Offering personalized gifts to your clients is a great way to market yourself and inspire referrals, according to Mildred Davis, a financial advisor and principal of Mildred Davis Capital in Toronto.

Clients respond to “touchy-feely” gestures that show an advisor’s interest in their lives, Davis says, as long as those tokens of appreciation complement a relationship based on sound financial planning.

“It’s getting in there, knowing people and doing the right thing by them first,” she says.

The key to making these gifts resonate with clients is not the amount of money you spend, but the way you personalize them.

Davis often has these gifts engraved with the client’s name or initials. The gifts are sent to the clients without any marketing material for her practice. Gifts are about the client, she says, not the advisor.

Davis offers the following suggestions of the types of gifts she regularly provides to her clients:

> A binder for medical documents
When you think of client appreciation gifts, you’re probably not considering something as utilitarian as a binder for organizing medical test results, prescriptions and other information. However, it is an important tool that can be of great help to your clients.

When a client visits a specialist who needs his or her medical history, a package such as this will make that information readily available, Davis says, as opposed to waiting for the client’s general practitioner to send it along.

It will also prove helpful should your client wish to purchase life insurance.

“When I have to ask clients a medical question [and] the binder is there,” Davis says, “we can shorten the time to do everything we need.”

> A “dreams and thoughts” journal
“I explain to my clients that the most important thing to me is the ‘soft stuff,’ which is their dreams and goals,” Davis says. “The soft stuff is what they write and want to achieve.”

By recording their aspirations in a notebook, clients can more easily articulate the results they want their financial planning to produce.

For example, one client wanted to travel. So, Davis encouraged him to record his dream vacations in a notebook she provided. Davis was then able to establish a plan that would make those trips financially viable.

> A photo album
A place to store favourite photographs is the perfect gift for the client who has everything, Davis says.

She chose this gift for a high net-worth prospect who was celebrating his birthday. Davis chose an elegant black album and had the client’s name and the words “his world” engraved in gold.

The client declared the album “priceless,” Davis says, and asked his wife to fill it with photos right away.