Creating DIY bundle style cross-promotions can significantly enhance your subscriber acquisition and retention strategy. In the subscription world, cross-promotions help brands target customers already spending on similar, complementary, or trending services, offering them the option to add your service at a discount.

Why Subscription Cross-Promotions Make Sense

1. 1. More Subscribers: Entice subscribers to buy more services by giving them an incentive to add yours too (and vice versa).
2. 2. Retention and LTV: By tying subscription discounts directly to their service, the seller adds significant LTV to consumers who buy those promotions.
3. 3. Lower CAC: Share marketing costs across partners and avoid additional charges like app-store fees.
4. 4. Simplicity: Unlike bundling, cross-promotions can be entered into without the red tape, complex negotiations, cross-brand revenue sharing, and fixed pricing making them far easier to implement.

Marketing Cross-Promotions

One of the great benefits of subscription cross-promotions is that each party benefits—whether you’re selling another brand’s service and reaping the additional LTV or gaining new subscribers from a partner promoting yours, you're getting a huge return on your investment. 

While both parties benefit, each may have their own unique and different strategies for acquiring subscribers. Brands will have preferred emailing and newsletter preferences, rely heavily on specific social platforms, incorporate different kinds of influencers, etc. The key is not uniformity in marketing methods, but effectiveness in driving consumer action. Each party should concentrate on their most successful strategies, with results outweighing the need to duplicate the exact same processes across all partners.

 

Marketing Guidelines

While partners should focus on their own specific channels, branding, tone, etc. each partner should have a general guide of what is expected from them. This will act as a checklist. Here are some basic bullets each party should do their best to fulfill.

1. 1. Emails: Start out by sending an email to potential NEW subscribers (canceled subscribers, subscribers on free plans, other non-subscribers in your CRM) about exclusive offers they can get from your partner(s) when they join a paid plan from your brand. Follow it up with an email to your EXISTING subscribers with exclusive offers from your new partners as a reward for being a valued paying subscriber of your brand.
2. 2. Social Media: Introduce new promotions to both new and existing subscribers across your brand’s most popular social sites.
3. 3. Newsletters: Announce and highlight your new partnerships and exclusive offers in your regular newsletters.
4. 4. Links / Integrations: Include links to cross-promotion purchase pages on your website and within your app.

 

Rinse and Repeat

The more each party promotes, the bigger the win on both sides - increased new subscribers, higher LTV, and lower CAC, all driving up your ROI.

Tracking and Analyzing

Ultimately, data will reveal if your promotion is worthwhile. Identify partners that drive revenue via new subscribers or higher retention value (hopefully both). Since cross-promotions are flexible and non-binding, you can experiment with multiple partners and pricing strategies to find the optimal approach for your brand. This flexibility can also reveal unexpected but profitable partnerships you might not have considered before.

Simplifying the Process – Choosing the Right Platform

To simplify all of this, find the right platform that considers all your potential use cases. Below are some items to consider when selecting subscription cross-promotion solutions.

• l  Partnership Discovery and Management: Easily find and establish new partnerships.
• l  Seamless Customer Experience: Enable subscribers to easily purchase from all your cross-promotion partners in one place.
• l  Secure, Compliant Payment Processing: Fast and reliable payment solutions. 
• l  Comprehensive Marketing Support: Guidance on how to promote partnerships effectively.
• l  Detailed Analytics: In-depth insights into subscriber behavior and promotion effectiveness.
• l  Strategic Recommendations: Suggestions for new partnerships and pricing strategies.
• l  Real-Time Flexibility: Ability to adjust promotions on the fly—pause, restart, or change pricing as needed.
• l  Transparency and Communication: Clear, open communication between partners.
• l  Targeting Options: Multiple methods to target new and existing subscribers.
• l  Flexible Promotion Types: Supports both mutual and one-way cross-promotions.
• l  Simple, complete API integrations: Easy integrations that provide full transaction data, easy cancellations / upgrades, and prevent sharing of unnecessary customer data.

One-Stop Solutions

Curious about how to best create, manage and market subscription cross-promotions? For a comprehensive solution that addresses everything listed above and more, check out SubSuite.io.