My answer is always and forever "Consistency". It's so surprising that this can be a new concept to so many and how often I have to stress this so much. Yes, it's true that different marketing channels will often benefit from different messaging and offers, but when you're small and just getting started or don't have the branding and visibility of other well known sites, it's best to start small and keep your message and offers consistent via all channels.
There's no reason a strong offer that's working well via your e-mail marketing shouldn't do well via paid search or social network channels. It can often be those multiple touchpoints that will lead to closing a sale.
But that's only part of it. When it comes to affiliate marketing, you need to have consistency with your affiliate communications as well.
Imagine if you had a door-to-door sales person working for you. This salesperson would go door-to-door showing potential customers a catalog of the latest products, offers and discounts available for purchase. He/she does a fair job of getting new customers and getting existing customers to continue shopping with you. Now imagine what would happen if this catalog is only valid for a few weeks and after a couple of good copies, the salesperson doesn't hear from you. So he sits and he waits, and finally gets an updated copy two weeks late. Maybe the salesperson thinks it was just this one time so he/she continues to go out again promoting your catalog.
This latest one expires and again there's no update. The next one arrives three weeks late. Now the salesperson is starting to get a little annoyed. They rely on this income and need the information to coninue to come through on time. But again, they still go out and hope it'll get better.
This time they're waiting for over a month for something new. At this point your once eager and happy salesperson is probably now looking for a new job. Now take this one step further. Imagine that this same salesperson is being constantly barraged with updated catalogs and new offers from your competitors on a regular basis, trying to entice him to promote their products or services instead of yours.
Why would you expect any different from an online affiliate? Why would an online affiliate keep your ads and your offers in the forefront when they don't hear from you and are constantly indundated with hundreds of new offers, specials and products from other advertisers on a daily basis?
It's just too important to consistently communicate with your affiliates and provide them with the latest products, sales, offers and everything they need to sell for you properly and consitently. Even if you don't happen to have anything particularly new, it's still so vital to keep that constant flow going and make sure all your existing and newly joined affilaites are getting something from you to remind them of the great offers you have and keep your site and your products in the forefront of their minds along with all the other advertisers out there.
