LinkMink Review: Features, Integrations and Pricing

SaaS brands can reap serious revenue with an affiliate program. But if they want to scale that revenue? They’ll need eyes on affiliate performance data from each partner, and a way to streamline the endless tasks that come with running an affiliate marketing program. That’s where affiliate tracking software comes in. LinkMink LLC is an affiliate marketing tracking platform that specializes in SaaS brand affiliate programs, serving clients like ConvertKit and CrowdCast. 

We’ll give you the lowdown on LinkMink’s top features, pricing, reviews, pros, and cons. And if you’re curious about other SaaS affiliate marketing software solutions? Keep reading to see how LinkMink compares with Tapfiliate. 

LinkMink Affiliate Tracking

LinkMink is an affiliate management and tracking software built specifically for SaaS affiliate programs. 

It’s only compatible with SaaS brands that use the electronic payments with the Stripe payment platform, and offers basic features like affiliate tracking, automated monthly payouts, and affiliate segments. 

LinkMink Key Features

Automated Commission Approvals and Stripe’s Risk Analysis Results

If you’re worried about affiliate fraud, LinkMink’s Stripe integration offers some solace. The platform’s risk analysis helps you review commissions for potential red flags before actually paying them out to a shady affiliate. Similarly, you can automate commission approvals once you build trust from certain affiliates. For example, you can enable automated commission approval for affiliates based on their email addresses. 

Reliable Tracking

LinkMink offers reliable affiliate tracking and revenue attribution for as many as 19-step conversion flows. The platform’s integration with Stripe ensures attribution for every coupon, purchase, refund, or cancellation. Additionally, brands can track commissions and direct conversions with multiple subdomains and catch ad blockers that might inhibit customer actions. 

Integrated Payouts

LinkMink offers integrated payouts so that you can pay affiliate commissions right on their platform. While convenient, LinkMink mentions that they do keep a portion of the payout as per PayPal MassPay^TM costs. 

Keep in mind that while automated mass payments are a solid benefit of LinkMink’s service, they’re only available to subscribers of the mid-tier Growth plan and beyond. Basic-plan customers can only access manual commission payouts. 

Segmented Affiliate Groups

Segmentation allows brands to assign different commissions to different groups of affiliates. For example, you could assign a 30% commission to affiliates with wider social media follower bases, and a 20% commission to affiliates who don’t meet a certain follower threshold. 

Affiliate Management Dashboard

While brands can see affiliate and referral data on the platform’s internal reporting, LinkMink offers similar views for affiliates via the affiliate dashboard. It displays constantly updated figures about leads, incoming referrals, and commissions. Affiliates can plug in custom date ranges to see their revenue, promoting more transparency between brands and affiliates. Plus, LinkMink allows for custom marketing materials and guidelines to be shared with affiliates on their dashboard. 

Direct Linking

Brands can assign unique URL parameters to affiliates through LinkMink, and each link corresponds to various pages on your website. This gives them more variety in how they promote your brand. 

Integrations

LinkMink only integrates with Stripe, though you can integrate it via Javascript, Payment Links, and the API. Unfortunately, LinkMink doesn’t integrate into popular ecommerce, marketing, or course software tools as Tapfiliate does. However, they do offer concierge migration for businesses moving their affiliate program from different affiliate platforms to LinkMink. 

Can I Use Customization With LinkMink?

LinkMink doesn’t have many customization options. The only item we could see that’s customizable is commission lifecycles, affiliate groups, and affiliate approvals.

Auto-approved affiliates allow you to set predetermined, customizable criteria like follower count or social media channels so that LinkMink can automate affiliate approval. However, you can manually approve them as well. 

Additionally, brands can customize refund and payment lifecycles with risk assessments and waiting periods for refund windows and commission payouts for affiliates. You can also segment affiliates into groups with customizable commission structures. 

But as for white-labeled pages or custom colors and themes? You’re pretty limited to LinkMink’s default user interface.

LinkMink Pricing

LinkMink offers three pricing affiliate tiers with monthly plans that increase in price depending on your affiliate revenue. One pro is that all pricing plans include unlimited affiliates. Here’s a quick look at each tier:

• Starter Plan: $39 per month. Up to $1,000 in total referred revenue tracked, manual payouts, unlimited affiliates. 
• Growth Plan: $65 per month. Up to $8,000 in monthly referred revenue tracked, automated payouts, premium support. 
• Business: $125 per month. Up to $25,000 in referred revenue tracked. 
• Enterprise: A sliding scale based on affiliate revenue. $249 to $1,499 per month for affiliate revenue between $25,000 to $50,000, and $1,000,000+, respectively. All basic features from previous tiers are included, while price points increase based on revenue. 

Who Are Some of LinkMink’s Customers?

LinkMink exclusively serves SaaS brands that use Stripe, like: 

• ConvertKit: A creator marketing platform SaaS, ConvertKit acts like a hub for all your marketing initiatives including different channels and product campaigns, automated funnels, landing page creators, and sales dashboard integration.
• Crowd Cast: This virtual events platform levels up webinars with multiple hosts and audiences, Q&As, workshops, polls, and community engagement. 
• Coach Catalyst: A coaching SaaS platform, Coach Catalyst helps coaches streamline their management tasks with a program builder, challenge library, client data and progress tracking, and real-time client-coach communication features. 

What are LinkMink Reviews Like?

LinkMink doesn’t have many reviews on popular software review sites. Capterra shows a 5-star rating, but keep in mind that the average is only generated from 2 reviews. While customers cite satisfaction with LinkMink’s responsive customer support team and automated affiliate tracking, negative points surround the platform’s limited features. 

Marcel P, a CEO in the computer software industry, elaborates: 

It lacks many of the features you might be looking for in more complicated affiliate programs

A Guide to Finding the Best Affiliate Tracking Software for Your Affiliate Program

Wondering if LinkMink is a good fit for your affiliate business? Find out with our selection process for affiliate management platforms. 

Look at Your Needs

Take a big-picture look at your affiliate program and ask yourself what’s missing. Do you want more qualified affiliates with larger follower counts or more relevant audiences? Or perhaps your conversions aren’t where they need to be and you want reporting insights to strategize more. 

For example, some brands come to Tapfiliate for support automating and streamlining their program. Other common affiliate program needs we help brands with include flexible commission structures and organization, along with filtrable, detailed reports for specific insights. 

Research, Research, Research

Next stop? Google is your one-stop shop for business ideas and software shopping. The affiliate marketing management software industry is poppin’ with tons of options, many of which specialize in a certain niche. Ideally, you want an affiliate marketing management platform with customers similar to your brand in terms of niche, industry, company size, and marketing goals. 

Another vital point of research? Software review sites. These include Capterra, G2, Intercom, and TrustRadius. These sites offer a platform for customers to leave unbiased reviews about various basic and advanced features of the software. 

Does it Work With Your Tech Stack?

If you’re an ecommerce online business, advanced affiliate management solutions should integrate with all your favorite platforms. Why? Because this makes it easier to streamline your affiliate program and save time in your workflow. Ideally, you want a software with many direct integrations that don’t require much coding to connect with your tech stack. However, some software offer custom integrations via APIs or Javascript — just double-check that these additions don’t cost much extra on top of your subscription fee. 

Find Out Your Budget

Affiliate systems cost anywhere from $50 to $5,000+ per month. We know; it’s a big range. But in those ranges are also necessary (and unnecessary) features and add-ons depending on your unique affiliate program needs. 

It’s your job (and sole discretion) to assess whether the program subscription you’re after makes sense with both your marketing budget and needs. 

Check Out Free Trials

The best way to see whether an affiliate program management platform works for you is through its free trial. If a software doesn’t offer a free trial period? We see that as a red flag. Companies that sell solid affiliate tracking software should feel confident enough in their product to let customers try it. A solid benchmark is a 14-day free trial period. 

Psssst. Tapfiliate offers a 14-day free trial. 

Take this time to toggle through a software’s various features like custom commission terms, and allocations, reporting filters, brand customization functionality, affiliate communication, and more. 

Look For Ease of Use

Assess how easy it feels to navigate the platform. Are dashboards smooth and accessible? Or does it take 10 pages of bulky white space to get to the information you need? Similarly, look at how long it takes to move from one feature to another. Every section of the software should feel intuitive so that you can breeze through all your affiliate tasks. 

How Secure is The Software?

Affiliate fraud is real these days, and subsequently, the best affiliate software keeps up with the risks. Look for companies that prioritize data security and privacy with GDPR compliance, suspicious affiliate account alerts, and end-to-end encryption. 

Talk to Customer Service

Affiliate software is tricky to master your first few days. Still, a solid software should have an equally solid customer service team to support you in a timely manner. Consider response time: how long does it take for them to get back to you? Ideally, you want software that offers 24/7 chat as well as phone support. At the very least? Look for ones with comprehensive support articles to help you manage hiccups on your own where possible. 

A Flexible Alternative to LinkMink: Tapfiliate Affiliate Software

LinkMink is a basic affiliate software that might work for some SaaS brands, but if you’re looking for a little more pizzazz? Tapfiliate might be the LinkMink alternative you’re looking for. 

Calling all SaaS brands with an affiliate program! Boost conversion rates and revenue with Tapfiliate’s real-time tracking, flex commissions, and easy integrations. 

Integrations

Tapfiliates integrates with all the important software any ecommerce online business uses daily. From Stripe to Shopify and WooCommerce, online businesses can count on our integrations. Along with a ton of useful ecommerce integrations, Tapfiliate also integrates with course platforms like Teachable and marketing tech like MailChimp. Plus, we offer custom integrations via our Rest API and Javascript. 

To compare, LinkMink only integrates with Stripe, which limits payment options for brands that want to subscribe to their software. Unfortunately, it doesn’t integrate with any other ecommerce tools like Shopify or WooCommerce. 

White Labeling:

Tapfiliate offers full white-labeling for enterprise customers, allowing them to remove Tapfiliate’s logo and verbiage from their affiliate portals. Talk about brand alignment!

Automated Partner Recruitment:

Tapfiliate takes affiliate discovery and recruitment to the next level with our fully automated customer referral program. Pick custom events to trigger automated emails to your customers inviting them to join your referral program with incentives. Customers and affiliates merge in roles to create an unstoppable promotional team for your brand. 

Our clients across a wide range of industries get to engage their customers and bring in referral revenue with this program — win, win! 

Multi-currency:

The world is bigger than the US, UK, and Canada — unfortunately, many affiliate tracking platforms don’t realize that by only offering USD as a currency. Tapfiliate caters to an international roster of clients across multiple industries, and we support multiple currencies to reflect our global presence. Clients can choose which currency best suits their affiliate program; and if your currency isn’t listed? Just reach out to our customer support team to make it happen. 

Multi-Language

Why limit your customer reach to North America and the UK? 

Tap into global affiliate networks and hundreds of affiliates with Tapfiliate’s multi-language affiliate management dashboard. We offer the same features and dashboards in affiliate view in English, German, Brazilian Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, and French. 

Works for Affiliate, Referral and Influencer Programs

Affiliate marketing is a profitable space for any brand, but it’s not the only form of partnership marketing. Leverage influencers and your best cheerleaders (your customers) with Tapfiliate’s multiple program functions for referral and influencer marketing alongside affiliate marketing. 

Our automated customer referral program makes it easy to recruit new and old customers to start promoting your brand. Plus, our affiliate marketing management suite includes branded creatives. These let you deliver branded promotional materials right to the affiliate portal, which makes it much easier to appeal to influencers to promote your products on their channels. Of course, you can leverage influencer third-party content in your strategy, but the brand alignment that comes with allowing influencers to use your own content is unparalleled for brand recognition and trust. 

Flexible Commissions

Of course, adjustable commission amounts are useful for various affiliate segments. But flexible commission types take affiliate engagement and brand compatibility a step further. SaaS brands will enjoy recurring commission payouts to match each customer subscription payment while sweetening the deal for their prized affiliates. 

Similarly, lifetime commissions reward affiliates with every purchase made by a new customer. You can also enable product-specific commissions to meet various business goals like selling more of a certain product, or on the other hand, making another product feel more exclusive. Furthermore, you can view the performance of eligible products within your affiliate dashboard. 

The best part? All these will enhance your creator relationships and build your brand rep across the affiliate space!

Direct Messages: 

Flexible commissions and branded creatives are a great way to engage affiliates. 

But everybody craves a human element to their work. Give your affiliates exactly that with instant communication via our platform. Send them direct messages with praise, instructions, clarifications, or pretty much anything they need on our enterprise plan. You can also share notifications with them based on triggers you set yourself. 

Automation

Does your marketing workflow include a wide range of software? Tap into each one in customized workflows with Tapfiliate’s deep integration to Zapier. You can also use our platform to automate your affiliate approvals, automated customer referral program invitations, commission increases, and much more. 

MLM

Multi-level marketing on Tapfiliate helps you harness the many networks of your existing affiliates. Chances are, they jive with other professionals in a similar industry, making their circles prime hunting grounds for new potential affiliates. The best part? You don’t have to go hunting. Let your affiliates do the work for you in exchange for the incentives you decide on. 

Our MLM features help brands recruit a whole army of affiliate marketers in record time. 

Pricing

Tapfiliate includes unlimited affiliate programs and affiliates with all subscriptions. Meaning? Even basic plans for pricing can scale their programs to new heights with endless affiliate partnerships. Here’s a more detailed look at our pricing on an annual plan: 

• Essential: $74/month. 34 direct integrations, 20,000 tracked clicks, 2,000 tracked conversions, coupon codes, affiliate links, and standard commission management. 
• Pro: $124/month. Custom domains, product-specific commissions, MLM features, 100,000 tracked clicks, 10,000 tracked conversions. 
• Enterprise: Custom. Unlimited tracked clicks, conversions, and tracking requests, in-platform messenger, custom wording, white labeling, dedicated personal affiliate managers. 

LinkMink Affiliate Management vs Tapfiliate Affiliate Management

LinkMink offers decent affiliate tracking and attribution features for SaaS business owners, but falls short in a few key areas that could take your affiliate program to the next level. Additionally, LinkMink only caters to SaaS brands that use Stripe. 

Tapfiliate fits the bill for SaaS, ecommerce, dropshipping, and subscription brands that crave flexible commissions, ultimate customization, and more branding options. 

Let’s see how the two platforms compare. 

Affiliate Marketing Program Management:

LinkMink’s affiliate program management centers around its comprehensive tracking and reporting features, which cover geography, IP Address, traffic stats, and more. Brands can also access more detailed reporting on website traffic. 

But the land of affiliate management goes beyond mere reporting. Tapfiliate upgrades these management features to recognize the need for streamlined efficiency and affiliate status recognition. Use our webhools to enable triggers for custom assets and emails to each individual affiliate. Leverage more integrations to other ecommerce platforms (not just Stripe), and harness flexible commissions and performance bonuses to engage and retain strong affiliates. 

Tracking and Reporting Analytics

LinkMink’s affiliate tracking is quite robust, linking website leads and conversions to Stripe to ensure 100% accurate affiliate attribution. The platform’s comprehensive reports help you lay everything out in a user-friendly way, with stand-out figures for revenue, affiliates, and conversions. 

Tapfiliate also offers real-time tracking and accurate reports, but our reporting dashboard dives a bit deeper with powerful segmentation and filtration features. Check out affiliate performance stats for every marketing channel, product, campaign, or affiliate – you name it. In other words? Complete control over your affiliate performance data. 

Languages:

Any brand that markets internationally should be able to communicate with affiliates in multiple languages. After all, you wouldn’t want to miss out on a qualified affiliate if you can’t speak their language. LinkMink only caters to a Canadian/American audience with its limited English language support options. Contrarily, Tapfiliate offers multi-language affiliate portals in either English, French, German, Spanish, Dutch, and Brazilian Portuguese. 

Currencies:

Catering to a global audience? You better offer multiple currencies to engage your international affiliates. Unfortunately, LinkMink doesn’t list any information about multiple currencies on their website. On the other hand, Tapfiliate supports commissions in multiple currencies like Euros, dollars, and more. This makes it much easier to power and profit from global affiliate marketing campaigns. 

Customization:

LinkMink offers customizable criteria for automated affiliate approvals. On top of that, they allow for customizable commissions based on segmented affiliate groups. But that’s as far as their customization goes. They don’t even offer any white-labeling functionality on the platform. This prohibits brands from customizing the platform’s interface, affiliate portal, and dashboard with their own branding slogans. 

Tapfiliate offers a wide customization suite of features, including custom referral links and coupon codes, social media assets, banners, and a branded affiliate portal. Plus, we provide full white-labeling for enterprise customers, allowing them to remove Tapfiliate’s logo and verbiage from their affiliate portals. Talk about brand alignment!

Automation

Both LinkMink and Tapfiliate offer automated affiliate approvals where you can set predetermined criteria for acceptance. Similarly, both offer manual approvals as well. However, Tapfiliate offers much more automation potential via our Zapier integration, which lets you automate custom workflows with other software tools in your marketing stack. You can even take the workflow to deeper depths with more customization from our Rest API and Javascript. 

On top of that, our webhooks can enable triggered email communications to affiliates after onboarding or achieving certain performance milestones. 

MLM:

The best way to find affiliates? A solid place to start is your existing affiliates’ network. You can tap into them with Tapfiliate’s multi-level marketing (MLM) features, which incentivizes existing affiliates to bring you more recruits. We offer MLM features on our Pro plan, which you can access for only $165/month if you opt for annual billing. 

LinkMink does not offer any MLM features. 

Support:

Both platforms offer live customer support via an online chat service; however, Tapfiliate’s customer support and sales team stands out for its 24/7 availability. We also offer live chat support via social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter. Similarly, our resource library is a bit more comprehensive than LinkMink’s, and we also offer premium phone support for higher-tier subscribers. 

Pricing:

While LinkMink offers a more affordable roster of pricing plans ($39, $65, and $149 monthly plans), the value is clearly stronger with Tapfiliate’s plans ($89, $149, and custom). Our flexible commissions span different structures and more customizable performance bonuses that you can access on our Pro plan. Furthermore, our custom plan offers much richer customization features to tailor your affiliate management workflow to your unique business landscape and goals. 

FAQs about LinkMink

What is LinkMink?

LinkMink is an affiliate management tool for SaaS businesses that use Stripe, offering integrated payouts, flexible direct linking, segmented affiliate groups, and accurate conversion tracking. 

What are the limitations of LinkMink?

LinkMink only works with companies that work with the Stripe payment platform, making it unaccessible to businesses that use a wide variety of different payment platforms. Additionally, the software doesn’t allow for total branding customization because whitelabeling isn’t available in any of the subscription tiers. 

Who are LinkMink competitors?

1. Tapfiliate: Our robust affiliate tracking software offers both affordable and scalable management solutions for ecommerce, SaaS, dropshipping, and many more brand industries, complete with revenue-generating features like custom real-time reporting, flexible commissions, multi-level marketing management (MLM), branded affiliate creatives, and workflow automation.
   
2. GoAffPro: An affordable, basic affiliate marketing management system with custom commissions, automation potential, and custom triggers and alerts.
   
3. Referral Rock: This affiliate software offers both affiliate and referral marketing managing features like branded customization, analytics for affiliate campaigns, automated payouts, and rewards to incentivize sales. 
   
4. Voluum: A Poland-based ad tracker for media buyers, Voluum offers campaign management for Facebook, Google, and more, along with affiliate marketing features like A/B testing, ad publisher, and overall optimization functionality. 
   
5. UpPromote: This affiliate management software is meant for Shopify store owners, especially in the ecommerce retail space. It offers tiered commissions, affiliate performance rewards, communication features, and custom reporting. 

All in all? LinkMink is a basic, affordable software for SaaS brands. But Tapfiliate is an awesome affiliate management software that appeals to a wider audience base and offers more advanced features. 

Ready to reap some real revenue with your affiliate program? Sign up for Tapfiliate’s free 14-day trial period today!