Backpack Affiliate Program Review (Transparent Summary)

Most merchants would think that to drive a traffic to their funnels, they would need to shell out money for advertising regardless of how awesome their funnel, marketing sales copy and their product is. Marketing your products and selling them does not necessarily mean that you need a large budget in order to see ROI and profits.

A great example of marketing without having to spend a lot is through affiliate marketing. It is a type of marketing where affiliates earn commissions based on the amount of conversion to sales.

Why Affiliate Marketing?

Because affiliate marketing is a performance-based type of marketing, you only get to pay for successful conversions as opposed to advertising where you pay for clicks or impressions regardless of conversion. Affiliate Marketing also has a few advantages that makes it a point of interest for marketers:

1. It helps you save on marketing cost because your affiliates will do the marketing for you.
2. It drives a large volume of traffic into your website or funnel because it allows you to tap into your affiliates’ markets.

Because affiliate marketing relies on other marketers to promote and sell your products or services, it’s best to make sure that it is introduced through a system that already has everything they need including the ability to monitor their progress and earnings.

This is where Backpack comes in.

What Is Backpack?

Backpack is ClickFunnels‘ affiliate marketing management platform which is a native application just like Actionetics. Because it is native to ClickFunnels itself, you’ll find that your affiliate marketing works seamlessly with your funnels enabling you to have the power to build and design your funnels, setup your affiliate program, integrate your affiliate program within the funnel and setup your email automation for marketing purposes.

User Interface

Like Actionetics (or just about anything about ClickFunnels), Backpack features a user-friendly interface. Non-tech savvy and tech savvy users alike will find Backpack easy to navigate and use. This allows users to easily familiarise themselves with all the features and functions quickly. Users will also appreciate the readily available how-to videos and guides to make the most out of their Backpack experience.

With time-efficient processes and easy to understand guides, you spend less time on the set-up process and more time growing your affiliates.

Pricing

Upgrading your ClickFunnels subscription for $297/month allows you to access ClickFunnels‘ whole suite of tools which includes Actionetics and Backpack. Note that you cannot purchase Backpack separately from Actionetics. Both tools come as a bundled offer to upgrade. This allows you to fully incorporate your affiliate marketing with marketing automation to your funnels.

Backpack Features

Dashboard

The dashboard area is where you will see general affiliate information which includes the number of active affiliates you have, how much they have earned for you in sales, how much you owe them in commissions and how much has already been paid to your affiliates.

The great thing about this is that you get to track and monitor the payments allowing you to not miss a single payout which the affiliates will appreciate.

Affiliates

The affiliates section is where you will find the list of all your affiliates. Aside from being automatically added to your list when they sign up as affiliates, you can also manually add affiliates by exporting your list through a CSV file or by clicking the Add New Affiliate button.

In this section, you can also manually edit your affiliate’s information which includes their name, email, phone number, time zone, address, payment, and other settings.

You will also be able to see a preview of your affiliate’s dashboard by clicking Login As next to your affiliate’s name. This gives a glimpse of individual affiliate performance.

Commissions

The Commissions section is a fairly straight-to-the-point section where you will see all commissions, affiliate who earned the commission, amount due, the purchase made and when the commission is due to be paid.

Payments

The payments section is one section I’m sure every affiliate program creator would appreciate. This is where you keep track of commissions due, payments made and future commissions ensuring that you never miss a payout to your affiliates. I’m sure they’ll appreciate that, too!

Commission Plans

The Commission Plans section is where you set up how much your affiliates get paid in commission for every sale they make from promoting your product or service through ClickFunnel. What’s cool about this section is that you are empowered to create not only one type of commission plan, but also create tier-based type of commissions.

An example of a tiered commission plan is that of 2-tier plan where your affiliates promote your product or service and offer to be entered through the affiliate system as an affiliate. On the first tier, your affiliate receives a commission (20% or so) for selling your product/service and signing up another affiliate. The second tier activates, allowing that affiliate to earn further commissions (5% or so) when the affiliate he signed up receives their commission from sales.

To create your Commission Plan, here’s a quick guide for you to follow:

Step 1: Click Add Commission Plan

Step 2: Enter the information needed such as the name of the commission plan (internal purpose), currency and status (active or inactive) of the commission plan. Click Create Commission Plan when finished.

Step 3: Choose the affiliate type by clicking Add Affiliate Type letting you segment the affiliates qualified to receive the commission you are currently setting up.

Step 4: Once you are done with the affiliate type, click Add New Tier and set up the amount of commissions, the payment type (percent or fixed) and the number of months before the payout.

You can add as many tiers as possible in one Commission Plan.

Affiliate Types

The Affiliate Types section is where you create affiliate types that work hand-in-hand with the Commission Plans section.

Here, you will be able to create the default names for different affiliate types which will come in handy if you offer a multi-tier commission plan or if you have different kinds of affiliate programs in your ClickFunnels.

Affiliate Funnels

The Affiliate Funnels section is where all your funnels with affiliate programs are listed. In the event that you do not have any funnel with affiliate programs integrated, your Affiliate Funnels page will be left blank just like the example below.

Summary

Backpack is a great affiliate management platform and even more so when coupled with Actionetics; so you not only get to manage your affiliate marketing, but also enable email automation. You get all of that packed into ClickFunnels.

Funnels + affiliates + email automation = an all-in-one system that lets you do away with other tools and programs.

In summary, Backpack is more than your money’s worth in terms of performance, efficiency and convenience. If you are looking to do a way with subscribing to and paying for different platforms for your every marketing needs, I’d have to recommend ClickFunnels with its native email automation and affiliate management.