Home Party Door Prizes

One of the most exciting parts of attending a home party is the prospect of winning free stuff. I mean, common on, who doesn’t like free stuff? As a consultant, you need to figure these freebies into your business plan and expense account and not only because people like them. There are real benefits you can gain by offering gifts and door prizes.

A gift can be offered to a hostess to encourage attendance to her party. Put a special sticker on one of her invitations before you mail them out. Then tell her she needs to call all of her invites two days before the party to remind them to attend. When she calls she needs to find out who got the special sticker in order to win the prize. Alternately, you can offer her a gift if she gets a minimum number of people to attend.

Gifts for attendees can be used for anything from encouraging purchases and enticing party bookings, to entertainment. To encourage purchases, you can offer a prize to the person who orders the most or you can designate a “secret product” and the first person to order it wins. Entice party bookings by offering gifts to each booker or the first person to book. As entertainment, door prizes can be offered to the winner of a party game. One great party game is to have everyone fill out their contact information on a card that also has blocks to mark off to sign up for email newsletters, book a party or request information about being a consultant. Then put the cards in a basket and pick a winner. That way you gain something from having given away a prize.

The type of prizes you give away will depend on the product line you are selling. If you sell a line that has low cost items or sample sizes, then these items make an inexpensive way to offer gifts and further promote the products you are selling. Or if you sell more than one line of products, samples from a different line can be an unobtrusive way of letting people know you sell more than what is being presented that day. However, if your product line does not lend itself well to gifting then you’ll need to put in a little more thought. You could just pick up cheap votive candles at the store, but I would suggest trying to support other home based businesses whenever you have the chance. So if you want to offer candles, then contact a candle consultant and purchase some from her. Alternately, there is a company called Sample Gal (http://www.samplegal.com/members/wildrose/) that sells boxes of 10-15 samples from small and home based businesses. At $15.00 per box that is approximately $1.00 per sample, not a bad price. This will give you a variety of low cost prizes to offer your guests and help out other small and home based businesses in the process.

So gather up your prizes and shower them on your guests to promote good will, products and businesses so everyone wins. (And do not forget, it’s a tax write off!)