Booster Card Promotion Wrap-Up

Over on the forums, we were asked whether we considered the booster promotion a success and whether we would do it again. It's a great question that I thought deserved more of an audience, so I'm answering it here.

Was the promotion a success?

I would say it was mixed. We certainly saw a lot of interest from fans over the months that it ran, and every day's mail had a sheaf of people sending in their forms and their UPCs and their money (more about that in a moment), so from the perspective of fan engagement, absolutely it was successful.

We fell down in a couple of areas, however, and in ways that in retrospect we should have seen coming.

First, the card needed to be cooler. This is entirely on me; I underestimated the desire for unique, wonderful effects on a one-off card and failed to create a card that stood out as "Whoa!" If you see me at a show and bring me the card, I'll make it cooler, I promise. (I don't know how yet, but I've got a whole MONTH before Gen Con to figure it out.)

Second, we failed to account for the Warehouse 23 boosters in this promotion, because they don't have UPCs. We allowed fans to send in the little insert instead, and most people either figured it out on their own or asked about it.

Third, and something we would have known immediately if we had only asked our business office: it turned out that the processing fees on foreign checks were more than the money they were worth. A lot of foreign fans ended up getting cards for just the cost of postage as a result. Whoops. This is definitely something we will have to account for if we do redemption-type promotions in the future.

Overall, we're very happy with how it went . . . but we're gamers, and it's in our nature to nitpick.

Will we do another similar promotion again?

Too early to tell. We don't have anything like this planned at this time, and we would be unlikely to do something exactly the same in any event. But redemption codes and the like are mainstays of marketing for a reason, and I can easily see us finding something new to do with the concept.

Thanks to everyone who participated!