The Happiness Planner: How This Planner App Creates More Content

Published: March 18, 2021

As a teenager, The Happiness Planner founder and CEO Mo Seetubtim dreamed of empowering people to reach their full potential. Like the self-help books she loved to read, she hoped to create a resource “to inspire people to live a purpose and passion-driven life and find happiness from within.” Now, those words form the mission that drives her business.

What began as Mo’s motivational blog grew into The Happiness Planner, an e-commerce shop that offers inspirational planners, journals, workbooks, and an app to promote introspection and personal growth.

“We’re helping people learn to train their minds so that they can be whoever they want to be, and so that they can learn to be more patient, resilient, happier, and more fulfilled,” Mo says.

Content has remained central to what Mo provides for her audience. She now blogs on The Happiness Planner site and shares it via email. Despite the popularity of her products, she sees the highest engagement on newsletters she writes about self-help strategies.

She began using Mailchimp for email marketing early on, not just because of the feature’s ease and power, but because she could see herself in the Mailchimp co-founders’ story of growing a business from the ground up.

But since her company launched officially in 2015, Mo has witnessed her industry become more crowded. “Now there are so many competitors, so we needed to think of how we could be more niche,” says Mo.

The challenge: Broaden content and build community

Mo knew that the most effective content was also the most sincere. “Building relationships is the most important thing,” she says. “Because when people sign up to your newsletter they want to be in touch with you, and I think it's important to build emotional connection with your customers.”

To set The Happiness Planner apart and deepen their relationship to their audience, they’ve begun offering virtual workshops. Like the products they sell, these workshops revolve around personal development, featuring topics that range from cognitive behavioral therapy to aligning your chakras.

The workshops are taught by up-and-coming wellness thought leaders. Mo sees this as a fitting expansion for a brand that’s all about uplifting people. “I feel like we're promoting each other—we promote them, we introduce them to our customers, and they also introduce their customers to our brand. We're building relationships.”

But in order to keep the experience streamlined for their small staff of 5, new workshop teachers, and their audience, it was important to communicate through the platform they already count on for their marketing: Mailchimp.

The tools: Mailchimp x Calendly integration

Before they could market their workshops, Mo and her team needed a way to find time slots that worked for the teachers, as well as to collect each teacher’s information. Mailchimp’s Calendly integration made it simple. The integration allows them not only to collect information they need to add the teachers to their audience, it provides a scheduling tool that minimizes the back and forth communication. Prospective teachers use the Calendly form to submit all of their information, as well as to choose a time that’s convenient for them to teach.

“When we've been in discussion with people who want to run workshops on our platform, we send them the Calendly link to book a slot. Then they fill in all the forms so the Community Manager can go to the audience list and see the details,” she says. “It makes it easy.”

As they build out emails to promote the workshops, The Happiness Planner team has what they need to know about the teachers organized within their contact profiles in Mailchimp—that includes things like their social media handles and a short biography. Plus, workshop leaders are tagged so that the team can easily reach them as a targeted segment in the future.

The results: Time saved and content gained

Not only does the integration make it easy to put the information they collect to immediate use, it maintains the simplicity that Mo’s team needs to function efficiently. “Instead of having to use different platforms and wasting a lot of time, you just use one platform, saving time and convenience,” says Mo. “Once they type in the form, it just goes straight into motion and you don't need to create another spreadsheet in order to look at the information.”

They use the time saved to create promotional content for the workshops and to find new teachers for workshops to come.

Mailchimp’s Calendly integration makes it possible for Mo to follow her own golden marketing rule: “Focus on building really great content,” she says. “Because in the end, content is what keeps people on your list.”