APIs Explained: the What, the How, the Why

APIs, or Application Programming Interfaces, allow you to connect two applications for the purpose of communicating or transferring data. APIs maintain the structure and security of both applications while allowing information to pass between applications.

In the context of direct mail, APIs are particularly handy for automating your direct mail workflow and/or adding direct mail functionality to an existing website or program. Click2Mail’s APIs can reduce your cost of operations and save you the time of having to print, fold, stamp, and mail any size mailing order.

There are two different types of APIs:

1. Batch API

Batching API calls increases efficiency to only need to open a single connection, do the entire series of job calls, and receive the results back together. This is particularly helpful for large sets of jobs which may increase processing time. The Batch API is used when the application will be sending a fully formed document for mailing and an address. There is a Batch API guide in our developer documentation.

2. REST API 

The REST (Representation State Transfer) API is a protocol that transmits resources between client and server in order to produce a representation of the resource. It allows you to access and integrate information within a server or database. Perfect for web-based applications, mobile applications, and highly interactive social applications. The REST API also allows creation of a document and job template on the Click2Mail side. The document and template enable mail merge. Refer to the REST Quick Start Guide and continue exploring our developer documentation to learn more.

A Click2Mail API in action

Bret owns a mid-sized marketing firm. One of his most effective lead generation tools is to offer a whitepaper for free download on his website. Visitors enter their names, physical addresses, email addresses, and phone numbers, and in exchange they receive the whitepaper in the mail.

It’s a great marketing tool for Bret, but the process of inputting visitors’ personal information into his database, creating mailing lists and labels, printing, folding, stamping, and mailing the whitepapers was incredibly time-consuming. Eventually Bret hired an assistant to do that work; she spent 35 hours a week doing nothing but printing, folding, stamping, and mailing. It was costing Bret’s company a great deal of money and detracting from other activities.

So Bret had our developers help him develop a REST API that would enable him to automate his mailings. With the API, when visitors enter their information into Bret’s website, it automatically populates Bret’s database – and through the API, our database as well. It also generates an order within the Click2Mail system, so we print the whitepaper, address it, and mail it. Bret gets the same lead generating benefits as he was, and now his (and his assistant’s) time is freed to focus on higher-priority activities.

Is an API right for you?

An API might be right for you if you have an online database that collects personal contact information in order to create a mailer. If you’re not quite sure where to start, we are here to help. We will:

• Help you determine which API would work best for your project
• Assign a Click2Mail developer that work with you through the entire process
• Provide a free API account to get you started, and sample code that is available in many different development environments
• Plus, we’ll help you debug code while you are testing with us

If you don’t have an online database from which you send mail or a developer to help you create the integration, then one of our other mail automation apps might be a better fit: