25 Email Salutation Examples for Professional & Cold Outreach (2026)

Your email salutation is read in under a second — but it sets the entire tone of what follows. The wrong one signals mass outreach before the prospect reaches your first sentence. The right one signals that you know who you're writing to. This guide covers 25 email salutation examples across professional, cold outreach, and casual contexts, with guidance on which to use when — and which to avoid entirely.

What is an email salutation?

An email salutation is the opening line of an email that directly addresses the recipient — "Hi Sarah," or "Dear Mr. Chen," for example. It is distinct from the subject line (which the reader sees before opening the email) and the opening sentence (which follows the salutation).

The salutation signals three things simultaneously: how well you know the person, how formal the context is, and how much effort you put into personalising the email. In cold outreach specifically, it's one of the first signals the prospect uses to decide whether to read on or close the tab.

What are the best salutations for professional emails?

The best professional email salutation depends on the relationship and industry. In most B2B contexts, "Hi [First Name]," has become the standard — it's warm without being informal, and widely expected in tech, SaaS, and modern business. "Dear" remains appropriate for formal industries or first-contact emails with senior executives you've never spoken to.

Here are the 10 best professional email salutations, ranked by how broadly they apply:

According to Boomerang's analysis of over 350,000 emails, emails that include a personalised greeting receive significantly higher reply rates than those with generic or no salutation. The difference is especially pronounced in cold outreach, where a named greeting can lift open-to-reply conversion by 15–25%.

What salutations work best in cold outreach?

In cold outreach, the rule is simple: always use the recipient's first name. A named salutation is the first proof that this email was written for a specific person — not blasted to 2,000 contacts.

The five salutations that consistently perform best in cold B2B outreach:

"We A/B tested 'Hi [Name],' vs 'Dear [Name],' across 4,000 cold emails to SaaS companies. 'Hi' got a 22% higher reply rate. Prospects in tech and SaaS read 'Dear' as corporate spam — it's the wrong register for the audience."

— SDR Lead, B2B SaaS company, 80 employees

One thing that matters more than the salutation itself: the quality of your list. The reason most cold emails fail before the greeting is even read is that they're sent to the wrong people. If you're targeting companies that already use your competitor, your salutation matters much more — because the rest of the email is already highly relevant. A tool like Stealery lets you build that targeted list first: search a competitor, filter by company size and location, and you know every contact on your list is already in-market before you write a single word.

What are good casual email greetings?

Casual salutations are appropriate for warm contacts, internal emails, follow-up threads, or industries with an informal culture (tech startups, creative agencies, early-stage companies). They should still be professional enough not to undermine your credibility.

When casual works — and when it doesn't

Casual salutations signal social awareness: you know what register to use with this person. That's a positive signal in the right context. In the wrong context — a cold email to a CFO at a Fortune 500, for example — "Hey Marcus!" reads as presumptuous and is likely to reduce your reply rate.

A useful heuristic: look at the company's own website and job postings. If they write informally ("We're looking for a rockstar engineer to join our scrappy team"), a casual salutation fits. If their copy reads like a Bloomberg press release, stay with "Hi" or "Hello."

What salutations should you avoid in professional emails?

Some salutations instantly signal that an email was not written for the recipient — and no amount of good copy after them will recover the impression.

How do salutations affect reply rates in B2B outreach?

The salutation's impact on reply rate is real but secondary. It functions more as a filter than a driver: the wrong salutation can kill an otherwise good email, but the best salutation can't save an email that goes to the wrong person or says the wrong thing.

The variables that actually move reply rates, in order of impact:

1. List quality — Are you emailing companies that have a reason to care? Targeting competitor users, companies hiring for your category, or companies with a specific trigger event is the single largest lever.
2. Subject line — Gets your email opened. A bad subject line means the salutation is never seen.
3. First sentence — The line immediately after the salutation. This is where most cold emails lose the reader.
4. Salutation — Named vs. generic. "Hi Sarah," vs. "To Whom It May Concern." The difference is real (15–25% in reply rate per Boomerang data) but not the primary lever.

The teams running the highest reply rates we see aren't obsessing over whether to use "Hi" or "Hello" — they're obsessing over sending to the right list. Once you know the company you're emailing already uses your competitor, the right salutation is "Hi [Name]," and the rest of the email almost writes itself.