Blue Sky Factory is pleased to announce the availability of a new API that clients can leverage to provide a seamless experience for their users. The new API is called ‘Forward to a Friend’. As you can imagine, this expands upon Publicaster’s already popular Forward to Friend feature. Now you can create and host your own customized Forward to a Friend landing page and simply pass the data along to Publicaster for inclusion in a Publicaster defined email that gets sent to the Forward to a Friend targets.

What makes the API so special is that you have total control of the form you want the users to fill out and you have the ability to work with the data. The general flow of things using our API is this: (1)You create and host your forward to a friend form on your own site (users never leave the comfort of your environment). (2)When the form is submitted, you call our API to activate our Forward To Friend code. (3)Then you can take that data (since you have never left control of your site) and put it into an internal sales leads database or shoot it into your SalesForce database – the choice is yours.

Ok, now let’s talk about how to get this set up and working from within Publicaster. The Forward to Friend API will use an existing email content you have already defined in Publicaster. You will notice when you are in the email editor a new field called ‘Campaign ID.’ Make a note of this ID – you will need it for the API.

Lets take a look at the API argument signature. It’s really pretty straight forward.

SendtoFriend(ByVal CampaignID As String, _
ByVal AccountID As String, _
ByVal FromName As String, _
ByVal FromAddress As String, _
ByVal SubjectLine As String, _
ByVal MailContent As String, _
ByVal StringOemails As String) As emailStats

Campaign ID – This is the ID (remember I told you to keep track of it) of the email template you want to send to the potential subscribers.

AccountID – This is your encrypted account id. Existing API users are very familiar with this little nugget. If you are not, you can get your encrypted API from Account Manager -> Account Preferences (at the bottom).

FromName – This is a string that you pass that will display in the email that is being sent ad the Friendly From Name.

FromAddress – This is a string that will display in the email as the Reply-To address.

SubjectLine – Another, you guessed it, string that will display as the subject line in the email.

MainContent – A string where you can specify a custom message you want to append to the top body portion of the email you are sending. A very popular Forward to a Friend feature is a little blurb of text the person who using the form may want to pass on to their users. For example: “Hey All – thought you might find this interesting!” In addition to the exiting Publicaster content, we will put this text right after the closing body tag.

Hint: A heavy graphical based email may not work best for Forward To Friend. Make sure before you start using Forward To Friend that you test to make sure the format is like you want.

StringOEmails – Well we know it’s definitely a string. Actually, to be a little nerdy, it’s a pipe “” delimited string. So for the list of emails you want to send this message to, just create a pipe delimited string- well parse and validate and only send to valid emails. Eg ‘foobar@blah.com,jimmybuffett@margaritivalle.com,chomp@chew.com’

We also provide a return object so you can tell if your send was successful. The name of the object is ‘emailStats’ and it will return:

SendSuccess – A Boolean telling you if the emails were sent.
numSent – Tells you how many emails were actually sent.
errorDescription – In the event of a problem, we will tell you exactly what happened.

How to exactly use a web service really depends on what language you are using. But for some general 101 type of info check out.

http://www.15seconds.com/Issue/010530.htm
http://webservices.xml.com/pub/a/ws/2004/03/24/phpws.html
http://www.asp101.com/articles/colin/webservices/default.asp

Let’s talk about a few things that our Forward to a Friend feature will NOT do. First, we do not store the users email in our database. We require any subscriber that is entered into our database be opted in. If a user fills out a Forward To Friend form and click submit, the people getting the email never opted in to anything so they cannot be stored in Publicaster. Second, we don’t track any stats on who the mail was sent to and if they acted on the mail. Again, it’s because they are not Publicaster Opt-in user so we don’t store them in our database. Also, any Publicaster customizations you have in your Forward to a Friend Email will be stripped out and not sent to the user.

If you would like full documentation or example on this new API – please email bsfsupport@blueskyfactory.com.

A couple of other upcoming IT stuff here at the Factory. We are in the final testing phases of our new List Import tool that will allow you to import Excel files! Also, we are launching an API next month that will let you send an Publicaster email to an already defined list without ever logging into Publicaster. Stayed tuned for news and information!