Frequently Asked Questions

The Benchmark Email API is a powerful tool that allows you to integrate your database programs with our system. Users managing subscriptions or message content on their own system may use the API to transfer data from their internal system to their Benchmark Email account.

1. Easily push contact information from your website or software to your Benchmark Email contact list
2. Create and manage contact lists. Easily to export existing contacts to your system
3. Create campaigns with content from your site. Send test emails to your own accounts without having to actually login to Benchmark Email website
4. Get performance summaries for your previous email campaigns
5. Pull data for campaigns and store it on external systems

You can now easily manage your lists, emails and campaign reports using our API. You can connect into our API using XML-RPC.

1. Campaign Related Methods
2. Contact List Related Methods
3. Reports Related Methods
4. Security Related Methods

Contact List Related Methods
These functions allow you to create, subscribe, unsubscribe, update and export your contact details.

Campaign Related Methods
These functions allow you to create, copy and update your email campaigns. You can now even schedule and test emails in your account.

Reports Related Methods
These functions allow you to get all the statistics associated with your email campaigns. You can easily pull the data from the opens, bounces and forwarded emails.

Security Related Methods
These functions allow you to generate and manage your tokens. Use these security tokens to access the above methods without having to login to your Benchmark Email account.

View our API Library for more details.

For API related questions, see API help.

You must have an account with Benchmark Email to access the API's. The free trial account also have access to the API's.

We assume that you have technical skills to use the API's to integrate your application / website with our API's. If you don't have the technical expertise, you would need to hire a developer to use the API.

To view the documentation related to the API's please visit the following URL. API Library

To generate your token to use the API,

1. Login to your Benchmark Email account
2. Hover over the Avatar drop down and select Account Settings.
   
3. Click on generate your API key link which is at the bottom at the page

You can use the API to add a contact from your website to your Benchmark Email list.

We recommend you store the ID of the contact list in your code. You can fetch the contact list ID using the listGet method.

To save contacts from your website/database into your Benchmark Email list use the listAddContacts method.

To remove a contact from the list use the listDeleteEmailContact method.

You can now create contact lists, manage your contacts, send emails, view reports from your website/application by using the Benchmark Email APIs. You would have to have some programming experience to implement the API methods.

To know about the API visit the URL API Library

If you want to send a welcome email to your recently added subscribers to your site, you can do so using a combination of our API's and Autoresponders.

You would first need to create a Autoresponder for the contact list you are going to add the contacts to. You then need to create a "zero" day email which you want to send to your subscribers.

When you add the subscribers using the API method listAddContacts, the "zero" day email will be sent to the contacts.

You can also use personalization in the email, if you have given the extra field information when saving the contact using the API.

Some of the common reasons why the contacts are not added to the list would be:

• The contact has not clicked on the confirmation email. You can check this by clicking on the "Not Opted-in Yet" link in the contact listing
• The contact could be in your Master Unsubscribe List
• The contact could be already present in your list

You can contact us by using this form

Please be as descriptive as possible. We can assist you better if you provide us code examples that you are trying to implement.

We recommend these practices while using the API, which are:

• Make sure you are using valid tokens. Failure to do so might lead you to be locked out for 10 minutes
• Try to store authenticated tokens and reuse them, instead of using login() for each method call
• Please make use of the batch sizes when fetching bulk results. All our bulk fetching methods like emailGet, listGet, reportGet have the option to fetch specific pages of results. Trying to import very large amounts of data might lead to timeouts.
• Do not try to create email campaigns for an individual contact. This is something we do not encourage.

In case you are facing any technical issues, please feel free to contact us. If you can provide some sample code, it will help us resolve the issues more effectively.

You will receive this error if you have tried to log in with an invalid token/password at least five times within two minutes.

This requires a "cooling" time of 10 minutes, where any attempts to log in will be rejected. Before attempting to log in again, you will have to verify that your login/password is correct.