Brand Partnerships Add Long-Term Subscribers at SimplyCook
Tweaking the acquisition recipe to include brand partners led to a major increase in customer quality at the subscription service.
About the advertiser
SimplyCook is a popular subscription-based recipe box service that aims to get even the busiest people cooking at home. Every month, its members are treated to four recipe kits, which are paired with fresh ingredients to create a wide range of delicious meals.
The challenge
As a subscription business, SimplyCook’s prime marketing objective is to acquire long-term customers.
The main ingredient of the brand’s acquisition recipe is a trial offer, where customers sign up to receive a free SimplyCook box to get a taste for the service.
The trial was driving significant amounts of volume through freebie sites and cashback partners. However, SimplyCook grew conscious of acquiring customers who were actively looking for freebies and had a higher propensity to churn once their free trial ended.
Cashback and freebie sites are invaluable to a number of brands. For a subscription service like SimplyCook, there was reason to diversify the acquisition strategy and pursue a different type of customer with the aims of long-term growth and a greater return on investment (ROI).
SimplyCook defines a high-quality customer as one who stays subscribed for a minimum of six weeks. Around 37% of customers referred by traditional affiliate partners met this criteria. Could the brand use Awin to find more suitable partners and audiences?
The solution
Brand partnerships had previously been identified as a potential growth opportunity for SimplyCook, and a logical area to scale.
Sharing the same free trial with brands, rather than publishers, on their checkout pages, email newsletters, in mobile apps, or similar, had immediate upsides:
1. High-quality environments
Audiences engaged via brand partnerships are not necessarily looking for a deal or freebie within their journey. This would enhance their chances of being genuinely interested in SimplyCook and staying subscribed.
2. Partner reputation
Household names like electronics retailer Currys, telecom provider Sky, and digital rail platform Trainline - all available as brand partners on the Awin platform - boast high levels of trustworthiness. SimplyCook could leverage that prestige by positioning itself as one of their recommended partners.
3. Complementary sales
Despite being classed as a non-endemic advertiser (one that does not sell on the brand partner’s website), SimplyCook had plenty of partners selling complementary products, e.g. cooking appliances, enabling it to target a relevant audience.
How do you manage brand partnerships via the affiliate channel?
Awin’s platform has a number of specialist brand partnership tech providers, which connect advertisers like SimplyCook with their extensive networks of brand ‘hosts’.
The beauty of activating brand partnerships via the affiliate channel is that advertisers can instantly engage a specialist tech provider like they would any other affiliate.
Simply share your rewards, trials, and offers with the tech providers’ brand hosts, and track and pay for the customers you acquire via Awin.
SimplyCook launched with Awin brand partnership technology providers like BrandSwap, Tyviso, and RewardsBag to get its trial in front of customers both pre and post-checkout at Not on the High Street, SharkNinja, Currys, Thompson and Morgan, Sky, and Trainline among others.
The technology providers and brand partners worked to get SimplyCook closer to its target audience. For example, BrandSwap found that SimplyCook was popular among audiences buying TVs at electrical retailer Hughes, which gave the brand partner more reasons to push the trial in front of this audience.
In addition to the coverage, SimplyCook benefited from ease of management. It had previously tried forming brand partnerships directly with limited success. With Awin, it could delegate the sales cycle to the tech partner, entrust them with recruiting new partners, launch their rewards with these hosts, and start seeing results.
The results
“We have some brand partners we run on the outside and it complicates things. If you provide a direct link, they have to ask how it performs, how many conversions they have. Then you have to issue a direct invoice. I’d rather do everything through Awin. It’s handy having everything centralized in one place.”
By utilizing Awin’s specialist tech providers and their connections with some of the world’s biggest brands, SimplyCook created a high-performing acquisition channel from scratch.
In January 2025, 55% of customers referred via brand partnerships were retained for a minimum of six weeks, beating the 37% managed by traditional affiliates.
The six-week retention rate for brand partnerships is also getting progressively better, rising to 57% in February 2025 as the brand hosts gain insights around which audiences have a stronger affinity toward SimplyCook.
The findings led to brand partnerships accounting for 42% of SimplyCook’s total acquisition volume in March 2025 (+38% year on year in Q1). Brand partnerships’ proportion of total sales is up 86% within SimplyCook’s affiliate program in the same period, reaching 73% to become a crucial acquisition method.
“As a subscription brand, it’s vital for us to acquire high-quality customers who don’t churn. We use Awin to form and manage strategic partnerships with brands selling products that complement our recipe kits. In doing so, we’ve created a high-performing acquisition channel that is starting to compete with Meta for customer quality and is conveniently managed in the same place as all our other affiliate activities.”