The Pen Salesman Looks Up And Says...
What goes together better than bread and butter? A pen and paper do, of course. From the home to the office, a pen is a perfect promotional product that nearly everyone has received as a gift or bought from the local shop.

"A stroke of genius", "a source of inspiration", and "a fountain of knowledge" are all phrases associated with the brilliance of this writing utensil. What makes this
promotional tool so popular among B2B, retail, B2C, and other segments of the business world? Frequency of use tops the list. A pen is a fairly inexpensive purchase that gets your company name or logo in the hands of key decision-makers every day and sometimes several times every day.

While other promotional gifts, like a tee shirt for example, require some amount of design effort to produce, a promotional pen is easy to customize. You have a large number of styles, functions and shapes of pens to choose from. You can easily customize a pen with an inscription and choose your corporate colour as the base colour for the pen. Any way that you can make the pen represent your company will make a great promotion. And since pens are sold in bulk, you can place a large order and save money besides.

While most promotional pens are simply handed out to the general public, you do need to decide who your target audience is before you order pens. An ordinary ballpoint pen will work well for the general public but you may want to provide your sales staff with a finer quality pen to use on sales calls which they can leave behind as a reminder item.

As with any other promotional item, once you have determined what you want to buy for a particular audience, you can look at cost figures. Again, the larger bulk purchase gives the lowest per unit price. Consider buying all your promotional items from www.akprinting.co.uk to lower costs as well. Another way to reduce the cost of the pens is to streamline the embossed message. Most promotional pens can carry up to five lines of text message. That's more message than your customers need to locate you. Perhaps all you really need is your name and telephone number, especially if you are a service company. Usually all that needs to be embossed on the pen are the company name, the company logo, and the phone number. These days web addresses are also popular to add to artwork, but they need to be fairly short, which is a good practise anyway. Just remember that sometimes less is more, and being concise will make for an uncluttered pen and portray your company in a professional light.

Think about putting out promotional pens for youngsters aswell. These pens can be more colorful and appealing with some jokes or contest reminders as well. Kids love to write with colourful pens and would be intrigued with key chain pens or lanyard pens. Another popular pen with children is the 'Dinky' mini-pen.

A wonderful place to start ordering promotional pens online is at Personalised Pens (http://www.personalised-pens.co.uk). Some popular pen brands carried by them are Parker and Lecce.

Copyright 2005 Neville Barkin. All rights reserved
Edited for relevancy to the UK market.
- posted by Keef @ 8:31 AM