A Marketer's Guide to APIs

Author:

Derek Harding

Source:

In recent months, I've had many conversations with marketers around the subject of triggered messaging. Inevitably these discussions get into the technical details and we start talking about APIs and such. Most email service providers (ESPs) offer an API (define). However, what that API can do and how it does it can vary enormously. The devil in such situations is in the details. Unfortunately, it seems marketers have often been left out (or perhaps tuned out) of the conversations about what APIs are, how they work, and why they're important.
 
So, here's my guide to the key things marketers should understand about APIs:
 
API stands for application programming interface.
 
This is perhaps the biggest area of confusion. APIs have been around for a long time and are simply standardized protocols (interfaces) that allow one computer program to directly communicate with another.
 
In the context of triggered messaging and ESPs, we're usually talking about Internet-enabled APIs and you'll hear mention of terms such as SOAP (simple object access protocol), REST (representational state transfer), and XMLRPC (extensible markup language remote procedure call). There's no need to be too concerned by those. They're just the mechanisms by which your systems can connect to those of the ESP. What really matters is what you can do once you're connected....