When your business grows to a substantial size, it can become almost impossible to market your products effectively through email marketing by yourself. Sure, it might have worked for you to write all the emails manually or send the same one to all your customers like a newsletter, but does that really work for you when you have thousands of customers with varying needs? It’s inefficient at best and a total disaster to try to do this.

Email service providers like Gmail often give businesses the option to automate their whole email marketing platforms, making it easier for businesses to communicate with their customers through email. With the help of email API integration, business owners can now send emails,view analytics and much more.

What is Email API Integration?

API stands for application programming interface. Email API integration is a process where you pull your email functionality onto a new platform by allowing it to communicate with another online platform without human interference. By this process, you can now access functions that were previously unavailable like email analytics, automatically sending emails, providing editable drafts, flagging content marked as spam, checking emails for authenticity, (through email validation API) and the ability to manage all this through a single, faster platform.

This way, you now have an email service that’s designed to communicate with thousands of people at a time, unlike traditional email.

Emails like those for password changes, email notifications, and huge marketing campaigns are all sent through an integrated email API. More advanced models can even create tailored emails with the help of drafts that are already provided to it and by understanding the context behind each email being sent and received.

Types of Email API Integration

There are two main types of email API integration, both based on what the integrated API is capable of doing.

● Transactional

● Contextual

Transactional API is responsible for sending basic emails as needed, which includes email notifications, emails for password change, and marketing emails. This mechanism is fairly simple and common.

Contextual API helps a business more or less fully automate their email functionality. With this type of API Integration, you can access email analytics, automatically send emails tailored to a recipient’s needs, sync data across various platforms and more. This kind of API integration takes longer to pull off, and needs to be maintained more rigorously, but in the end is more functional and efficient than transactional API integration.

How to Integrate API Into Email?

When you decide that API Integration is the right thing for your business, you must now embark on a long journey to make it happen. Here are the steps you can take to do so.

1. Know Your Businesses Needs: Before you start the actual process, consider what API integration would mean for your business, and even what you want out of it. Keep in mind that not only will this change how you operate, send, and receive emails, but it’ll also change the way your customers interact with the emails they receive from you.
2. Gather Resources: After you’re done figuring out what you need, you can start thinking about the resources. Organizations can choose between hiring a dedicated team to create special softwares for them or using integration platforms already available in the market. If your needs are specialized, you should go with the first option, but it’s fallen in popularity because of the ease and economy market ready options have to offer.
3. The Trial and Error Phase: After the IT team has done its job, it’s now time for your marketing team to get on board and try the new systems out. This is the phase that may seem most frustrating to many, and you may experience quite a few setbacks. Just Remember that your marketing team is trying to be good at something that’s probably very new to them, and keep your eyes on the big picture.
4. Maintaining the System: Email API integration isn’t just a one time undertaking. Once the systems are put into place, they need to be maintained and updated constantly. You need to keep updating existing drafts, improving the trigger words you give to your APIso that it can understand the context behind certain emails better, and even updating the programming and security protocols.

Pros and Cons of Email API Integration

At first glance it seems like API integration is for everyone, but of course, it’s not. It could just be a useless investment for a small business with only a few emails to send each day, while the same system can be a godsend for a big corporation with thousands of customers all over the world. Today we’ll talk about the pros and cons of email API integration.

Pros

Email API integration comes with its own benefits like:

● Business Growth
● Automation

●  No More Errors in Email

● Easier Communication

Business Growth

Email API integration can allow your business to grow by making email marketing campaigns and customer collaboration easier, more streamlined, and more efficient. With its help, you can tailor emails to the needs of different client groups, maximizing results and providing your customers with greater value.

Automation

Your employees will save a lot of time they would have otherwise spent on writing, sending, and reading emails. Now that the whole process is automated, they can spend their time doing other, more productive things.

No More Errors in Emails

Emails sent by a machine will most likely have less errors than ones sent by human beings.Email API integration also ensures the timely delivery of emails into customers’ inboxes, giving almost a few seconds of delay between a query being sent by a customer and them getting the answer.

Easier Communication

The automation of your email marketing process makes it easier for your marketing team to design and carry out marketing and customer outreach campaigns. Your business now has more potential and scope to provide value to your customers, thereby improving your customer retention.

Cons

Email API integration isn’t for everyone, and this is why it might not be for you:

●  Expensive and Time Consuming

●  Needs Continuous Maintenance

Expensive and Time Consuming

The whole process of email API integration may take up to one year to effectively implement and get running. A process this long also requires money to match, which is what keeps many medium sized businesses from opting for this process. The good news is that there are nowmany cheap options available in the market, ready to be used.

Needs Continuous Maintenance

Once the whole system is set up, you need to constantly update and maintain it to ensure security and optimal performance. You may or may not have to hire a few new employees,which adds to the expense.

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