Quick Start Instructions

Create an Account

  1. Go to TouchBasePro.com.
  2. Select "Sign Up" to create an account.
  3. Fill in the following fields:
  4. Full name
  5. Company Name
  6. Email Address
  7. Password - don't forget this!

Get your API Keys

  1. Login at TouchBasePro.co.za
  2. Select Overview
  3. Copy your ClientID and API Secret.


Note: These should not be shared with unauthorized individuals.

Authorizing Any API Request

All API calls to TouchBase Pro requires your API key. Every request follows this format:

The API key must be included after the words "Bearer." For example, if your API_KEY is "123456789", then the request would be:

Any requests made without this key will return a 401 Unauthorized response:

Checking Your Credit Balance

To check your credit balance at any time through the API, submit a GET request to whichever API request you are making. For example, to check your credit balance while performing validation requests:

As long as you're over 0 - you're good to go.

If you make a request and you're out of credit, you'll receive a 403 Forbidden response:

Start your API Based Campaign

Now that you have your ClientID and API Secret, let's start on your first campaign. Thanks to TouchBasePro, we have four systems to use:

  1. Validation: This helps you check an email address or list of email addresses to verify they are correct and are what you need to reach your customers.
  2. Enrichment: Have some information on someone and need to know more? Enrichment can find out a wealth of information about a person or a company with just a few bits of data.
  3. SMS: Send your messages via SMS out to your customers.
  4. Email: Create new email campaigns, add email addresses to them, and connect to your customers.

Validation

Validation provides the ability to submit email addresses and determine how valuable they are. For example, if they're a real person's email address or one used by a system (such as a "do not reply" address). For more information, please see Validation API.

To validate an email address, we can do that as a simple GET. Here's an example through CURL:

And here's a typical response:

Please refer to the Validation API page for more details, but the Validation system can confirm that an email address is good or just a "junk" email address that you shouldn't waste your time on.

Enrichment

Enrichment lets you gain more information about a person or company. Have some basic data on someone but don't have enough to send an SMS message or include them in an email campaign, the Enrichment API call can gather that for you. For more information, please see Enrichment API.

The Enrichment API call is a POST request that submits some information. In this example, we'll use a fake Twitter handle and see if we can collect more data on that person:

SMS

We have our validated email address, and a plethora of information about our potential customer. Let's send them a SMS message. The basics are covered here, but for more information please see the SMS API documentation.

SMS messages boil down to two sections:

  • The message
  • The number(s) to send to.

A successful message results in a 202 Accepted reply. Here's an example of how to send out an SMS message and see the results:

Email

The bulk of TouchBasePro's API calls are within the Email campaign system. For a complete list of all of the commands regarding email campaigns, please see the Email API documentation page.

We'll focus on just a few important commands to get you started:

  • Create a Subscriber List
  • Add A New Subscriber To A Specified List
  • Create a campaign
  • Schedules draft campaign for sending

Create a Subscriber List

Subscriber lists contain the email addresses that will be sent out as part of a campaign. This is the first step in sending out those messages to your clients. To see the full details, please visit addList.

A successful submission returns a 201 Created response with the Subscriber List ID, as seen in this example:

Add A New Subscriber To A Specified List

We have our Subscriber List - now we need to add some Subscribers! This uses the addSubscriber. We'll just add one email address to our previous list as an example, and get back a 201 Created response with the email address we've added in:

Create new draft campaign

The full details for drafting a new email campaign are available on the Create new draft campaign page.

A new campaign emulates much of what you see in a typical email: Subject, From, and other related fields. Once the details are filled in, specify which Subscriber List to use. The subscriber list(s) used will be turned letting us know the campaign was created.

Our campaign will be very quick and easy with the following example:

Schedules draft campaign for sending

Time to send out our campaign. We have our subscriber list, we have email addresses added to our subscriber list, the campaign is set up - time to use the sendDraftCampaign.

Here, we'll schedule when to send out draft campaign. For when? How about immediately. We include a ConfirmationEmail that verifies that the email campaign was sent out successfully. If everything goes well, we get a 200 OK response.

Here's an example:

Here, we'll schedule when to send out draft campaign. For when? How about immediately. We include a ConfirmationEmail that verifies that the email campaign was sent out successfully. If everything goes well, we get a 200 OK response.

Here's an example: