*supercollider

How’s this for a set of opt-in engagement stats to drool over?

Kids virtual world Club Penguin has 6.7 million monthly users. Of those, two-thirds visit their weekly “newspaper” the Club Penguin Times. And they get 30,000 daily content submissions from their users, on everything from questions to a fictional advice columnist to poetry and essays.

That makes their e-newsletter more widely read than the New York’s Daily News or the Chicago Tribune.

Club Penguin clearly gets both CRM and community, two of the reasons they were recently sold to disney for $750m.

Where brands go wrong with “CRM”

In many circles, CRM has somehow become another word for direct marketing. The execution of the “CRM strategy” is simply e-newsletters filled with brand spam. This is completely missing the point.

If a person has taken the time to opt-in to receive communication from you, this is a rare privilege to be rewarded with value, not an invitation for junk mail.

When brands repay their loyal customer’s interest with ads for the latest product they’re trying to push, or random brand messaging just because they “have to get a newsletter out”, it’s hardly a wonder why those emails have anemic open rates and abysmal click-through rates.

Your customer was expecting something of interest to them, not to you.

Why Club Penguin’s newspaper is so successful, and what brands can learn from them

1. They put their customers first

Club Penguin could make significant revenue from advertising in the newspaper, but they don’t. They focus on simply making it a place of value, a primary means of building deeper engagement with the community.

That’s taking the long-term view, and really thinking about what relationship management means.

2. They recognize a brand’s role in the community.

Whether it’s a village, Manchester United, Club Penguin, or Harley Davidson owners, people want to belong to a community to feel part of something bigger.

To really feel that, communities need a voice. Members need to know what’s going on in the community, what the news is, who the players are, what’s important to know. They need this to feel connected. And if brands don’t provide that voice, it leaves a vacuum and weakens the community.

In the old days, it was the town crier that provided this service. Now, it’s satellite TV and news aggregators. This service is still deemed so essential that nations like the United Kingdom and Canada underwrite the broadcasters BBC and CBC respectively.

In brand communities, it’s often left to the brand to fulfill this role. And if they don’t recognize or fulfill the need, they leave a vacuum that ultimately weakens the community.

Club Penguin gets that, and give their community shape and voice through a true community herald. Their paper both engages the community and demonstrates it’s engagement, both vitalizing properties.

3. Value in CRM comes from the opportunity to deeper engage with customers, build loyalty, and learn from them.

Club Penguin get that CRM is called Customer Relationship Management, not Direct Marketing.

They use their newspaper as a tool to bind the community closer together and to spur more engagement within the community, which ultimately leads to better metrics: more time spent in the community, higher retention rates, higher referral rates.

Loyal advocates, and more of them. In this age of fickle consumers and word of mouth influence, that’s worth it’s weight in gold. And certainly worth much more than whatever 0.001% of your loyal customers buy something from the spammy newsletter you send them, which they probably would’ve bought anyway.

Which leads to the final point…

4. They invest for success

Many brands treat their CRM activity not as a valuable opportunity to be tapped, but almost an obligation. A tiny fraction of the marketing budget is sliced off to send out a few product announcement newsletters. And all the cost of gathering contacts, maintaining the databases, and producing and distributing the communications is essentially wasted.

Club Penguin has 3 full-time staff and one part-time staff working on the newspaper. That level of commitment allows them to produce fresh, interesting, valuable weekly updates. And taking it that seriously is what pays all those dividends.

Loyal, engaged customers or potential customers turned off by your product spam. I know which I’d rather have.

Via LSVP.