happy families
Dr. Justin Coulson created Happy Families in 2005 to help others transform their relationships and their lives for the better. Over the years,...
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Dr. Justin Coulson created Happy Families in 2005 to help others transform their relationships and their lives for the better. Over the years, the business has grown from Justin giving talks in schools around Australia, to a membership platform offering a number of resources such as blogs, podcasts, and other premium content.
An ActiveCampaign customer since 2015, Happy Families outgrew their initial Lite plan within the first four months, upgraded to Plus, and have continued to expand through plan tiers as the company has scaled. Their most recent jump was to ActiveCampaign Enterprise, providing the Happy Families sales & marketing team access to benefits such as extensive customization options, unlimited apps and integrations, and dedicated support. But if you were to ask Evelynne Hatchard, Strategy & Marketing Manager at Happy Families, the best thing about ActiveCampaign has been the Landing Pages feature.
“Having that ability to create sales pages myself without needing to reach out to a tech team is everything,” said Evelynne. “I can control the whole system, make it look better than the tech team can make it look and it’s just so easy.”
“Using ActiveCampaign Landing pages has been the thing that’s the most transformative,” she continued. Previously, Evelynne would have to set up WordPress pages for every promo or campaign, with little control over how it looked.
ROI with Landing Pages & Automations
Before Happy Families started using ActiveCampaign Automations, they had used Eventbrite for all of their webinar events and email invitations. “But with no control over how it really looks,” said Evelynne. “And trying to get that information into ActiveCampaign was painful, plus we had to pay Eventbrite a percentage of every ticket that we sold. ActiveCampaign has enabled us to sell webinar tickets ourselves without having to use a third party.”
With ActiveCampaign, whenever there’s an event or a promotion coming up, Evelynne creates a Landing Page, setting up the registration for the event, but she also creates additional CTA’s enticing visitors to the online shop to see what’s new. The increased traffic provides for more visibility to new products as they’re launched.
In addition to the month to month marketing activities, Happy Families executes three or four larger campaigns for which Evelynne builds landing pages:
“If I had to pay someone to build a page for each of those campaigns, it would probably cost us at least 10 grand a quarter to pay someone else to build it, and it still wouldn’t look as good.”
Happy Families runs all of their webinar campaigns using ActiveCampaign. Members purchase a ticket in the shop or they sign up for the email reminders through their membership and they’re added to a webinar automation in ActiveCampaign. From there, they receive reminders for the webinar and Evelynne can track engagement and attendance data. Often people purchase a webinar ticket not intending to watch it live. As a part of the webinar automation workflow, members receive the recording the next day.
Combat Social Media Spam by Owning Your Data & Messaging
“A while ago with the free webinars that we were running on Facebook, we were getting spammed by hackers putting up fake links and fake events. It became really obvious to us at that point how important the security of our databases is.”
“ActiveCampaign enables us to own our own audience,” says Evelynne. “We can control how we talk to people.”
Understanding the importance and value of owning their data is a critical area Evelynne believes has contributed to Happy Families growth. “Everything that we’re doing is tied to owning our data and growing our memberships. ActiveCampaign makes it easy to accomplish this.”
Continuing to provide access to membership benefits while maintaining the integrity of their data is always top of mind for Happy Families. With live engagements canceled during Covid, the team moved Justin’s speaking engagements to live-streamed Zoom events accessible via ActiveCampaign Landing Pages. Being able to quickly launch campaigns in support of these initiatives was a win for both Happy Families and their customers.
Evelynne was able to easily brand a landing page for every school that signed up for a recent virtual event, and by using the ActiveCampaign integration with Google Sheets, she provided sign-up and engagement data specific for each school, making both the school administrator and Evelynne look like heroes. “It looked like we gave them this fancy login page just for their school. It’s been awesome just being able to deliver that customized experience with such little effort.”
Tripled Earnings by Staying Digital
Today, revenue from the Happy Families online shop is significantly greater than the speaking revenue, even pre COVID.
“We’ve essentially tripled our earnings since COVID, and we couldn’t do it without ActiveCampaign.”
“So many of the things that we offer we just couldn’t communicate in the same way. It wouldn’t look as good, and I would have had to outsource so many things. Then we couldn’t have afforded to do things because the rate of return wouldn’t be worth it.”
Happy Families has developed a cadence of marketing activities that is reliable, that they know work, and they’re going to keep executing on. “But every quarter, we like to try two or three new things that we haven’t tried before, and whenever those new things are, it will always involve ActiveCampaign, because we’ll always need to communicate about it and will always need to have some kind of sign-up process because we want to stay digital with all this happy family stuff.”
If you would like to explore the platform that Evelynne uses every day to stay competitive, try ActiveCampaign free today.
