I am mailing a "Professional Letter" to a list of apartment owners and targeting both people whom hold it in their name but also LLC's and Trusts.

My question: How do you write a salutation when it's an LLC?

In my prior mailers I have always excluded "Trustee-owned Properties" and "Corporate-owned Properties"

So the beginning of the letter would look like this:

"John Smith

123 Main Street

Austin, TX 78701

John,

I am writing you about blah blah blah...................."

But with a trust it would look like this:

"803 Northwest Parkway Land Trust

123 Main Street

Austin, TX 78701

803 Northwest Parkway Land Trust,

I am writing you about blah blah blah...................."

So I have two questions:

1. How do I write my salutation?

2. We hand write the envelopes; what do we put as the addressee on the envelope? The USPS will be crazy confused if I put:

"803 Northwest Parkway Land Trust

123 Main Street

Austin, TX 78701"

Thanks!!

Bump...

@Chris Ruoff

What I did was I created a letter that did not include a salutation with a name.

For example:

"Hello,

I am writing you about blah blah blah...................."

That's a pretty good one. Thanks.

Any idea on the addressee for the envelope?

Hello @Chris Ruoff  

1.  I prefer Dear Sir or Madam. 

2. We always have the LLC or Trust on the address to the recipients, even if its "803 Northwest Parkway Land Trust". We haven't had any issue. :)

I always go with "Dear or Sir or Madam" and you should always name the trust or LLC as the USPS has probably already received mail for the entity.

That's good input. I can't believe that you guys don't get a high return rate using the Trust name but I'm glad to hear it...

I also remembered that here in Texas you can easily look up an LLC's registered agent... so I plan on carefully looking up all of the LLC's and then researching the registered agent to see if it looks like the owner. Then we will build our list to be as specific and accurate as possible. But we obviously can't do that with a trust as anonymity is the whole point.

In direct mail, you'll typically see more success when you target your salutation and/or message to the receiver.  Keep in mind that the difference in conversion based on how you write your salutation may be minute. 

If you don't have the time or resources to look up the owner or registered agent of an entity, you could also use: "Dear Real Estate Investor"; or "Dear Investor"; "Dear Business Owner."   You could also go with more of a "power salutation" such as "Dear Success Real Estate Investor," or something even more creative than that.

Good input. Thanks... I am researching these myself but will inevitably have some that need a thought out salutation.

I would normally have one of my VA's do something like this but I think it's a good idea to do it myself so I can learn the market and the properties on the list. And tailor the message to the recipient as you mentioned...

If you wanted to really impress them... Higher a VA off of Upwork to dig into the LLC's and pull out the registered agents. You've got their attention.

When I get mail to my LLC I pretty much know 99% of it is garbage from ATT and Comcast.

When stuff comes to me at the office it all gets opened.

Hey @Ryan Dossey that's actually what I ended up doing... except I am doing it myself because I don't think my Upwork vendors have the US street smarts to dig as deep as I'm going... and about 10% of the properties I wouldn't even want to own... It's a lot of work but the good news is that this is going to be a really great list when I'm done and should cut back on returns and wasted $$.

@Chris Ruoff Great job man. It's funny how many people will spend thousands on mail, thousands on seo, and thousands on their site. To prospect to a crappy list. It's the little things that make you stand out. Like have both owners names on the piece as opposed to just owner one. 

If John and his wife Sarah are getting bombarded with post cards/letters that are all to John Smith. The Dear John & Sarah is going to stand out. 

@Ryan Dossey holey moley that's a good one... I've basically been offending John and Sarah. I'll have to figure out how to do that in mail merge... Thanks!

@Chris Ruoff  

=IF(F2="",B2,CONCATENATE(B2," & ",F2))

Make your first name be in the B2 slot on excel and the F2 slot be the owner 2 first name. 
You can change the B and F's to match the correct Excel fields. Just make sure you keep the content in the same order. You'll paste this formula in an empty column. Click the bottom right corner and drag down for your entire list. 

Should end up where it's "John" if there's no second name. And John & Sarah if there's a second owner in your file. 

I prefer that to the Smith Family approach. While that can work... What if you have two guys with different last names? Don't want to make any assumptions.