The Informz API is a flexible tool that allows you to leverage Higher Logic Thrive Marketing Professional (Thrive Marketing Professional)'s deliverability and reporting capabilities with your application.

Sync lists and personalizations

The key to a robust integration is to plan how to keep the various lists of subscribers inside your system synced with those lists inside Thrive Marketing Professional.

Important definitions

Before you begin developing, you should understand a few terms in Thrive Marketing Professional.

• Subscribers - A set of contacts, members, people, etc.
• Lists (aka Interests) - Different groups of subscribers (e.g., all active members).
• Personalizations - Different subscriber attributes (e.g., first name).
• Demographics - Different picklist (options with a limited number of selections) subscriber attributes (e.g., gender).

Steps toward developing

There are several decisions that you'll need to make when developing. Always consider the following:

• Decide how users are going to create and name lists of subscribers in your system.
• Decide how those lists are be stored in your native system.
• Decide which combination of personalizations and demographics to include with subscribers.
• Build the XML call to Thrive Marketing Professional. This "pushes" this information from your system into Thrive Marketing Professional.
• Decide how frequently to repeat the above call to keep the values in sync. Higher Logic recommends once a day.

Special characters

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

Steps

The Informz API uses UTF-8 encoding. When you are building your XML to send data into Thrive Marketing Professional, always HTML encode any characters with 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 this:

When you build the mailing and insert the personalization code, it looks something like this:

Now, when you send your mailing, you'll see the characters render as they would in your system.

Know your use cases

Now that you have an idea of how to use special characters in the API, make sure you're aware of situations when you need to use them. These characters are typically needed when you're working with accent marks in non-English languages (e.g., the umlaut in German words like "Das Wörterbuch") and when you are using trademark, copyright, and other symbols.

Develop IPM with API

Integrated Preference Management is a useful tool that allows your subscribers to select which mailing content they wish to receive from you. Often, organizations manage preferences from multiple streams, so it is often best for their native system to serve as the authoritative source for those preferences. This article serves as a technical outline for how you can accomplish this with your own system.

• Do you have preference management for your subscribers stored anywhere in your native CMS/CRM/AMS system?
• If Yes, you need to determine where you store this information.
• If No, you need to decide where you want to store this information.
• Determine the list of preferences or categories that you wish to see managed on a form or landing page inside Thrive Marketing Professional.
• Create those preferences as Interests in Thrive Marketing Professional.
• Using the API BulkUpload (with Interest) call, send the entire list of membership for each of those predefined interests and subscribers with a single call.

You have successfully migrated all of your chosen preferences into Thrive Marketing Professional. You can now use these in your mailings as targets.

• The next step is to create a data input or landing page form in Thrive Marketing Professional using these interests. You'll embed this page as a URL in a template or mailing that you send to those targeted interests. Ultimately, this allows your subscribers to Opt-In or Opt-Out of different categories.
• To allow your native system to track the changes subscribers make based off of this form, you'll need to execute this XML call on an hourly, daily, or weekly basis. Take the results from this call and use them to update your native system.
• Once the update is complete, repeat the API BulkUpload (with Interest) call to make sure the preferences in Thrive Marketing Professional remain up-to-date with those in your system.