Although affiliate marketing is a high volume area which should not be avoided by marketers I have my own personal reservations with regards to affiliate companies and programmes and the possible cannibalisation of your existing loyal consumers. In the past I dealt with a reputable company of 25+ years which back in the early 90’s successfully evolved their business from a catalogue and postal order based selling strategy to a cross-channel sales strategy which included various new and exciting (at the time ) digital marketing disciplines. Currently, in the TwenTeens (My take on this decade’s abbreviation) the company sells products to a diverse range of young and old consumers. They rely on regular purchasing as a result of their weekly email broadcasts, monthly snail mail catalogues and PPC marketing campaigns.

2007 and business was great; we had managed to drive their email and pay per click ROI’s to an all time high and very much enjoyed watching the revenue tracker tick over month on month. As all was peachy in the Email, PPC and SEO marketing of their brand the most intriguing revenue channel to explore at the time was affiliate marketing.

It’s simple! They bring you ‘X’ amount of clicks which gets ‘X’ conversions and you pay them a small percentage accordingly. All involved parties make a return on their initial investment. Great, what could be better?

Although it started off small, over a few months we saw a gradual but significant ramp up of affiliate traffic and conversions which seemed very promising and rewarding at the time. What we also realised a few months later was that on the flip-side there was a gradual decrease in Paid and Natural search conversions.

Let me explain. You have a database of regular purchasers, each month they search on Google (as you do) to find your brands website. The first paid and natural search results will (most likely) display your brand. You then decide to take on affiliate companies to promote your brand and the results start looking different. Now the first paid or natural search results may be the affiliate company offering your product at a slightly reduced rate and you find yourself competing to get the top spot.

Based on this, what your brand suffers from is an existing long time customer who has always been more than happy to pay the full price for your products now finding the same goods at a lower price or with an incentive to go through the affiliate site which you then pay commission to.

In many instances the affiliate companies will have more in their budget to punt your brand on Google than you are willing to part with. After further investigation and cross referencing who the buyers were we terminated all affiliate activity and took back full control of the brand.

In conclusion, companies should carefully research who they affiliate themselves with. My advice is to keep clear of the larger players and cash back type companies.

Let me know if you have found similar instances where crossing channels has caused more damage than success.