It’s easy to rattle off the reasons to use promotional pens in your marketing: They’re affordable, useful, effective, easily transported, and adaptable to any campaign. And that’s just a start.

Custom pens can promote any message and raise awareness for any organization, product or service. They’re like slim marketing ninjas. They’re swift and powerful at promoting your message, and they shatter through all the marketing noise out there.

If you want to get your message into the hands of new customers, you can’t go wrong with promotional pens. Here are five creative ways to use them:

1. Leave-behinds.

When you sign a credit card receipt at a business or restaurant, leave your logo pen to be re-used by employees or the wait staff. The same thing goes at the doctor’s or dentist’s office: Leave your pen after signing in.

2. Tokens of appreciation.

Hand out custom pens to your staff and suppliers. They’ll appreciate the freebie, and they’ll likely use the pens outside the office, too.

3. Donations.

Head to your local schools, churches, libraries and community centers with a few boxes of promo pens. These places often have small budgets but big needs for supplies.

4. Direct-mail.

Enclose custom pens in your business mail—not just promotional mailings. They make a nice surprise for the people processing your electrical payment.

5. Extras in gift baskets.

Logo pens are easy to include in gift packages for clients, whether you’re giving them promo tumblers or elaborate gift baskets. It’s just one more way to get your message in front of them and show them how much their business matters to you.

Now that you have some ideas for handing out your promo pens, check out these brand-name pens you can customize with your logo.

Promo know-how tip:

Use bright, vivid colors to make your pens immediately noticeable. Here are some other tips to get your promotional pens spotted.

Quick: Grab some logo pens at your desk and jot a note with one. Now look at the pen’s imprint. Is it upside down, or is the imprint perfectly positioned for you, the note jotter?

Ideally, the imprint should face you—not the guy across from you. He has his own logo pens to look at.

We noticed an imprint blunder on this pen (it’s totally upside down for our righty CEO, Jason Robbins), and it brings up an interesting point when promoting your business with custom pens: Target your marketing to the majority.

More than 90% of the world is right-handed, so it doesn’t make much marketing sense to position your imprint for the left-handed few (sorry, lefties).

Yes, you can still see the logo, but why make recipients twist their heads to read your message? When giving out logo pens, it’s best to make your imprint for those who are right-handed.

Promo know-how tip:

It’s also important to consider the size and color of the imprint on your logo pens. Our Promotions Specialists will help you find the right pens and will make sure the imprint is perfect.

[Editor’s Note: This post is written by ePromos customer Katharine Thoresen of oaSES Online, a software provider for tutoring companies.]

I consider myself a normal person by and large. Nothing in my childhood points to a “bad pen experience.” I was never stabbed by a cheap pen, never drawn on with a free pen, never had my house burgled by a marauding group of savage nasty pens, but yet I am left with a deep loathing of scratchy pens.

You know the ones. The balls don’t glide across the page like Michelle Kwan executing a perfect triple Sal chow. They catch and scratch, and sometimes you can even hear them marching through the pressed wood pulp that is my crisp notebook page. With a final spit in my eye, they will even leave a great ink blob at the end of my scratchy sentence.

I associate this kind of pen with cheap hotels. You grab the hotel logo pen in your dash from the room, all pleased with yourself that you remembered it, yet within an hour it is destined for the nearest trash can. This kind of fussy, OCD behavior has led me to spend rather a lot on pens in the past.

So imagine my horror when I was tasked with ordering promotional pens for a tradeshow. I did not want my customers associating oaSES Online or The Tutor Report with cheap hotels, yet I knew my budget would be this side of generous. I did not want this task at all; I wanted someone else to get it and order nasty pens so I could continue my hate rant about said nasty pens.

Nevertheless, I set out on my mission to find a good quality, non-scratchy, non-blobby pen and decided to start with ePromos. “Why?” I hear you ask. Well the answer is simple. I had already been on ePromos’ site every month for the last year, using their great annual list of events, campaigns and nationally recognized days to help me write my monthly promotional post on The Tutor Report, so it just seemed like the first place to look.

I received my sample test pen in good time, preached needlessly to the big boss about the virtues of a good pen because it was really very affordable, and placed my order with my newly appointed rep, Clinton, for hundreds of logo pens. The artwork process was streamlined and simple, and they arrived on time.

And in case you are wondering, yes … I am very happy with my non-scratchy, non-blobby, easy-to-hold fabulous pens. And, more to the point, so are my customers and prospects.

Katharine Thoresen is Operations Manager for oaSES Online, a software provider for tutoring companies, and is blog master for the online tutoring magazine The Tutor Report. She is a self-professed connoisseur of pens.

Are you using promotional pens in your marketing? You should be. Seventy-six percent of people consider pens an important, very important or extremely important part of their daily personal activities, according to a recent independent study.

Plus, when you give your customers logo pens, they use them—and often. Thirty-nine percent of people use promo pens 10 times a day and 21% use pens five times a day.

Want to put pens in your customers’ hands? We have four tips to make your promotional pens stand out.

1. Make them doubly useful.

Custom pens aren’t just pens—they can also double as a highlighter, post-it dispenser or stylus. The more versatile your pen, the more likely your customers are to reach for it. It just makes life simpler when a pen serves multiple purposes.

2. Go for quality.

You don’t have to spend big bucks, but you should always give your customers a pen that writes easily and smoothly. Nobody likes to scratch at a piece of paper to get the ink to appear. Give them a great writing experience and they’ll keep your custom pen around.

3. Be bold and bright.

Neons and vibrant hues aren’t suitable for every business, but for most, color is just the thing to get your logo pens to stand out. When everyone else is handing out pens that are black, blue or white, your bright custom pen immediately pops on the desktop or in a drawer.

4. Do something different.

If you typically use straight-sided stick pens (which are well and good!), try using curvy custom pens for a change. They’re just more fun to grab, and plus, a shapely barrel gives a little extra oomph to your logo while providing an ergonomic writing experience for your customers.

Promo know-how tip:

From ink types to imprinting options, you can get your custom pens exactly how you want them from ePromos. Keep reading for four things to know when selecting promotional pens. 

Think promoting your business has to cost a lot? You can get huge exposure for not a lot of coin by using promotional pens. They’re an effective way to get your logo into your audience’s hands—and for cheap. There are many promo pens under $1, and you can even snag some priced under 25 cents.

Yep, it is possible to give your brand a boost with some loose change. Marketing doesn’t have to bust the budget for it to be effective.

The key to a successful promotion using bargain promotional pens is getting them in front of your target market. You don’t want your pens to be hidden behind a counter or remain packaged in a box. That’s not doing your business any good.

Instead, make your pens visible to your audience. You want them to notice your discount promotional pens, grab one (or a few) and use them often.

Our client, Crystal Title Agency, a company that provides residential and commercial title and closing services, knows how to take a promotional pen and turn it into a smart, cost-effective marketing tool.

The company is using logo pens in two ways: to boost brand awareness and to promote the business on sales calls.

“The pens were ordered for a street fair. They’re a huge hit,” says Maureen Maher with Crystal Title Agency. “We also will be using them for some of our sales reps to leave with our clients.”

It’s a smart strategy that gets the company’s name in front of thousands of people—and it doesn’t shatter the budget. That’s bang for your buck.

Promo know-how tip:

Promo pens under $1 can still have that high-end, executive feel—it’s all in the accents. Talk to our Promotions Specialists about achieving the look you want for less.

ePromos was pleased to sponsor the United States Army Special Forces Association’s 2012 Convention.

Here at ePromos, we love it when custom pens go to work for good causes. That’s why we were happy to donate custom pens for the United States Army Special Forces Association (SFA) Convention earlier this summer.

The SFA celebrated its 60^th anniversary with five days of special tributes and events in Fayetteville, North Carolina. We were honored to be a sponsor and provide custom pens to commemorate the big celebration.

Do you have a special event on the horizon? We’d love to help you select some custom pens for the big occasion. Promotional pens are useful, popular and they get passed along, getting your company name and logo some valuable exposure.

Promo know-how tip: Custom pens aren’t just for inexpensive giveaways—they’re also perfectly gift-worthy. Add a custom gift box to elevate the presentation.