One of the best strategies available for companies to contact clients and increase income is email marketing. However, integrating email capabilities into apps or websites requires more than just an email platform – it calls for an email marketing API.
What are APIs, and How Do They Work?
API stands for “Application Programming Interface.” APIs act as a messenger that takes requests and tells an application what you want it to do. They also deliver the response back to you – like ordering food at a restaurant via an app instead of talking to a server.
Here’s a quick API terminology overview:
- API Endpoint: The URL of the request that triggers an action (like sending an email)
- Authentication: API keys or tokens that verify the requesting application’s identity
- Parameters: Extra pieces of data that act as filters for the request
- Returns: The response from the API, usually in JSON format
Using APIs, developers don’t need to build everything from scratch in order to add functionality to their system. Email marketing APIs offer apps the ability to send and track emails with code rather than a graphical interface.
What is API in Email Marketing?
An email marketing API allows developers to integrate email functionality into their apps and websites programmatically. Instead of logging into an email service and clicking buttons, developers can use code to access core features like:
- Creating and managing contacts
- Designing email templates
- Sending single or bulk emails
- Tracking opens, clicks, unsubscribes
- Fetching reports
All of the major leading email solutions providers like UniOne, Mailchimp, SendGrid, and Constant Contact provide APIs to power email in apps. However, not all APIs are equal when it comes to pricing, features and scalability.
Why Use an Email Marketing API?
Here are some of the top reasons to leverage an email marketing API:
1. Send Transactional and Triggered Emails
Transactional and triggered emails relay time-sensitive messages to customers after an event occurs. Common examples include order confirmations, password reset emails, user onboarding flows, and more.
Instead of sending these one-off messages manually, APIs enable apps to trigger emails programmatically. Setting up flows like this by hand doesn’t scale well. Using an API, apps can send unlimited transactional and triggered emails to align with in-app user actions.
2. Embed Email Functionality Into Apps
Email marketing APIs allow developers to bake email capabilities directly into new apps or existing ones.
For example, CRMs and support ticketing tools can leverage an email API to notify users of new tickets or comments via email without reps needing to leave the platform. APIs handle embedding and sending messages automatically behind the scenes.
Email integration expands the notification channels available to app users beyond in-app alerts and takes advantage of transactional emails’ high open rates.
3. Centralize Contact Management
Manually exporting and importing contacts between apps is tedious and error-prone. Email marketing APIs enable developers to manage contacts from one centralized platform programmatically.
API requests can push new contacts from a form or API call directly into an email service database. Developers can also pull contact data, such as email address changes, back into the app to keep information in sync.
Centralized data avoids duplicates, saves time on imports/exports, and creates a single source of truth for subscriber information.
4. Access Email Analytics Data
Most email marketing APIs facilitate accessing campaign analytics, such as opens, clicks, unsubscribes, and more.
Developers can pull email performance data into custom admin dashboards or feed it to other apps like CRMs or business intelligence tools. Having programmatic access to rich email metrics enables deeper analysis.
5. Scale Email Volume Without Limits
If your application gains traction, email volumes could scale up rapidly. Email marketing APIs are built for developers to optimize for scalability from the start.
With the right API, sending hundreds of thousands or even millions of monthly emails is easy. And because APIs abstract away much of the email infrastructure, development teams don’t need to worry about delivery or server maintenance.
The email sending API handles the heavy lifting so developers can focus on creating amazing app experiences.
Evaluating Email Marketing API Solutions
All email marketing APIs are not made equal. When comparing potential solutions, keep the following criteria in mind:
- Developer Friendly. Integrating with any apps should be easy, an API should clearly define endpoints, parameters, authentication, and returns. Look for offers with detailed reference docs instead of sparse consumer-focused APIs.
- Pricing Model. Be careful with API pricing models that do not offer transparent pricing schemes. As your app grows, look for simple, scalable pricing that doesn’t break the bank.
- Deliverability. All marketing and transactional emails should arrive reliably in subscriber inboxes. To make sure your deliverability rates are strong, have a proper SPF/DKIM setup to avoid falling into spam.
- Support Options. Even with great documentation, questions still pop up. If your team gets stuck in the integration part, prioritize APIs with solid multichannel support.
- Infrastructure. The API should run on a modern cloud infrastructure, built to scale, unlike legacy systems that are hard to maintain. The benefit of automatic scaling is that it saves engineering time as volumes increase.
- Feature Availability. Decide carefully what email use cases you support. Primary needs are to access contacts and templates, as well as send and track emails and analytics data through APIs.
By keeping these aspects in mind while comparing providers, you can select an email marketing API tailored to your app’s requirements now and as user volumes grow.
Use Cases to Power With Email Marketing APIs
Now that we understand the benefits of leveraging email APIs, let’s view some examples, explore specifics and use cases where they excel.
Notification and Update Emails
Apps focused on finance, project management, social networks, etc., can all leverage emails to notify users when key events occur like:
- Finance: Payment received, balance low alert, suspicious activity notices
- Project Management: New task assignment, milestone achieved, deadline reminders
- Social Media: New follower, someone reacts to your post, got mentioned notifications
Sending alerts through email in addition to in-app ones provides another channel to grab user attention and drive re-engagement. The familiarity and open rates of email perfectly suit timely notifications.
Transactional messages like these often use merge tags populated from databases to personalize content for each subscriber with context like their name, account status, recent activity etc. Email APIs make merges easy to implement.
User Onboarding Campaigns
Onboarding campaigns guide users through key workflows after signup to activate them as quickly as possible. Typical onboarding steps include:
- Intro email to welcome new users
- Prompt to add profile info
- Nudge to connect to social accounts
- Tips for first-time actions like posting content
- Reminders if stalled at a step
Good design of drip campaigns can significantly raise conversion rates. According to research by Delvin Peck, companies using onboarding see 52% higher retention compared to ones that don’t.
Email APIs let developers link with lifecycle marketing solutions or create focused onboarding routines. This eliminates the need to build complex workflows from scratch.
Admin & Billing Emails
Beyond end-user features, apps also need to facilitate business operations like managing subscriptions and handling support tickets. Email can assist by powering:
- New user signup notifications
- Manual invoice delivery
- Failed payment alerts
- Ticket assignment alerts
- Password reset emails
APIs provide the template and contact management tools needed for admin use cases like these without requiring engineering resources.
Ecommerce Abandoned Cart Reminders
Abandoned carts are the bane of online businesses, with the average site losing 70% of its carts before checkout. However, cart recovery emails help reclaim 10-15% of abandoned carts on average.
Ecommerce platforms can change abandoned cart reminders to work off email APIs, sending the missives automatically after a fixed amount of time of inactivity once a customer adds items to it but does not check out. Saved cart session data can populate messages to remind users what they’ve left behind and offer incentives to return with them.
Deep integrations with platforms like Shopify and WooCommerce are just one of the things that the best email APIs for ecommerce have to offer, along with syncing data and executing campaigns.
Appointment & Event Reminders
Automated email reminders, either before or after an event or appointment, can also be helpful to other apps that facilitate appointments, events and bookings.
Customers want to communicate with your brand and expect it to be done in a timely manner. Friendly reminders in the form of emails prevent no-shows and leave your brand at the top of your mind.
Wedding sites, salon apps, medical software, ticket marketplaces, etc. can integrate email without engineering resources via APIs. The dynamic content ensures each subscriber receives relevant timing and event details.
Key Takeaways About Email Marketing APIs
Here are the critical points to remember when it comes to determining if your customer-facing app needs an email marketing API:
- Automate Transactional Emails. Trigger real-time emails on user actions like signups, purchases, content sharing, event registrations etc.
- Embed Into Apps. Integrate email capabilities right into your web or mobile apps.
- Centralize Contacts. Have one place to manage your audience data and eliminate incoherency issues.
- Access Analytics. Track the performance of your campaigns by fetching email engagement metrics such as opens, clicks, etc.
- Scale Without Limits. No infrastructure headaches even when you send hundreds of thousands (or more!) emails.
- Accelerate Development. Don’t set up an on-premise email platform; use prebuilt APIs.
- Choose Developer Focused Options. Use tools optimized for transactional email rather than bulk marketing.
Email integration is something that’s easy to underestimate, but it is still a must-have capability for many applications. As email marketing APIs mature, you get access to the most advanced features without the traditional hassles.
Don’t put email on the backburner or try to build it in-house; instead leverage a purpose-built API. Your developers and your customers will thank you!
