Clickfunnels Backpack Review - What is it And Why it Stands Out?

Affiliate marketing industry is estimated to hit $6.8 billion in annual spending in 2020. This is what attracts thousands of people to this industry every day yet many brands don’t leverage this opportunity because they’re insecure of the outcome.

A lot of brands aren’t even aware of affiliate marketing and what it is.

And while you’re standing there and wondering if you should run an affiliate program for your products and services, there are millions of companies out there who have leveraged their affiliates to achieve massive results like f.e. Clickfunnels, the company I’m happily affiliated with.

In this post, I am not going to talk about why affiliate marketing is important and why you should start your own affiliate program quickly but also how to do it with the tool called Backpack, one of the apps you get with Clickfunnels Platinum membership.

Today, I’ll cover:

What is Affiliate Marketing
Why is it Important
How to Create an Affiliate Program for Your Business
What is Clickfunnels Backpack
Why Choose Backpack
An Inside Look and How it Works
Conclusion

This is going to be a bit longer one so sit back, remove all of the distractions and let’s start!

What is Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is a business model where an individual or a company teams up with a brand and promotes their products and services, earning a commission for every sale that’s made through them.

An affiliate gets a specific link that has their identification number in it and whenever someone clicks on that link and buys a product, that affiliate gets a commission.

Affiliate marketing is like being a middle man between a buyer and a seller. You just connect the two who aren’t aware of each other’s existence at the time.

You find people who have a specific problem and then find a product that solves that problem and connect them. After that, for every buyer that buys a product they need to solve a problem, you get paid a commission. This is how affiliate marketing works.

Why is Affiliate Marketing Important for a Brand

Affiliate marketing is attractive to many people because they don’t have to create a product nor deal with the customer service. All they have to do is just drive traffic to the company’s sales page and that’s it. The company then acquires a customer they’ve brought in.

How is this beneficial to a brand?

Having a great affiliate program attracts great affiliates. Having great affiliates promoting your brand can bring your business a ton of new leads and customers. By having affiliates do the most of the selling for your business (not all, of course), your business will have much more space for working on other things, creating new products etc.

If you’ve been wondering how to increase your reach and influence in the market and make more sales without spending crazy amount of money on advertising in hopes that it will bring you some new leads and sales, running an affiliate marketing program for your business is a great solution because you don’t have to focus on advertising anymore.

Why?

Because your affiliates will do that for you. The better affiliates you find, the better results you’ll have.

Let’s put it like this. Imagine this scenario.

You’re selling a product that’s priced at $200. With all of your marketing methods, you’re making, let’s say, 5 sales per day. This totals at $1.000 per day which is great but now imagine this…

You now have 10 affiliates that are bringing in 5 sales per day as well. How much revenue are you generating then? Total revenue is $11.000 per day!

Sure, you have to give a part of that money to your affiliates as a commission for making those sales for you but that doesn’t even matter. Let’s say that you’re paying a whopping 50% commission for every sale an affiliate makes. This still leaves you with $6.000 per day!

And that’s without almost any hard work on your side. Remember, it’s the affiliate that does all the marketing, pays for the ads, publishes content daily etc. The result is even more amazing when you have great affiliates promoting your products/services.

Note that great affiliates don’t just bring a few sales a day. Great affiliate marketers are capable of bringing tens of thousands of sales for your business. Giving them a commission for that result seems like a good deal, right?

What makes a great affiliate program?

High commissions – Commissions that aren’t $5-$20. If commissions are low, that means that an affiliate needs to put in a lot more work into promoting a product just to make some income which is what most of the affiliates run away from. They want high commissions. High commissions start usually from around $50-$100 and go up.
Recurring Commissions – These are types of commissions that exist in a membership-type affiliate programs where a customer pays a monthly fee to have access to a product. Recurring commissions are paid out every month to the affiliate as long as the customer they’ve brought to the business stays a member.
Done-for-you promotion material – This includes sales material like emails, banner ads etc. If you help your affiliates by taking care of some of their work, they’ll really appreciate that and be very encouraged to promote your products long-term.
Great affiliate support team – Technical problems happen. This is why you want to have a team ready to help specifically your company’s affiliates.

These features make a great affiliate program that everybody wants to get involved in. Sure, you don’t want to go too crazy and have commissions you can’t afford to pay but actually showing your affiliates that you respect their work, which is hard and often misinterpreted as easy, they will appreciate it.

Many businesses often don’t show any care about their affiliates and this is what pushes them away from promoting that business.

This relationship goes both ways. If you want your affiliates to work hard for you, you’ll have to work hard for them and make them feel happy to promote your business.

How to Create an Affiliate Program for Your Business

Now, onto the part of actually creating an affiliate program for your business. How to do it?

First of all, you need to choose the right affiliate platform where you’ll manage your entire program. In this post, I’ll talk about Clickfunnels Backpack which is an amazing tool but you can also check some of the alternatives if you want.

Then, you’ll need to recruit affiliates. At this step, you need to understand which types of affiliates would be the best for your needs.

For example, Instagram influencers usually have younger audience. This is why products that adults are mostly interested in may not be the best solution for an influencer to promote to his/her audience.

Then, someone with a blog about finance isn’t really a great fit for promoting protein powder or tech gadgets. You’ll have to know your audience and then find affiliates who have similar, if not the same, audience.

There are many types of affiliates – influencers, content marketers, PPC (pay per click) affiliates etc.

Decide which type would be the best to promote your business and then recruit them from there. Great way to figure which type of affiliates you need is to figure where your audience spends the most of their time (is it Facebook, Instagram etc.).

Learn how to recruit affiliates for your affiliate program.

What is Clickfunnels Backpack

Clickfunnels Backpack is an affiliate management tool built-in Clickfunnels that allows you to create affiliate programs for your business easily.

What is Clickfunnels?

Clickfunnels is an all-in-one marketing toolkit that builds sales funnels. If you’re unaware of what a sales funnel is, it’s a complete sales process that turns a stranger into your customer online, all on autopilot.

And Clickfunnels helps you put that process together and publish it. For more about the software and how it works overall, check out my Clickfunnels review.

Now, onto the specific app inside of Clickfunnels – Backpack.

ClickFunnels Backpack is an affiliate management software that’s a part of Clickfunnels Etison package. With this tool, you can create affiliate programs for your products, manage your affiliates and commissions you’re paying them etc.

It is a great solution for people looking to create affiliate programs for their products and get a lot of advertising work off of their shoulders while at the same time not spending crazy amount of money doing that.

Who needs Backpack? And why?

If you’re a business owner and have products/services that you’re selling or want to sell then Backpack is for you.

I am not going to get into how to actually deliver your product to the market and get customers, I’ve already mentioned my sales funnel article and inside that article you’ll find exactly how to do that. In this post, I am only going to talk about how to create an affiliate program that will generate traffic for you.

Great customer experience is the biggest goal of every business because it not only keeps the customer there for years but also brings in new customers via the word of mouth.

This is why you want to focus the most of your energy on the customer satisfaction and delivering new solutions to the market but you can’t do this if you do all of the advertising yourself. This is why having an affiliate program is such a beneficial thing because it puts away a lot of weight off of your back, as I’ve already mentioned.

Backpack helps you create an affiliate program that is attractive for affiliates to get involved in and then recruit affiliates who are the right fit. After that, finally, you’ll be able to manage how much money do you want to pay them per sale etc.

The thing that I and other people love about Backpack is that it’s super simple to use, like the rest of the apps inside Clickfunnels. It’s made in a way that even if you have no technical skills at all, you can set up your affiliate program in just a couple of clicks. No tech team needed.

Some of the other affiliate software is more complex and regular, non techy users can get overwhelmed and would then need to hire people to manage their programs for them which is unnecessary with Backpack.

Besides it’s simplicity, Backpack also stands out because:

Prioritized support
Easy integrations within the app and with the rest of apps inside of Clickfunnels
It uses sticky cookies. This means that if someone clicks on affiliate link and buys a product, the affiliate will get a commission. But if the next time, the same buyer doesn’t click on that affiliate’s link and buys a product, that same affiliate will get a credit anyway. This is what attracts super affiliates to affiliate programs.
It supports various payment gateways. Those include Stripe, Braintree, Recurly, EasyPayDirect, PayPal, ClickBank, JVZoo, Warrior Plus, Bluesnap and NMI.

Another difference which is not so pleasant for the most of people wanting to get involved is the price. Backpack is not cheap. It is only available with Clickfunnels Platinum membership which comes at $297 per month. However, what you get in return is much greater than the price. More about this in my article on why is Clickfunnels so expensive.

Inside of the Clickfunnels Backpack

Let me now give you a sneak peak. Take a look at everything you will find inside of Backpack.

Dashboard

This is the first interface you’ll see once you log into your Backpack. From here, you can see the most important stats of your affiliate program like the number of affiliates you have, the amount of sales they’ve made etc. and also easily navigate to the rest of the tool’s features.

Affiliates section

This is the main section of your affiliate management system. This is the room where you will find all of your affiliates. From here, you can manually add affiliates to your program by clicking the Add New Affiliate button and also every affiliate that signs up for your affiliate program will automatically be added to this room for you to see.

You can also preview each affiliate’s dashboard and see how are they performing.

Commissions section

From here, you can view and manage all of the commissions from your affiliate programs. You can see who had made the sale, how much are they going to get, how much are you going to get and the date the sale has happened.

Payments section

Very important section. In this room, you can see all of the commissions you’ve paid and the ones you have to pay until a specific date. This is very important because it helps you know your numbers and how much money do you own to your affiliate partners.

These were the management features. Now, let’s get into the features that help set this all up. It’s easy!

Commission Plans

This is the place were you set up the commissions your affiliates are going to receive when selling your products. You can always edit them when you’d like so that you can always improve your program and attract more affiliates.

The thing that is great with Backpack commission plans is that you can create an affiliate program of multiple tiers. For example, a 2-tier affiliate program works by whenever an affiliate refers somebody to your business and that person becomes an affiliate as well, the affiliate that referred the other affiliate will get a commission off of the every sale they make as well.

You have no idea how attractive this is for a lot of affiliate marketers and it’s something you should consider if you’re selling f.e. a membership product with a recurring subscription.

To add a commission plan, you can simply click on the Add Commission Plan button and then enter the basic information such as name, currency etc.

Affiliate Types

From here, you can categorize your affiliates into different types. This section goes hand-in-hand with the Commission Plans section because here you simply continue the process of setting up the affiliate program after you’re done with your commission plans.

Affiliate Funnels

This is a section where all of your funnels that have an affiliate program will be listed in. If you don’t have any funnel with an affiliate program, this room will be left blank.

Learn how to add an affiliate program to your sales funnel.

That’s it! Hope that it didn’t seem too techy because it really isn’t. If you’d read my Clickfunnels review, you would have known that Clickfunnels offers a free coaching call with one of their experts to every single one of their users. So, if you ever feel lost or stuck, you can schedule a call and ask them all of the questions you have.

Conclusion

Clickfunnels Backpack is made in a way that even a complete beginner and/or a person that doesn’t like dealing with the techy stuff and coding can set up an affiliate program for their products and services. Although it comes only in a pricey package, what you get in return is much greater – great quality affiliate system that’s super easy to manage.

If you’re ready to get started with Backpack, I’d like to sweeten the deal a bit for you. I offer some sweet bonuses for people who purchase Clickfunnels through my affiliate link so if you’re open, you can check them out here.

Anyway, I hope that you’ve liked this Clickfunnels Backpack review. If you did, make sure to leave a comment below and click on that little Like button because it shows the Google’s algorithm that this article is a good piece of content and therefore, it shows this content to more people who need this information.

If you have any questions, feel free to ask them in the comments below. I’ll reply as quickly as I can. Have a great day!