Telcos and streaming subscription merchants are capitalizing on bundling partnerships in new and unique ways. An increasing number of merchants are offering products and services for Telcos to bundle as customer offers. Sophisticated targeting of those bundles boosts customer acquisition and retention, monetizing those customers more effectively.

This series explores the market trends creating the biggest opportunities in OTT bundling, explaining the innovative technology required for merchants and Telcos to maximize the full potential.

#2 Upsell customers and increase top-ups with incentives and rewards

  • Trend: Telco’s are incentivizing pre-pay customers to top-up more reliably and by greater amounts through bundled offers. The same incentive programs reward post-pay subscribers for upgrading plans by offering them extras, like a month of free Prime Video or Netflix
  • Opportunity: Increase the number of customers on higher value post-paid plans. Regulate the frequency of top-up behavior with pre-paid customers, and boost revenue by increasing the value of top-ups.
  • Strategy: Manage bundled offers through a purpose-built platform that provides offer management technology. This makes it quick and easy to deliver customized offers by creating the rules and conditions that trigger specific offers.

Earlier this year, Amazon announced the launch of  Prime Video Mobile Edition. This product is a single-device, mobile-only media plan, only available to customers through Amazon partner offers. Currently available in India (and powered by Bango), Amazon’s offering is used by Airtel, who have tied it directly to a customer’s pre-paid plan – with the option to upgrade to the full Prime Video experience plus Amazon Prime. This is a smart move by Airtel – offering a desirable product as a reward for topping up their account by a minimum amount each month. For Airtel, this boosts the value of pre-paid balances, ensuring fewer calls fail and data services suffer fewer interruptions.

All Airtel customers on pre-paid bundled packs get a 30-day free trial of Prime Video Mobile Edition. Subsequently, these customers can activate Mobile Edition starting at an introductory offer of  ₹89 (Source: Airtel), which is about 1.10 US dollars.

Speaking in a statement, Amazon Prime Video’s India director and country general manager Gaurav Gandhi said: “This initiative for Amazon, is designed not just to give customers more choice (of plans) but also easy access to subscribe to Prime Video along with mobile data plans.”

Products like Amazon Prime Video Mobile Edition can be used to incentivize subscribers to top-up a slightly higher value, more frequently to keep receiving their free subscription. That higher account balance means calls, data usage and in-app payments are more likely to succeed. Delivering Telco’s higher revenues, happier customers and lower care costs. And because the subscriber wants to keep getting Prime Video Mobile Edition effectively for free, they remain loyal and are less likely to churn. Win-win.

It’ll be interesting to see if more services available in third-party bundles become more widely available this year, and if other merchants with subscription content follow Amazon’s lead by providing lower cost, mobile-only versions in selected markets. This is a clear example of how Telco’s can use low entry point, third-party services to reward customers based on taking desirable action. Remember, providing a bundle only product also offers upgrade incentives to post-paid subscribers. For merchants, what a great way to get consumers to try before they buy!

Capture the entire opportunity….

Success with third-party bundles, rewards and resale are all about creative innovation and differentiation. They are techniques designed to motivate and influence customer behavior – like the Airtel top-up rewards. The Bango offer management technology makes it quick and easy to deliver creative offers like these. Simply create rules and conditions that trigger specific offers.

Also, Bango Boost+ technology ensures more people take the offers up through reminders, nudges and customer comms.

Bango Resale provides the complete solution to deliver the best results from reselling and bundling products and services. Uniquely, Bango technology delivers the full customer lifecycle for your bundling and resale business. Click here to find out more.

The launch of Prime Video Mobile Edition in India marked a world-wide first for an Amazon Prime country. Prime Video Mobile Edition was launched with the aim to democratise access to quality entertainment in India. We thank Bango for their contributions in helping us deliver a seamless Prime Video Mobile Edition experience for our Airtel pre-paid customers.

Sameer Batra, Director, Mobile Business Development, Amazon