Why don't more businesses succeed with affiliate marketing?

Answer 1

Affiliate marketing tends to require products/services to be high margin or to be used up relatively quickly in order to make it comparable with other forms of direct marketing. Affiliate marketers prefer to market products/services where they'll receive a large royalty from each sale or an amount from repeat purchasers. So, both sides will usually only attempt to market the same type of things.

Another aspect is the time and knowledge a business needs to get into affiliate marketing, and the ability to properly run affiliate marketing within the company. Oftentimes, it appears to be easier and have a higher ROI to stick with other forms of marketing than to create an entire marketing channel.

It is common for certain aspects of a company to fall apart if one specific person leaves the company. If an executive implements affiliate marketing in their company, but the go-to person for this task leaves six months in, there's a chance that the entire affiliate marketing plan could crumble. The same goes for if that executive is the one doing all of the leading, but then leaves the company. This would likely result in the employees running the affiliate marketing campaign to either end their work in affiliate marketing or not know how to move forward.