The Informz API is a flexible tool that allows you to leverage the deliverability and reporting capabilities of Higher Logic Thrive Marketing Professional (Thrive Marketing Professional) in your external AMS/CRM environment.

IMPORTANT: This article references Informz, a prior name of the Thrive Marketing Professional product. Instances of Informz remain in some areas of the API in order to ensure its functionality.

Before you begin

The integration between your AMS/CRM database and your Thrive Marketing Professional account relies very heavily on lists of subscribers (refer to Higher Logic terms, below). It's important that these lists are kept up to date and are synchronized ("synced") between the two systems. This will better ensure that you can maximize the features and functionality of Thrive Marketing Professional to the fullest.

Higher Logic terms

Before you begin, you should understand the following terms as used by Higher Logic, in the product, and in various documentation.

• Subscribers - contacts, members
• Lists (aka Interests) - groups of subscribers (e.g., all active members, opted-out subscribers)
• Personalizations - subscriber attributes (e.g., first name, job title) that can be used to "personalize" your messages per subscriber
• Demographics - picklist (options with a limited number of selections) of subscriber attributes (e.g., location, gender) that can be used to "personalize" your messages per subscriber

Development decisions

When you are setting up an API integration, consider the following:

• Decide how lists of subscriber records will be:
  • created,
  • named, and
  • stored in your system.
• Decide which personalizations and demographics to include with subscriber records.
• Build the XML call to Thrive Marketing Professional.
  • This call "pushes" information from your system to Thrive Marketing Professional.
• Decide how frequently to execute the XML call in order to keep the lists synchronized.
  • Higher Logic recommends once per day.

Special characters in the API

This section outlines how you can successfully get special characters from your system into Thrive Marketing Professional for use in personalizations and mailings.

HTML encoding

The Informz API uses UTF-8 encoding.

When you are building your XML call to send data to Thrive Marketing Professional, always HTML encode any characters that have codepoints (ANSI codes) greater than 127. If you don't, it can cause decompression errors in uploads that contain those characters.

Below is an example of what characters might look like in your system:

When you view them in Thrive Marketing Professional, they may look like those shown below.

When you build a mailing and insert the personalization code, it resembles:

When you send the mailing, the characters will render as they would in your system.

Using special characters

Make sure you're aware of situations in which you should use special characters in the API. These characters are typically required for:

• accent marks in non-English languages (e.g., the cedilla [ç] in French and the umlaut [ä] in German) and
• symbols (e.g., the trademark and copyright symbols).

Develop IPM with API

Integrated Preference Management (IPM) allows your subscribers to select which mailing content they want to receive from your account. Many organizations receive these preferences from multiple streams, so their AMS/CRM is the best place (and, subsequently, the authoritative source) for storing and managing subscriber preferences.

IPM and Thrive Marketing Professional

• Do you manage your subscribers' preferences in your AMS/CRM system?
  • If Yes, determine where in your AMS/CRM you store subscriber preferences.
  • If No but you want to, decide where in your AMS/CRM to store subscriber preferences.
• Determine the list of preferences or categories that you want managed in Thrive Marketing Professional via a Landing Page or a Data Input Form.
• Create those preferences as Interests in Thrive Marketing Professional.
• Use the BulkUpload with Interests action request to send the entire list of membership for each of those predefined interests and subscribers with a single call.

After you have migrated preferences into Thrive Marketing Professional, you can use them in your mailings as targets.

Next steps

1. Create a Landing Page or Data Input Form in Thrive Marketing Professional using these interests.
2. Embed this page as a URL in a template or mailing that you send to those targeted interests. This makes it possible for your subscribers to opt in to or opt out of their preferred categories.
3. Schedule the XML call to execute regularly (hourly, daily, or weekly) so that your AMS/CRM system can track the changes that subscribers make based on the form and update the records in the system.
4. After the update is complete, repeat the BulkUpload with Interests call to push the changes to Thrive Marketing Professional, thus ensuring that your subscribers' preferences are aligned and up to date in both systems.