Cloud-based email API technology has advanced a long way in the past decade, diversifying substantially in both breadth of functionality and depth of integration. The emergence of email APIs lets you quickly and easily connect your users’ inboxes, powering engaging email functionality that can take advantage of the contextual information that lives in your app.
In the previous article, intro to email APIs, we introduced the concepts of an email API and some real-world examples of their usage. In this article, we will dive deeper into the types of Email APIs available for developers and explore further what it means to be a contextual Email API. Let’s dive in!
Transactional emails are emails triggered by standard user interactions within an application, such as creating a new account or placing an order on an e-commerce site. Generally speaking, a transaction is an event that involves an exchange between your web/mobile app and the user.
Examples of events that trigger transactional emails include:
Transactional emails are typically triggered programmatically via a web API or SMTP relay because they frequently happen as an immediate consequence of predefined user actions. Companies that specialize in transactional emails include SendGrid, MailChimp, and MailGun.
Marketing emails operate just like transactional emails, except that marketing emails are timed and sent strategically to a specific list of recipients instead of being triggered by individual user actions. The content will correspond to marketing campaigns, product promotions, newsletters, or other general communications for customers that don’t apply to a particular transaction.
Examples of marketing emails include:
Marketing and transactional emails operate at the same level of depth and differ only in the timing and content of the messages. Most Transactional Email API providers cover marketing email automation use cases just as well as transactional use cases. They’re well suited for either 1-to-1 or 1-to-many email blasts with tokenized customized messaging.
In contrast to transactional and marketing Email APIs, contextual email APIs are designed for developers building software applications that require email sync, send, and analytics embedded directly into the application for their end user’s benefit. Contextual email sees much higher email deliverability rates than you would see with mass email senders like SendGrid and Mailchimp (see more on how to improve email deliverability). A contextual API is named such because it lives within the context of a larger application, with direct access to the state of the system and all connected accounts.
Outlook.com, Microsoft Exchange, Office 365, Gmail, and IMAP email providers each have different methods for syncing and sending emails. If you have a user base spread across different email providers and you want to have a unified email experience for your application, you have two choices: build out the necessary integrations to each provider yourself, or integrate with a contextual email API provider to abstract away the complexities of building and maintaining each integration. A contextual email API allows you to power your web/mobile app with email sync and send across 100% of email providers using just one API rather than several different ones.
Contextual APIs are commonly chosen for applications that need a complete communication and scheduling solution embedded within the app for their users. The creators of these apps want to help their users understand each contact, opportunity, or deal at a glance without worrying too much about the underlying communications architecture.
Common applications include:
Essentially, any product or service that centers around relationship management with clients or customers would want to leverage a Contextual Email API Platform.
If sales representatives, recruiters, finance, and real estate agents don’t have to switch to another app to communicate, they can be much more productive and close deals faster.
In many cases, you’ll want to have deeper personalization in your communication with key clients, so contextual APIs are designed with this level of customization in mind. They’re suited to both 1-to-1 and 1-to-many email blasts where personalization is essential to close high-value deals.
Developer-led API companies like Stripe (a payments API for online businesses) and Twilio (APIs for SMS and Video) know first-hand the pain of integrating with multiple, individual APIs and are intentional about making the experience as easy as possible for developers.
The implementation ideology of a contextual email API is to help you connect to multiple systems with one integration. That is, to simplify your email integrations into one REST API, freeing up your time to build other important features.
With direct access to users’ inboxes via a universal email API, creating products that integrate with and embed email functionality becomes richer and easier.
Contextual email APIs don’t just save you the initial cost of building the integration. They also help:
At Nylas, we’ve built a contextual email API with all these features and more. Our API allows you to quickly integrate with every email service provider 12x faster than building on your own, and our API success metrics speak for themselves:
Get a free API key and test out Nylas’ Email API by creating an account here.
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