Separate Your Way To Success

This post only applies to Legacy Version 3 of the API

Would you tow a trailer with a sports car? Would you tighten a bolt with a hammer? Would you eat soup with a knife?

Many of our clients, either by design or due to allocation of resources, have a separation of responsibilities in regards to their email marketing activities. This is especially true when an API integration is involved and the developers handling the integration may or may not also be involved on the marketing side.

The Bronto API is a powerful tool that allows you to control your entire work-flow, from contact management, to message creation, to message sending.  From a development standpoint, this is great in that you have all the power in your own hands. While this may suit your needs perfectly, you may also want to ask yourself what parts of your work-flow are best served by your custom integration, and what would make more sense to save for human intervention in the Bronto application.  Developers and marketers sometimes view things very differently, so let's look into a couple of places where you can make some choices to affect how you ultimately end up sending messages.

No Code Changes Required

So your developers have integrated your contact database with Bronto. Messages are being triggered off of various activities on your website. Marketing messages are being sent regularly to the various lists managed by your integration. Transactional messages are being sent with a fury from all the purchasing that is occurring on your site. Unfortunately, the messages look like an old paper plate that someone wrote on. If your developers don't also double as email marketers and graphic designers, then perhaps you want to pass control of that portion of the process. We talked about how message creation, data population, and sending can be separate activities in Give Them What They Want. Your designers can create a visually appealing emails and your developer's custom integration can continue to trigger the sending of messages and managing contacts.  You shouldn't have to make any code changes because you want to update the look of a message.

Sending through an API Triggered Automated Message Rule, as we talked about in Owning Automated Messages is another way to not only get great reporting for your triggered deliveries, but to allow more choice for your marketing team. You can turn an AMR on and off, schedule it to expire, control lists of ineligible and eligible contacts, override frequency caps, and control throttling, all without having to make a single code change. Often this type of control is tied into the code that was written by your developers, but Bronto also allows you to make these changes directly from our web application.

Allowing your developers and marketers to do what they do best is one way to get maximum performance from everyone and hopefully yield a successful marketing campaign. Don't eat soup with a knife.  It burns and you'll probably end up buying a new shirt.

Alex Durzy
Support Engineer at Bronto