Connecting Systems
For email marketing to become an integrated part of your marketing strategy, and to extract the maximum return on investment from the medium, it helps to link our systems with yours to keep data in sync. We’ve got several ways of doing that.
Smartmessages API
In-depth systems integration
An API is a programming interface that allows control of a system from outside. Using the Smartmessages API, you can connect your system with ours using whatever programming language you’re happy with. You can do pretty much everything that’s available through the web interface using the API instead, allowing complete integration under your full control. This can be linked to all aspects of your business.
Our API is a simple RPC-style interface that can return XML, JSON, serialized PHP or HTML. We provide a PHP class wrapper that makes most operations a one-line affair. We also have an ASP.NET wrapper that’s available on request.
Complete documentation is available on our help wiki.
Callbacks
Real-time synchronisation
In addition to our API we have a callback system. This can provide some of the same services you might use our API for (for example getting information about clickthroughs) but with less programming. Callbacks are also known as web hooks. Instead of writing scripts to interrogate our system, we can tell you whenever something interesting happens in your account.
You provide us with the URL of a script on your site that should receive these callbacks, and we’ll call it with some meaningful parameters. It’s an efficient mechanism because there is only traffic generated when something happens, it tells you immediately (no waiting until you ask it next), but at very busy times you may have a lot of requests coming your way!
Callbacks are ideal for posting events into CRM systems. For example when someone clicks on a link, it could put them into a follow-up contact queue for sales staff in your CRM; when a mailshot completes, your code could send you an email to say so.
Read our docs to get sync’d up!
Google Analytics
End-to-end ROI analysis
Google Analytics is a quick and easy way to link your email marketing to your web site. While we track all that we can (opens and clicks), we have no way of knowing how that helps your bottom line. How would you like to be able to see how many people from your mailshots actually bought something from your web site? That’s exactly the kind of thing that Google Analytics can tell you. It is quick and easy to set up and lets you get to know your customers better. Most of the setup for Google Analytics happens on your own site rather than ours, but we’ve documented what needs doing.
Automatable forms
Quick and easy subscribe and unsubscribe
Our standard subscribe and unsubscribe pages can act also as form processors for your own forms, just like the one on the home page of this site.
This means you can build your own signup forms (e.g. on your web site) and have us handle the request and then hand back control to your site. Our involvement can be made completely invisible to your users.
Want to know more? Get reading!