Provides developers with solutions to common API tasks
The system has a fully featured API meaning anything you do in the applications interface can be achieved programatically.
Uploading data lists
Please see Uploading data lists.
Triggering emails instantly
To send real-time emails, there are two main options. When the content stays largely the same, use Triggered emails to pre-define the email in Maxemail, and use the API to only send the recipient email address and relevant profile data. This has the added benefit of allowing the marketing user to control the content using the usual Maxemail interface.
Alternatively, if the content is controlled externally, Transactional Emails can be used to send the full, completed email content to Maxemail using SMTP or API.
Scheduling a daily email
There are 2 key scenarios:
Send the same content each day to a different list of recipients
Create the email as a Recurring Email in Maxemail, but disable the frequency setting so the API can be used to update the list each day, and only then set the Recurring Email's next run time to the desired value, so the system will automatically deal with the rest.
This dramatically reduces the number of calls you need to make, while still allowing users to control the email via the user interface, even disabling it by removing the email from approved status.
See Recurring campaigns for more details.
Create an email with different content every day, to the same or different people
Due to the high variability, it's best to use the API to create and send a standard email campaign on demand. You would need to specify all the details of this email (email headers, HTML content, lists to assign, segments, etc.) and then schedule it.
Common pitfall
With both of these scenarios a common mistake is to not ensure all processes are complete before sending the email. For example, the list is still importing when you schedule the email; or you have not created all of the content.
A quick solution is to schedule the email for a period of time when this will definitely be ready, or a more robust solution is to poll the list status and only send when the import is complete.
Creating content to merge into an email
Maxemail enables you to create content that can be pulled into an email, rather than having to populate each recipients profile data with the content details to merge. This can help reduce the amount of data transfer involved.
For example, you might want to merge in the product details of their latest purchase. In the customer record you can include a product ID, and you can create a content snippet containing the block of HTML and text for that product. If you need to merge more than one product ID you can store multiple product IDs in a single profile field as a concatanated string (Eg. 12,45,68). Maxemail has the capability to merge in a specific product snippet based upon its position in the string.
Most developers will be comfortable with over-writing the content snippet each time the content changes. However there will be the need on occassions to keep content snippets as they were. In this instance we recommend creating content snippets in date folders, and within the email we can refer to the snippet by using a dynamic date tag.
Another common mistake made by developers is sending emails to recipients even if there is no content for them that match their profile, resulting in blank sections of the email. For example, a project for a daily news service allowed customers to subscribe to several different topics - if there was no news for that topic nothing would be merged in. If the recipient was only subscribed to topics with no content, they would receive a blank email! The list must be filtered so the only people to be sent an email are those who are subscribed to sections with new content. This could be achieved by only populating the list with these people, or by creating a segment to filter the list.
Downloading reporting data
Typically this can be categorised into 2 types of requests:
- List cleansing information - bounces and unsubscribes
- Who was sent/opened/clicked on what
Any information tracked by Maxemail can be extracted, but typically these are the key examples.
For more information, see Download reporting data.
Further Information & Support
Full details of the available API functions are available within the User Manual. To arrange support and guidance through your Integration & Automation project contact your Account Manager to facilitate this.