Do you find yourself cringing or rolling your eyes while reading a work email? Sometimes it’s the content of the message, but more often, it’s a phrase or word that makes your skin crawl. We’re talking about the terms people claim to hate, but can’t seem to stop typing in their corporate correspondence. And a new study uncovers the worst offenders in our inboxes.
ZeroBounce, an email validation and deliverability platform, combed through more than a million (1,000,967) real work emails to find the most overused clichés. Their research reveals:
- About one in 50 emails includes a buzzword and roughly 22 of every 1,000 emails contain one of the top clichés.
- Nearly 3-thousand emails began with some version of “hope,” like “hope you’re doing well,” “hope this finds you well,” or “hope all is well.”
- While almost a quarter of employees now use AI to help write emails, the same buzzwords are showing up.
- “Even AI has picked up on our bad habits,” says ZeroBounce CEO Liviu Tanase. “The bots are ‘reaching out’ and ‘circling back.’ We laugh at corporate jargon, but we keep using it, and we’ve trained machines to sound like us.”
The Top 10 Overused Email Buzzwords, According to ZeroBounce:
- Reaching out – 6,117 emails
- Follow up (all variations) – 5,755 emails
- Check in (all variations) – 4,286 emails
- Aligned (all variations) – 1,714 emails
- Please advise – 1,459 emails
- Hope you're doing well – 1,300 emails
- Hope this email finds you well – 974 emails
- Hope all is well – 592 emails
- E-meet – 536 emails
- Circle back (all variations) – 533 emails
Source: ZeroBounce