As an estate agent, your business depends on generating leads. Advertising only goes so far – promotional products and business gifts can help you bridge the gap that’s left by typical adverts. You can use promotional products and promotional gifts in many ways to generate leads, boost name recognition, increase showings and close contracts. From giveaway gifts to customer appreciation gifts, estate agents will find many uses for promotional products of all types.



Using Promotional Products to Generate Leads

Lead generation can take many different forms for estate agents. Many agents use direct mail marketing to blindly target an entire neighborhood, parish, village or town. This can be costly, but there are a couple of ways to use promotional products to increase your response to direct mail campaigns.

1.Enclose a small promotional gift with your direct mail. Research in marketing shows that recipients remember a piece of advertising far longer when it includes a gift for them. The more valuable, clever or memorable the gift, the more likely they will be to remember the advert. In real estate, this memorability is very important, since many of the contacts you’ll make through a direct mail marketing campaign are not in the market to buy or sell their homes – but may be in six months, or a year or even five years. You want to be the estate agent they remember when they’re ready to sell or buy. Inexpensive options for this type of promotional product include refrigerator magnets, sticky note pads and pens. The more unique and fun your choice, the greater the response will be.

2.Offer a promotional gift to those who book an appointment for a home appraisal or who call to book a viewing appointment with you. When you use this strategy in conjunction with a direct mail marketing or newspaper advert campaign, you can track exactly how effective your advertising is by the fulfillment numbers. Promotional products used for this type of lead generation should have higher value than those that you send out with your direct mailers. Quality travel mugs, MP3 players or even personal planners are good choices for this kind of marketing.

Using promotional products as referral incentives

One of the standard techniques that any salesman learns is asking for referrals from everyone you know. Sweeten the pot with a promise of a little thank you gift for the referrals that you get. You can use different levels of incentives for different purposes – a printed travel mug for five names that you can contact, a USB flash drive if one of those contacts signs with you as a listing or buyers agent.

Appreciation Gifts

One of the nice things about giving appreciation gifts and maintaining contact with former clients is that they’ll become referrers for new customers – or use your service again when they make another move. In today’s mobile world, it’s not unusual for your former clients to become your current clients again – and they’re far more likely to do that if they remember you fondly. While the best way to ensure good memories is to give excellent service, promotional gifts can help cement your image in their minds. One estate agent we know puts together a small “emergency kit" for his home buyers that he leaves in a place where they’ll find it immediately.

Included in it are all the things that new residents commonly can’t find for the first few days – an electric torch, a small tool kit, an emergency sewing kit – along with a directory of community services and phone numbers. Of course, the name of his agency is printed on everything.

For additional information on advertising gifts, corporate gifts or promotional items then why not check out the leading promotional gift suppliers online today and start to make big savings.