For the past few months we’ve been gathering feedback from developers through email, Twitter and our forums on what you guys might like to see in the Campaign Monitor API. For those not familiar with it, our API makes it easy for you to interact with your Campaign Monitor account from your own web sites and applications. It’s the plumbing behind our growing list of plugins for tools like WordPress, Drupal and Magento.
While the available methods were great for managing subscribers, accessing reports and even sending campaigns, there was still lots of functionality available in the application that you couldn’t manage via the API. Today we’re much closer to closing that gap with a host of new methods and updates to our most popular wrappers.
New Methods
The new methods focus on giving our resellers access to client management from their own tools and applications. Now you can add new clients to your account, change the prices you charge someone and create new subscriber lists all without logging in. And that’s just the start. Here’s an overview of the new methods available.
Client Management
It’s now possible to create, edit and delete new clients. You can tweak their billing settings and even their permission levels. Here are the new methods at the client level. For those of you rebranding Campaign monitor and selling it to your customers, you can now automatically let clients signup to your account, create free trials and set your own prices. Reselling has never been easier to automate.
* Client.Create
* Client.Delete
* Client.GetCampaigns
* Client.GetDetail
* Client.GetLists
* Client.GetSegments
* Client.GetSuppressionList
* Client.UpdateAccessAndBilling
* Client.UpdateBasics
List Management
This has been a hugely requested feature. You can now create update and delete single and confirmed opt-in subscriber lists for each of your clients. You can even manage custom fields and set your own confirmation page on your server. Here are the new list management methods available.
* List.Create
* List.CreateCustomField
* List.Delete
* List.DeleteCustomField
* List.GetCustomFields
* List.GetDetail
* List.Update
Sending test campaigns is now possible
Last year we added the ability to send campaigns through Campaign Monitor from your own systems. You handle the creative, we’ll take care of deliverability and reporting, all without needing to log into your account. In this update we made a small but very useful improvement to the Campaign.Send method. You can now send a limited number of test campaigns via this method free of charge.
Previously, there was no way to send a campaign without actually paying for it via a saved credit card. This obviously made it tricky (and kinda pricey) to test this method when working with it. We were initially giving API developers free credits for this, but now each account comes with the ability to send a limited number of campaigns to less than 5 recipients free of charge.
New API Wrappers for .NET and PHP
To make it as easy as possible for you guys to work with the new methods, we’ve also updated the .NET and PHP wrappers to cover all of these new methods. This means there should be minimal code for you to write if you work in these environments.
You can access both wrappers and other API kits for Flash and Ruby in our API documentation. We can’t wait to see what you guys come up with once you get your hands dirty with the new methods. As usual, feel free to post any feedback, ideas or thoughts on the API in the API developer community within our forums.
