A while back, we posted an article about a new addition to the SendLabs application called Advanced Triggers. These triggers allowed SendLabs to communicate to external SOAP APIs when specific events happened. This was a huge milestone and marked the beginning of our Salesforce integration.

It was a little raw to work with and the flexibility was matched by the complications of actually setting the damn thing up. For anyone who had never previously worked with a SOAP API, the process wasn’t too far off from pulling teeth with a pair of salad tongs.

But that was all it was: “the beginning”.  Since that first integration, I’ve been hard at work over my proverbial stove cooking up the next step in Salesforce integration.

The next time you log into SendLabs, give the “My Account” button a click. At the top, we’ve added another tab called “Salesforce Settings”. If you populate these fields with your Salesforce credentials and check the checkbox to activate it, then any list that you have imported via Salesforce will report back to Salesforce when a subscriber interacts with the email.

For the moment, any time a subscriber in your list opens an email, clicks a link inside that email, unsubscribes or hard bounces, that information will get queued up and sent during one of the integration intervals. These queues run every 20 minutes and report information back to us the first time it runs into a problem.

Now before you go all, “Hey man…why the 20 minutes? Weren’t you pushing all this information live before?”, let me explain why we changed our procedure.

Each Salesforce account has an allotted number of API connections it’s allowed to make per day. Previously every time a subscriber did anything, one of these connections were used to instantly report them into Salesforce. So you can see how if you were to send an email campaign to one million subscribers, you might get close to hitting your limit for the day and potentially lose important information because of it – especially if you had more than one application utilizing Salesforce’s API.

Now we store all of your connections behind the scenes and send the information up in groups of up to two hundred at a time reducing the hundreds to thousands of connections to a modest seventy two connections a day.

Enjoy the new feature and as always: email on, dudes! For information about how to set everything up, hit up Josh (josh [at] sendlabs.com)

John Norton is a lead product developer for SendLabs, a hosted email marketing software and services company. Hit him up at Twitter: @jukebox42.

John Norton is a lead product developer for SendLabs, a New England-based email marketing software company with great customers across the street and around the globe. He's addicted to energy drinks, rock climbing, pandora and jQuery. Hit him up at Twitter: @jukebox42.