How to Build Trust in Direct Mail Greeting?

Buying Strategies
1

Hi all -

I'm getting ready to send out some personalized postcard mailers and I'm wondering what the best approach is to addressing Trust accounts in the greeting of the postcard?

For example, if I have a lead where the owner name is John Smith, I plan to start the postcard off with "Hi John,...". However, I have some leads where the owner is a trust account without any name in the trust (i.e. Smith Family Trust).

It seems odd to say "Hi Smith Family..." in the greeting but maybe that's just me?

I'm curious to see what approach other folks have taken here.

Thanks!

2

@dvucak when I'm sending out postcards, I don't include any mail merge at all (aside from the address fields of each card, obviously).

I'll just start the message with "To Whom It May Concern" and go from there. That way, I don't have to insert a name anywhere.

From everything I've seen, it doesn't seem to be hurting my response rate.

3

@retipsterseth

Yeah, I actually read that in the below blog post you put together. I figured it might be a good approach to try something different since most people are likely using the generic "To Whom It May Concern..." greeting.

However, now that I think about it, I think I might take a hybrid approach: IF [OwnerType] = Trust THEN 'To Whom It May Concern' ELSE [Owner(s) First Name].

Out of curiosity, if you're willing to share, do you do any postcards nowadays or do you just stick to blind offers? I've never mailed to this county before so I'm taking my ~1000 leads and doing a 50/50 test with blind offers and postcards. I hate the idea of postcards but I don't want to exclude them from my marketing efforts without any data to back that decision.

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Thanks for the response!

4

@dvucak yeah, that kind of IF/THEN approach could work too. I honestly don't think it makes a huge difference either way (we're talking about just a few words within the overall message of the letter), but I don't think it would hurt anything to do what you're suggesting either.

I did do a couple of postcard campaigns earlier this year when I was going after some larger acreage properties in my home state... the kind of thing that I wasn't confident about sending blind offers to. It wasn't a huge volume of mail because I was targeting a very specific property type in two counties. I think it was less than 500 units total. I didn't get a huge response from them, but I think the lower response had more to do with the recipients on my list than on the postcard itself (sending mail to the right people is always the biggest determining factor of how good the response rate is). It was an experimental thing that I probably won't try again, at least, not in the same manner I did.