In this article, we will learn what an email marketing API is, how to use them, and some benefits. We’ll share our top recommendations and give examples of to email marketing apis.
Email remains one of the most effective and direct forms of communication for businesses to interact with customers. Using an email marketing REST API is critical when sending emails to your customers.
There are plenty of email marketing service providers like Sendinblue, SendGrid, Mailgun, etc., through which you can send bulk emails to large groups of contacts without worrying about email deliverability issues.
Email Marketing API: What is it + 2023 Tutorial & Examples
In this article, we will cover the following topics of email marketing apis
- Popular Examples of Email Marketing APIs
- What is an Email Marketing API?
- What can an Email API do?
- The Key Benefits of Email APIs
- Why should you use API in Email Marketing?
- What kind of Requests can I send via the API?
- Is an Email API Better than SMTP for Sending Bulk Emails?
Popular Email Marketing API Providers
| Provider | Popularity (1-5) | Authentication | Target Audience | SDKs/Libraries | USP |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ActiveCampaign | 4 | API Key | SMBs to Enterprises | PHP, Ruby, Node.js, Python, .NET | Automation Capabilities |
| SendGrid | 4 | API Key | Startups to Enterprises | Python, PHP, Ruby, Node.js, Java, C#, Go | Scalability |
| Mailjet | 3 | API Key | SMBs to Enterprises | Python, PHP, Ruby, Node.js, C#, Java, Go | Collaboration Features |
| Mailchimp | 5 | OAuth, API Key | SMBs to Enterprises | PHP, Node.js, Python | Comprehensive Features |
| SendInBlue | 3 | API Key | SMBs to Enterprises | PHP, Python, Node.js, Ruby, C#, Java, Go | SMS Marketing |
| SparkPost | 3 | API Key | Startups to Enterprises | Python, PHP, Node.js, Java | Deliverability |
| Constant Contact | 3 | OAuth, API Key | SMBs to Enterprises | Java, .NET, PHP | Event Management |
| AWeber | 3 | OAuth, API Key | SMBs | PHP, Python, Ruby | Customer Support |
| GetResponse | 3 | API Key | SMBs to Enterprises | Java, .NET, PHP, Python, Ruby, Node.js | Landing Pages |
Notes
- Popularity is subjective. These popularity scores of email marketing software providers are an approximate scale based on user reviews and market presence that we have been able to gather at this point. This can change in the future.
- The target audience is difficult to determine. Remember, each email marketing platform might cater to a wide range of businesses. Their tools and features could potentially be used by anyone from a single individual to a large corporation, depending on specific needs and circumstances. For the most accurate and up-to-date information, I recommend consulting each provider’s website and available documentation.
ActiveCampaign
Choose the ActiveCampaign marketing platform if you want complete control over your segmentation and personalization. This email marketing software is a powerful tool with an excellent REST API. You can manage your entire contact list, segmentation and even send emails through the API.
We recommend ActiveCampaign and use it.
Quick Highlights
- Email Automation: ActiveCampaign stands out with its robust automation capabilities, allowing you to create complex, multi-step workflows to manage customer interactions.
- Deliverability Rates: While exact rates can vary, ActiveCampaign has generally been reported to have high email deliverability rates.
- Integrations: ActiveCampaign offers over 280+ integrations with popular platforms such as WordPress, Shopify, and Zapier, allowing for seamless workflows between different tools.
- Customer Relationship Management (CRM): ActiveCampaign provides a built-in CRM system, enabling businesses to manage customer relationships more effectively.
- Machine Learning: ActiveCampaign offers machine learning features, like predictive sending and win probability, which can help improve email campaign performance.
- Tracking and Reporting: With site and event tracking capabilities, ActiveCampaign allows you to gather data on customer behavior for more personalized marketing efforts.
- Security: ActiveCampaign is compliant with key international data privacy and security standards like GDPR and employs multiple security measures, including two-factor authentication and account activity logs.
- Support: ActiveCampaign provides a range of support options including a self-service Help Center, one-on-one training, and 24/7 customer support.
Sample Requests in ActiveCampaign Rest API
- Contacts: You can create, read, update, and delete contacts, and manage list membership and tags for contacts.
- Marketing Campaigns: You can create, read, update, and delete campaigns. You can also manage messages associated with campaigns.
- Lists: You can create, read, update, and delete lists, which are groups of contacts.
- Automation: You can read and manage automation, which are sequences of actions that occur based on your chosen triggers and conditions.
- Deals (CRM): You can create, read, update, and delete deals, which are opportunities in your sales pipeline.
- Forms: You can manage forms, which are used to collect contact information.
- Messages: You can create, read, update, and delete messages, which are the emails sent out to contacts.
- Tags: You can manage tags, which are used to segment contacts based on criteria you define.
- Webhooks: You can manage webhooks, which allow your application to receive real-time updates from ActiveCampaign based on event triggers you specify.
- E-commerce: You can manage customer orders and order history, if you’re using ActiveCampaign’s e-commerce features.
Our ActiveCampaign Article Series
This is one of many articles in our series on the ActiveCampaign email marketing software. Feel free to check out the entire series below to dig deeper into ActiveCampaign.
- What is the ActiveCampaign Email Marketing Service
- Using Lists in ActiveCampaign
- ActiveCampaign Tags vs Lists
- ActiveCampaign Custom Fields vs Tags
- Integrate ActiveCampaign with Laravel
- 3 Ways to Bulk Import ActiveCampaign Contacts
- Get Contacts by Email API Example
Get Started at ActiveCampaign
- Personalization in ActiveCampaign
- Using ActiveCampaign in SaaS Products
- ActiveCampaign Email Deliverability
- ActiveCampaign Pricing
SendGrid Email API.
Large companies like Uber, Spotify, and eBay use this email marketing API platform. Its most significant advantages are the high delivery rate and analytics dashboards. This is really helpful when you want to integrate email marketing data.
The free plan includes 100 emails per day.
Highlights
- Email Volume: SendGrid is capable of handling high volumes of email, reportedly sending over 70 billion emails every month.
- Deliverability Rates: SendGrid has consistently strong deliverability rates and provides extensive documentation on best practices for deliverability.
- Scalability: SendGrid is well-regarded for its scalability, being able to efficiently handle both small and large email volumes.
- API Requests: SendGrid’s API is capable of processing large numbers of requests, with high rate limits that allow for robust usage.
- Integrations: SendGrid offers integrations with a wide range of services, including popular web development frameworks and platforms.
- Support: SendGrid offers dedicated support, with a comprehensive knowledge base and technical support available.
Sample Requests in SendGrid Email Marketing Rest API
- Mail Send: You can send mail through the SendGrid v3 API.
- Templates: You can manage your email templates.
- Tracking Settings: Control various tracking settings for your emails.
- User Settings: Manage settings for your SendGrid account and users.
- Email Validation: Validate email addresses to improve deliverability.
- Stats: Retrieve global email statistics, category statistics, and more.
- Suppression Management: Manage unsubscribes, spam reports, and bounces.
- Inbound Parse: Set up and manage the parsing of incoming emails.
- Marketing Campaigns: You can manage your SendGrid marketing campaigns.
- Contacts Database: Manage your contacts and lists for use in marketing campaigns.
Digging Deeper into SendGrid Email API.
Want to learn more about SendGrid? This is one of several articles where we’ve explored this email service in detail. Check out the following articles to go deeper and learn more about what is SendGrid and how to use it.
- Deep Dive into SendGrid Email Service
- Send Email Using Sendgrid with PHP Examples
- How to Setup & Use Sendgrid IP Pools: 2 Min Tutorial w/ Examples
- 11 Top SendGrid Transactional Emails Questions Answered
- SendGrid vs AWS SES
SparkPost.
The SparkPost email marketing software stands out for its technical aspects and claims of the best delivery rates in the industry. It’s REST API includes many of the common functions to trigger emails, capture website visitors and more. It will help you save time when you start sending large amounts of marketing emails.
The SparkPost email marketing software also includes real-time metrics and performance alerts. The developer experience is also great. The trial plan consists of 500 emails per month, and the paid ones cost $20 for 30,000 emails and $205 for 300,000.
Highlights
- Deliverability: SparkPost focuses heavily on email deliverability and provides a suite of tools and services to optimize inbox placement. They claim to have the highest email deliverability in the industry.
- Email Volume: SparkPost has the infrastructure to support high-volume senders and boasts of sending 37% of all B2C and B2B email.
- Enterprise Focus: While it has solutions for businesses of all sizes, SparkPost has a strong focus on larger enterprises and high-volume sending.
- Data-Driven: SparkPost provides comprehensive real-time analytics and data on email performance, which can help in making informed decisions.
- Integrations: SparkPost offers a range of integrations, including with popular services like AWS, Heroku, and more.
- Support: SparkPost offers a range of support services, including a help center, community support, and premium dedicated technical support.
Sample Email Marketing Requests
The SparkPost API provides several endpoints to interact with the different aspects of their service:
- Transmission: Send email with various options, including email content, recipients, and tracking options.
- Templates: Create, update, and delete email templates.
- Recipient Lists: Create and manage lists of recipients for your emails.
- Suppression List: Manage your suppression list, which includes recipients who have unsubscribed or bounced.
- Webhooks: Set up and manage webhooks to receive updates on events like bounces, clicks, and opens.
- Metrics: Retrieve detailed metrics about your email sending.
- Message Events: Search message events to gather detailed information about individual messages.
- Inbound Domains and Relay Webhooks: Set up and manage domains for receiving inbound email and configuring relay webhooks.
Brevo (formely Sendinblue.)
Sendinblue, now Brevo, email software is an excellent choice as an email marketing API. Their REST API is fast, simple, and accessible to everyone. You can send millions of marketing emails in no time using Sendinblue’s robust Email API. Their email marketing API can accept up to 120k emails per minute, and 99% of emails are processed in less than 2 seconds.
The free plan contains 300 emails a day, and the paid ones cost $20 for 20,000 emails a day and $1000 for the business plus plan.
- SendInBlue: Using the Email Marketing & API Service (examples)
- Using ActiveCampaign vs SendinBlue for SAAS Email Marketing
Highlights
- Multi-Channel Marketing: SendInBlue offers a range of services beyond just email, including SMS marketing and chat.
- Ease of Use: SendInBlue is often praised for its user-friendly interface, making it a good choice for those new to email marketing.
- Automations: SendInBlue offers a powerful and flexible automation platform, allowing users to automate emails and SMS messages.
- CRM Features: SendInBlue includes a built-in CRM, helping businesses manage and grow their customer base.
- Transactional Emails: SendInBlue is well-regarded for its transactional email services.
- Pricing: SendInBlue’s pricing is competitive, especially for small businesses and startups, including a free tier and affordable rates for higher volumes.
- Support: SendInBlue provides customer support via email and chat, as well as a comprehensive knowledge base.
Types of Requests
Here are some types of requests you can make with SendInBlue’s API:
- Transactional Emails: Send individual transactional emails.
- SMTP Logs: Retrieve logs for individual emails sent.
- Contacts: Manage your contact lists, including adding, updating, and deleting contacts.
- Email Campaigns: Create and send email campaigns, manage your campaign lists.
- SMS Campaigns: Create and send SMS campaigns.
- Automations: Retrieve information about your automation workflows.
- Senders: Manage your sender information and identities.
- Webhooks: Set up and manage webhooks to receive updates about events such as email results (delivered, bounced, etc.).
- Templates: Manage your email templates.
MailJet.
Mailjet provides an easy-to-use email marketing platform for designing and sending email marketing campaigns, newsletters, and automated emails. In a few minutes, you can create beautiful responsive emails using Mailjet Email Marketing tool. You can start from scratch or select from various pre-designed templates in Mailjet email marketing API.
The free plan contains 6000 emails per month, and the premium plan costs $15 for 15,000 emails.
Highlights
- Email Volume: Mailjet is designed to handle large volumes of email, making it a suitable choice for businesses of all sizes.
- Collaboration Tools: Mailjet offers unique, real-time collaboration features on email design, allowing teams to create emails together.
- Deliverability: Mailjet provides tools and resources to optimize email deliverability, including a deliverability guide and proactive deliverability monitoring.
- Internationalization: Mailjet supports sending email in various languages, making it a good choice for international businesses.
- Support: Mailjet provides customer support via a ticketing system, as well as a comprehensive knowledge base.
REST API Request Types
Here are some types of requests you can make with Mailjet’s API:
- Send Email: Send transactional emails and marketing campaigns.
- Contact Management: Create, update, delete, and retrieve contacts and contact lists.
- Campaign Management: Manage your email campaigns.
- Template Management: Manage your email templates.
- Stats and Reports: Retrieve detailed email event data and statistics.
- Parse API: Set up and manage inbound email processing.
- Event API: Set up a webhook to receive updates about email events.
Mailchimp.
Mailchimp is a powerful marketing API service that provides you with intelligent email marketing automation. The REST API works with your favorite apps and web services and helps you do more with your email marketing. It can also find the tools you use or discover new ways for email marketing.
Mailchimp’s API client libraries and mobile SDKs make it so easy to work with Mailchimp Marketing and Transactional APIs with your language or platform of choice.
Highlights
- Industry Leader: Mailchimp is one of the most popular email marketing services in the world.
- All-In-One Platform: Mailchimp offers a comprehensive suite of marketing tools beyond email, including landing pages, social media ads, and more.
- Integration: Mailchimp offers a wide range of integrations with popular services and platforms.
- Analytics and Reporting: Mailchimp offers robust analytics and reporting tools to track campaign performance.
- Support: Mailchimp provides extensive online resources and tutorials, as well as email and chat support.
Types of REST API Requests
Here are some types of requests you can make with Mailchimp’s API:
- Audience Management: Manage your audience lists, members, segments, and tags.
- Campaigns: Manage your email campaigns.
- Automation: Control your automated email workflows.
- E-commerce: Manage e-commerce data including stores, customers, orders, and products.
- Reports: Retrieve detailed reports on campaign performance.
- Templates: Manage your email templates.
- Transactional Emails: Send transactional emails with the Mailchimp Transactional Email add-on (formerly Mandrill).
What is an Email Marketing API?
An email API (application programming interface) allows email service providers to access email services such as generating and sending transactional emails, managing email templates and lists, analyzing email marketing metrics, setting up domain authentication, and more. These are usually provided through a Rest API.
An email marketing API is a programmatic interface used by users to access the features of an email marketing platform using code rather than a GUI. Email marketing API is important for integrating email functionality into other software applications or websites.
What can an Email Marketing API do?
Many developers love working with email marketing APIs because they integrate well within the common software. You can create & manage contacts, lists, campaigns, and more. You can also use it to send out emails as well . Using an API can help in email marketing automation processes so that you can focus more on your core business.
Sample actions you should expect from a marketing API
- Send HTML-templated emails
- Create and manage contacts
- Create and manage lists
- Create time-sensitive email marketing campaigns
- Get lists of contacts and active email marketing campaigns
Using an Email API, you can create and send templates customized to an individual user based on their name, purchase, or other actions.
Here are the benefits you can get when using an Email Marketing API.
- Get email analytics to track metrics and assess your email campaigns.
- Create webhooks that send email event data to a CRM.
- Operate at scale.
The Key Benefits of Any Email APIs
Using email APIs can save a lot of time for development teams by just providing one simple API to integrate with every provider. They offer a range of values for teams of any size:
The following are some key benefits of using any Email marketing API.
- Ease-of-use
- Fast implementation
- Enable two-way communication
- Cost Savings at scale
- Service Reliability
- High Deliverability
- Email list management (e.g. unsubscribe requests)
- Reports and Analytics Dashboards
- Deep personalization (contextual APIs)
- Customer engagement
- Email automation
- Embeddable email functionality for applications (contextual APIs)
- Enterprise-grade security
Automated email streamlines your email marketing efforts and saves you time. Besides time savings and reliability improvements, email APIs can also help build faster user-facing product enhancements, such as analytics, near-perfect email deliverability, and personalization.
Analytics
Analytics is essential for any meaningful assessment of your email campaigns. The email API providers allow you to track important metrics such as the number of successful messages delivered, how many messages were rejected by an ISP, why the messages were not being delivered, how many recipients opened the message, or how many call-to-action links were clicked.
Deliverability
The deliverability, or the success with which your email messages reach their intended recipients at the intended time, depends on dozens of technical factors and contingencies. The web email API providers ensure maximum deliverability and can run their mail servers with expert supervision 24 hours a day and 7 days a week.
They are responsible for mitigating any interruptions caused by Internet outages, natural disasters, distributed denial of service attacks, and various other network problems that could impact the delivery of your messages. Their service guarantees that you won’t lose any business because your servers were unable to respond or improperly configured.
Why should you use an API in Email Marketing
You should use an API in your email marketing platform because it will help you automate and streamline your processes. In addition, it enables you to integrate within your entire platform for a seamless and optimized user experience. You will see an increase in profits while getting better customer feedback.
Also, using an API in email marketing can help you send bulk emails to your customers without any delay.
What kind of Requests can I send via the Marketing API
Use the email marketing API platform to send emails, create contact lists, segment users and establish campaigns. Many organizations find using the API faster and more efficient than using the web application. It also makes your experience more customizable and fully integrated.
Sample Requests that can be done in an Email Marketing API
- Capture website visitors
- Add users to email marketing campaigns
- Send emails directly
- Segment users into tags and lists
- Add more customization to your lists
- Create more dynamic emails to send in campaigns
- Trigger emails
An API request is initiated when a user adds an endpoint to a URL and sends a request to the web server.
For example, a web server receives a request from an application software (such as a mobile app), which the server evaluates and returns to the client.
The API endpoints are the communication points between an API and any other system. The place from which an API can access the resources it needs is known as an endpoint.
When using an API, you can manage and update by issuing the following requests:
- POST creates a new resource
- GET requests a resource
- PUT replaces a resource
- DELETE deletes a resource
These requests use standard Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) methods.
Sample of common email marketing API requests.
Is an Email API Better than SMTP for Sending Bulk Emails?
We recommend that you use an email API over an SMTP relay to send bulk emails because it is easier to integrate, generally cheaper, and less to manage. There are times when you may need to use an SMTP relay due to the project requirements and many email services do provide that option when needed but you should select the API whenever possible.
The SMTP relay is commonly used and is based on the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol. The web APIs, however, are better than the SMTP relay method in many use cases and have also increased in popularity.
Email APIs help you in email deliverability by making messaging easier for both senders and recipients. An email API service ensures that a message is sent to a predetermined audience.
If you are tech-savvy, then using APIs is a more attractive option, allowing you to customize and modify settings to suit your needs.
In general, the option to use SMTP or API entirely depends on your needs and the capacity of your application, platform, eCommerce, or website. Despite the earlier advent of SMTP and the more modern universality of the API service architecture, both protocols have their adherents.
SMTP relay is reliable and sustainable, but it does not guarantee high-speed delivery. On the other hand, Web API provides expanded functionality, but it’s more complex to use. Weigh all the pros and cons so your final decision will be correct. Good luck!
This PHP article explains what API is in email marketing. It also explains what an email marketing API can do, the key benefits of using an API, and why you should use it for sending marketing emails.
The article also explores the most popular email marketing platforms used for email automation. And it also explains which email transfer is better for sending bulk emails.
