the smallest lever on the page. The line directly above it moves numbers ten times harder. If you want a real gain, rewrite your email call to action and leave the closing alone.
What to do: audit your last twenty sent emails. If the closing line before your sign-off is some version of "let me know your thoughts," that's your problem, not whether you wrote Kind or Best.
One caveat on the Boomerang numbers before we move on. That data is from 2017, it came from community mailing lists rather than B2B outbound, and it shows correlation. People who close politely tend to be asking for small, reasonable things. The closing may be a symptom of a good email rather than the cause of a reply.
Pick your closing by thread stage, not by rulebook
Formality isn't a fixed setting on your account. It moves as the relationship moves. This is the framework I use and the one I'd hand a new rep on day one.
1. Cold first touch
Best regards, or "Thanks," if your email contains a small ask.
Nothing warmer. You haven't earned it, and the prospect can smell it. If you're still building the body of the message, our walkthrough on how to write a cold email handles the opener and the ask, and these B2B cold email templates give you structures that don't need a clever closing to work.
2. Follow-ups two through four
Drop a notch each time. Best regards on touch one. Thanks on touch two. Just your first name by touch four.
Formality that never shifts feels robotic by the third follow up email. A thread should warm as it goes, the way a conversation does. The phrasing in these sales follow up email templates keeps the tone moving without sounding impatient.
3. Right after a call or demo
Warm regards finally earns its place. You've heard their voice. You know their dog barked through the Zoom.
This is the one moment where warmth is a fact rather than a performance. HubSpot's team draws a similar line in their comparison of best and kind regards, pointing to warm outreach as the dividing point. A recap after a discovery call should sound like the conversation you just had, not like a form letter.
4. Emailing a VP or above
Kind regards. Every time.
Executives read fast and judge faster. Warm regards from a stranger reads as presumptuous. Plain "Best" reads as careless. Kind regards is the only option that holds up under a two second scan.
That matters even more when you're selling to a CFO or working a multi-threaded deal across five stakeholders, because your closing is going to get forwarded to people you never wrote to.
5. Internal email with your own team
Skip it. Your name, or nothing at all.
Closing with "Kind regards" to the person two desks over makes you sound like you're opening a dispute. Younger teams have largely dropped the farewell line internally and I think they're right. The convention exists to signal distance. There isn't any.
6. When someone's gone quiet
Hold the formality steady. Do not escalate it.
Getting chummier while they ignore you reads badly, almost desperate. There's a right way to politely remind someone to reply, and cranking up the warmth isn't part of it.
The one rule that beats all six: scroll up, read how they signed their last message, and match it or sit one notch cooler. Never one notch warmer. Mirroring does more for your tone than any lookup table, including mine.
Why "kind regards" lands differently outside the US
Closings don't cross borders cleanly, and most American reps learn this the expensive way.
United Kingdom and Commonwealth. Kind regards is the standard issue default. Plain "Regards" with no modifier in front reads as cold, occasionally as irritated. I've had British colleagues re-read an email three times wondering what they'd done wrong, purely because somebody dropped the "Kind." If you're building lists there, working with B2B data providers in the UK who get local titles right matters more than your closing does.
Continental Europe. Formal by default. Kind regards or best regards both land. "Best" on its own looks unfinished to a German or French reader, because their own conventions are full sentences, not fragments.
APAC. Skew formal, then go one step further. Sincerely is not excessive for a first email in Japan or Korea.
LATAM. Warmer than most English-speaking markets, though the warmth usually shows up in the greeting rather than the ending. Reps working a Latin America email list tend to find the opening line carries the relationship.
What they'd write in their own language
Useful context for why your English closing reads the way it does to them:
Notice the pattern. Almost every one of them is warmer and longer than the English "Best." When a French contact reads your two-word closing, they're measuring it against "Cordialement," and it comes up short. Adding "regards" closes most of that gap.
SMARTe covers contacts across 200+ countries, and the thing I keep noticing in international outbound is this: tone mistakes cost you fewer meetings than stale data does. You can recover from a closing that's slightly too stiff. You can't recover from emailing somebody who left the company eleven months ago, which is why tracking job changes beats polishing your farewell line.
16 alternatives, sorted by what they're actually for
Regards isn't the only family. Here's the wider set, grouped by job.
Safe professional (use with strangers):
- Best regards
- Kind regards
- Regards
- Sincerely (formal documents, contracts, job applications)
Gratitude (highest reply rates, use when you have an ask):
- Thanks
- Thank you
- Thanks for your time
- Thanks in advance (effective, mildly resented, use on small asks only)
Warm (established relationships only):
- Warm regards
- All the best
- Best wishes
- Cheers (UK and Australia safe, confusing elsewhere)
Forward-looking (good for active deals):
- Looking forward to your thoughts
- Talk soon
- Speak next week
Minimal (threads already in motion):
- Your first name, alone
Ones I'd retire: "Yours faithfully" outside legal correspondence, "Respectfully" unless you're writing to a government office, and anything with an exclamation mark. Also "Sent from my iPhone" used as a personality. It isn't one.
7 mistakes that undo an otherwise good closing
1. Capitalising the second word
It's "Kind regards," not "Kind Regards." Only the first word takes a capital. Minor, yes, but it's a tell that you learned email formatting from templates rather than from reading.
2. Dropping the comma
A comma follows the closing. Your name goes on the next line. Without it, the block looks unfinished.
3. Thanking twice
If your last sentence already thanks them, don't close with "Thanks" as well. Pick one. Double gratitude reads as anxious, and anxious is not the register you want in a sales email.
4. A signature block doing far too much
Three logos, a banner graphic, a booking link, a legal disclaimer and an award badge. Image-heavy signatures drag on inbox placement and look dreadful on a phone. Keep it to name, title, company, one link. If your emails are landing in spam, start with email deliverability tools rather than rewriting your copy.
5. Autopilot in your sequencing tool
Most closing disasters come from a setting somebody configured in 2019 and never looked at again. "Warm regards" hard-coded into a cold sequence is the classic. Check what your platform appends by default, especially across a multi-step sales cadence hitting hundreds of contacts.
6. A closing that fights the body
A tough email about a missed deadline, closed with "Warm regards." The mismatch reads as passive aggression, even when you didn't mean it. Match the ending to the message.
7. Asking the closing to do the CTA's job
"Looking forward to hearing from you" is not a call to action. It's a wish. Your ask belongs in a full sentence above the closing, with a specific next step attached to it. This is where cold email personalization earns its keep, because a specific ask needs specific context behind it.
If you're setting this for a whole team
Sales leaders, this part's for you. Don't write a twelve page etiquette doc. Nobody reads those.
Standardise three things:
- The signature block. Same fields, same order, no images. This is a deliverability decision, not a branding one.
- The sequence defaults. Best regards on touch one, Thanks on touch two and beyond. Set it once in the tool.
- The regional rule. Kind regards for UK, Europe and APAC domains. One line in the playbook.
Leave alone:
- Which closing a rep uses inside a live thread. They can read the room better than your doc can.
- Post-demo emails. Those should sound like the rep, not like the company.
New SDRs pick this up in about a week if you give them the three rules and stop there.
The part nobody wants to hear
Your closing is the final two words of a message that was either worth sending or wasn't. No farewell line rescues a generic pitch aimed at the wrong person at the wrong company.
I'd take a slightly awkward "Warm regards" sent to somebody who genuinely needs what you're selling over a flawless "Kind regards" sent to a contact who changed jobs two quarters ago. One of those gets a reply. The other gets a bounce, and bounces compound into B2B data decay that quietly eats a whole quarter of pipeline.
Get the person right. Then worry about how you say goodbye to them.
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