The company blog

Introducing……The NEW Esendex API

We’ve just added a new way for our customers and their development teams to interact with the wide range of messaging services provided by Esendex.

The NEW Esendex API offers a powerful, yet simple, interface to send and receive messages; manage contacts and contact groups; and your accounts. We’ve built it on simple and established standards following ‘REST’ (REpresentational State Transfer) principles based on HTTP and using XML. XML is widely implemented in programming languages and reduces the need for additional libraries which can be necessary, for instance, with SOAP services.

You will be familiar with the ‘REST’ style as it is the basis of the way the Internet works in general. A client makes a request on a resource to perform an operation and gets a response. For example, you are viewing this web page because your web browser formed an HTTP GET request for this page (resource) and the server returned you a HTML representation of the web page.

Instead of Services with a list of commands, the Esendex API provides a set of resources that you can interact with. These resources are identified by different URIs (Uniform Resource Identifiers). Resources represent the different types of data for Esendex. e.g. message headers, contacts, contact groups etc.

To perform an operation on these resources, you simply create an authenticated HTTP Request with an appropriate HTTP Method. The HTTP Method verbs of GET, POST, PUT and DELETE open up opportunities to retrieve, create, update and remove resources respectively.

One of the key advantages of the Esendex API is that you can start exploring the data you can get from it straight away using only your web browser. For example, if you navigate to http://api.esendex.com/v1.0/inbox/messages (and provide your Esendex username and password when prompted by your browser), you will get a paged XML response of your inbox messages.

There’s comprehensive documentation for the Esendex API on our website which will explain all of the resources you can interact with in detail.

Our confidence in the reliability and flexibility in our new API is such that our Web to SMS application front-end, “Echo”, is based entirely upon the Esendex API.

Mobile marketing – the future platform

The big theme at this year’s Mobile World Congress staged in Barcelona, was mobile advertising; a fact proven by the number of firms who were promoting apps and mobile marketing. A recent BBC article shows how marketers are racing to embrace this latest channel, as big brands like Procter and Gamble and Unilever allocate substantial budgets to mobile campaigns.

According to Kerstin Trikalitis, the CEO of Out There Media, they have witnessed triple-digit growth rates in the previous 18 months and it appears to be a trend that is continuing this year.  ”When an ad is targeted and it is valuable then consumers do like it. We are getting response rates of 20, 25%, which shows it’s working.”

Yet marketers still need to trend carefully. As with any marketing activity, the challenge for every marketer is always to ensure that their communications are relevant and targeted correctly. And with mobile marketing, this is particularly essential – since we carry our phones with us at all time, so SMS messages are entering our personal space.

Fortunately with our Echo application, targeting individual segments of customers with the precise contents is simple to do. You can even send a totally personalized message to every recipient in a campaign. This ensures that every SMS message seems more like efficient customer service than an advertisement.

SMS is still the most popular use for a Smartphone in the US