Choosing the Right Salutation for a Business Letter

The salutation does more work than its length suggests. It tells the recipient how you've thought about them, how you've thought about your relationship, and how you expect the rest of the letter to sound. The default in modern American business correspondence is "Dear [First Name]" for a contact you've met or corresponded with, and "Dear [Title] [Last Name]" for a first contact or formal context. Either is correct in the great majority of professional situations. "Hi" works in casual email but reads as too informal on a printed letter; "Hey" never belongs on a business letter at all.

When you don't know the recipient's name, the modern alternatives — "Dear Hiring Manager," "Dear Customer Service Team," "Dear Membership Committee" — are stronger than the older "To Whom It May Concern," which now reads as either lazy or willfully old-fashioned. The single most useful pre-send habit is a thirty-second search for the actual name of the recipient. A LinkedIn search, a glance at the company website, or a polite call to the front desk will turn up the right person more often than people expect, and addressing the letter to that name nearly always increases the response rate. For a more granular breakdown of the conventions discussed here, see the companion professional drafting reference we maintain alongside this guide. Practitioners who write in regulated industries may also find our compliance-aware editorial checklist a useful next step.

For recipients with titles — Dr., Professor, Reverend, Senator — use the title in the salutation unless you have an established first-name relationship. The honorifics Mr., Mrs., Ms., and Mx. are still acceptable but increasingly skipped in favor of the first-and-last-name form ("Dear Maria Chen,") which avoids assumptions about marital status and gender. When in doubt, that form is the safest. The colon after the salutation ("Dear Maria Chen:") is the most formal punctuation choice; the comma ("Dear Maria Chen,") is the everyday default. Both are correct.