Using API Keys to Make Your Website a Communication Hub

Your website is the best place to create a hub for your customer communication. It can help generate leads, spread your message, and convert onlookers into customers. So, how can you really harness the power of your website to make it do just that? By using API keys.

There are a few different types of API keys out there, but the concept basically stays the same. They allow for third party applications to pass information back and forth through encryption. Basically, API keys help all of your marketing platforms work together.

What APIs Can Work Together?

Since APIs work on a standardized language called the application programming interface, these applications can work together endlessly. Their ability to work together is basically endless. These programs use specific rule sets to pass information from one point to another, so the potential of APIs are endless. They really are the face of modern development and can be seen in use everywhere from manufacturing to logging onto facebook.

Since the application programming interface is standardized, you can create new APIs as well. If you can’t find a place that has created an API for the exact application you want to incorporate, you can hire teams to create API based triggers that pass your information from one place to the endpoint. That means you can make anything send you data with API keys, no matter the start point.

Sensors from manufacturing machines are a great example of this API data sending in action. They can track in the information being generated from the sensors, and pass it on to another application. That application might help you understand your machine’s workflow from day to day, or you could be using the information from the sensors to create a timeline of the potential lifespan of the machine. Truly, APIs let us connect the individual pieces of the world around us.

How Can I Use APIs With My Website?

If you want to know how to use APIs with your website, you first need to understand what role your website is playing. For many, the website is the front-facing lead generator that passes potential customer information from contact forms to CRMs. If this sounds like your goal for the website, you will want to look into a few things first. The most important will be seeing if your CRM already has APIs that you can incorporate into your website. Applications like HubSpot or ActiveCampaign already have amazing plugins ready for their consumers that help them create advanced functionality within their website. These plugins tend to run on simple API keys, and pass contact information from contact forms and email campaigns directly into the CRM itself. When John goes to your website and fills our a contact form, the information is normally sent via email to the destination email, but when you have one of these CRM APIs in place, that information can be directly transferred into a potential customer account without ever having to actually open the CRM itself.

Another great example is putting authentications on these contact forms. Have you ever wondered how people get those “I’m Not a Robot” boxes on their forms? Well, it’s done through API authentication. Your website can work directly with your Google account’s authentication APIs to boost the security of your forms and prevent spam. In your Google account, the admin panel lets you have access API keys that put those authentication boxes directly onto your website.

You can even take your email marketing to a whole new level by connecting API keys on the backend of your website. If you are using an sort of page builder to create the pages on your site, you can incorporate your email marketing with MailChimp in API form instead of being forced to in-line code the forms from MailChimp. That lets you make your own form, and the linked MailChimp API key picks up the information it needs for email marketing.

Making the Most of API Keys

API keys are amazing pieces of code that let application communicate with each other, even if there were never intended to do so from the very start. That leads to a whole new world of potential. These links mean that just about any application can work with another to create the information needed to get the job done.

Imagine you have a business that remotely manages a line of manufacturing machines. These machines pass tons of information back and forth from the sensors to a screen on the machine itself. This information is extremely important for the success of the production line, but there is a major issue. You can’t seem to monitor all of the information from all of the machines at the same time. That’s where API keys come in. Since you have all the information at hand, you can create APIs that harness that information and send them to a dashboard you have created to monitor all the machines at once. Now, you have one hub that monitors all the machines at once in real-time in a CSV format, and you can start to use that information in real-time. Maybe one of the machines is being underutilized, but the hustle and bustle of the manufacturing floor is making it hard to see. If all that information was in once place, you could see that those machines are being underutilized, and shift some of the workloads from one area of the floor to that one.

Basically, if you can dream it, an API key can help you make it a reality.

This article does not necessarily reflect the opinions of the editors or management of EconoTimes.