If you are buying in bulk you can get promotional pens for a few cents each. On the other hand you can also pay several hundred dollars per pen. It all depends on who your pens are intended for, and what you hope to achieve by distributing free pens. Your choice of supplier, how you want your logo printed on the pens and how widely you would like to distribute them can all factor into how much you end up spending on your pens. Here are a few guidelines for deciding how much of your marketing budget should be devoted to these promotional items.


Distributing to a Mass Market

If you want to get your pens in the hands of just about everybody, the idea is to find them as cheaply as possible. Here your pens are essentially flyers that are made out of plastic rather than paper, and the actual quality is not very important. As long as they do not look ugly and they write well enough they will do, and you should try to spend as little as possible on them. The idea would be to order and distribute as many promotional pens as you can afford to. As a general pricing guideline 500 pens should cost you no more than $200 or $0.40 per pen. If you order batches as large as 10,000 units you can manage to get your promotional pens for as little as $0.20 each if you find the right supplier.


Distributing to Existing Customers or a Specialized Market

If the sample you are distributing is smaller than a segment of the general public then the stakes change a little. Perhaps you are giving out your promotional gifts to all new customers who signed up for your service in the last year, or giving them out to one client’s staff as a way of saying ‘Thank You’ or to entice them to buy your products. Either way, you are probably looking at ordering 500 pens or less. Here it is not worth your while to go for one of the larger suppliers with loads of cheap pens.

Instead you want to try to find something interesting and gimmicky. Try to find pens that have gadgets built into them, or pens that are in wacky shapes. Go for bright colors, strange shapes and unusual functions as these are most likely to generate responses. People are always impressed by novel items and if you find pens that do something unique and interesting besides writing you will definitely leave an impression on the people you give them to. You can easily spend up to $10 per pen, but this investment will be well worth it.

If you are giving your promotional pens to executives or high profile clients then having them engraved with the recipient’s name is a sure fire way to reinforce loyalty. This kind of gift makes people feel as if they are personally appreciated by the company, and this can generate a lot of good will and future business.