To send single emails during your trial, you need to set up a valid email address first. This step ensures that your test emails get delivered, and allows you to send to any email address while testing.

For testing you can also send emails to your own address, which is the default option. Alternatively, you can add new addresses in Channels and Numbers.

Be sure to add the sender name and reply-to address, as well as the first line of your company address to comply with the CAN-SPAM­ act.

If you haven’t verified your address yet, you will be prompted again to do so.

Broadcast is the tool used to manage your message broadcasts. It is the first tool in the tool bar on the left side of the screen.

Please see the section on Broadcast.

When sending your test email you can choose between a domain or single sender. Single is recommended for testing purposes.

Fill out the from name (i.e. who the email is from), the from address, the reply-to email.

Next, add your content starting with a subject line and an optional preheader. After this, you can design and preview your email.

You may also opt to send a plain text email, as well, which improves deliverability.

To track your email, select the tracking options you desire. These include:

You can choose to have these reports via API pull to see how many messages were delivered, and by pushing delivery reports to webhook to subscribe to events on your account with your integration installed.

To personalize emails, select information from the data payload.

Next, scheduling allows you to launch your email campaigns at a specific time and date. Lastly, use Advanced settings to adjust the message speed setting the number of messages per unit of time, and the message validity period. After this time passes, no email deliveries will be retried.

Preview your email before sending – you can still make changes to your broadcast during the preview stage. If there are any errors, these will be highlighted in the Warnings menu.

You can still send a test from the preview and, if everything looks right – feel free to hit Launch.

Once you launch your broadcast you’ll be taken to the reporting page where you can see the real-time status of your broadcasts.

Now that you’ve sent your first email via Broadcast, check your inbox and have a look at your first email. Next, you can check out an overview and summary. If you did everything right, your delivery rate should look like this:

 Finally, you have the option to import your contacts via People CDP. And to help you launch your first campaigns quickly, you can browse our predefined email templates.

To make sure your messages land in as many inboxes as possible, check out our deliverability recommendations at the end.

Sending your first email requires you to first set up a sender.

During the free trial you can send to the verified email you signed up with, or add more in Channels and Numbers.

Add a sender name and reply-to email – your sender email field is pre-populated with your verified email address.

To send your first email via API, first choose between HTTP and SMTP APIs. Our APIs support scheduling, messaging templates, personalization, and more.

You can send your first email using our browser-based IDE and customized code for Java, C#, PHP, and Python.

SMTP, which stands for Simple Mail Transfer Protocol, enables safe and reliable email messaging. Infobip provides an SMTP server for fast and secure email delivery.

Our SMTP documentation takes you through the process of sending via SMTP API.

You can create custom email templates in Broadcast, customize our email templates, and import your own existing HTML emails.

Ready to send your first SMS message?

During the free trial, you will be able to use Infobip’s ServiceSMS test sender to send up to 15 text messages to 5 verified numbers.

To send your first test message, simply click the “Send message” button. And that’s it!

You can view delivery reports that provide you the status and details of each message.

The details here include the message type, the status and any associated errors, an explanation of the status and any errors, as well as the time the message was sent and its destination.

Next, you can check for any country-specific restrictions to your intended destination.

You can do this by expanding the “Check country-specific SMS regulations” tab and selecting your intended destination from the drop-down menu.

Next, depending on your business needs, you should also explore your sender options. You can do this from the “Explore sender options” tab.

You’re encouraged to fill out the brief questionnaire – beginning with “Do you plan to send to the USA and Canada” as well as subsequent questions – to improve your experience.

Specify whether your preferred messaging type is one-way (i.e. your account sends notifications and two-factor authentication codes to your customers), or two-way messaging, which provides customers with a reply path, allowing for conversations with customers.

Next, choose your preferred sender type. You can choose from dedicated or shared senders. Dedicated senders are unique to your account. Shared senders, as the name implies, are shared with other business accounts – often sharing a generic name, like InfoSMS.

During your free trial you can send SMS to up to 5 verified numbers.

Getting started is made simple with personalized code ready to run with Java, C#, PHP, Python or Go. We support other languages, as well – see our send SMS API for code examples. You can also find code examples in our developer SDKs.

As a developer, you’re experienced in integrating APIs into your existing systems.

Infobip makes this easy by providing fully personalized code examples that are ready to go. Easily implement Java, C#, PHP, Python, and Go – and for more languages and coding examples, visit our documentation hub.

Your account is assigned an API key at signup. This acts as an access token for clients to use when making API calls.

This is a simple way to secure access, and as such, a popular authentication method used with REST APIs.

You can generate more keys and manage your existing one from your API key management page. Find out more about API keys in our documentation hub.

Your base URL serves as your unique identifier which helps our platform identify the originator of each API request at DNS level to find the optimal route for API requests.

This ensures the best user experience, as well as more efficient technical support if you ever run into any issues. You can find out more about your base URL, here.

The Developer tools menu give you quick access to the most important tools for developers. We already mentioned API keys and where to manage them, and these are four more tools for developers:

These developer tools help you fully manage your developer account, as well as to create applications specifically for your unique use cases.

As a business user, your experience is a code-free one using web-based tools. Here’s a quick overview of the tools and how to use them.

The toolbar on the left side of the screen contains all the tools you need to get started.

Here, we’ll go through each in the order they appear in.

From SMS to Voice calls and Email, all your individual messaging is managed from Broadcast, the web interface for message deployment management.

Here you can create individual messages or complete campaigns.

It’s as simple as adding recipients, choosing your sender, setting your messaging parameters in terms of start, end, delivery window, duration, retry schemes, etc.

There are more or fewer options reliant on channel capabilities. We’ll review these in more detail when we explore each individual channel.

This menu gives you access to Channels, Numbers, Tools and Compliance, and My requests.

From Channels you can request new and manage your existing channels, discover how to use, read case studies, learn about requirements etc.

The channels available are:

This is where you can buy and manage numbers for your account.

This is a straightforward process – simply click on Buy Number and choose your destination from the dropdown menu.

Make sure to filter by number capability to match your requirement, i.e. SMS, MMS or Voice.

Note: We may not have numbers available for some destinations.

In Tools and Compliance, users can access these helpful tools:

When you sign up for an Infobip trial, you get up to 100 free messages, 15 SMS messages and access to CPaaS messaging products that help you build engagement with your customers.

Note: No credit card is required to sign up and test the platform.

To sign up, simply fill out the sign-up form:

When you fill out the sign-up form, you will be sent an email with a verification link. This email will be associated with your account, and during the trial period will be the only one that you can email.

Once you’ve verified your email, you will be prompted to enter your phone number.

Choose your country code from the drop-down menu and enter your number. You will receive a text message containing your verification code. Enter this 4-digit PIN when prompted to verify your number. This number will be associated with your account during the trial period.

When you create a free account, you are granted test credits in the amount of:

During the trial period, these free messages can be used to test each individual channel independently or as a part of our solutions:

The next step in your account creation is the guided survey aimed at optimizing your experience.

To get the best experience, fill out the quick survey and answer questions about:

Next, we’ll look at the experience for each account type.

Eager to try out Infobip, but don’t know how or where to start?

It’s easy – especially if you follow this step-by-step guide to getting started with Infobip Portal.

Infobip Portal is a digital communication solution that offers various channels for messaging third parties – depending on your needs.

The portal is intended for self use by business users and developers alike to manage messaging, accounts and account users, channels, solutions, and everything else to meet the demands of modern customer communication.

With Infobip Portal, you can quickly set up and manage your account to start sending messages in an instant.

Self-service is intended for clients who want the flexibility of a pre-paid account with no commitments, or who want to start engaging customers, fast.

Infobip offers a free trial to users, with no credit card required, to evaluate our service, channels and products to see if this is the right solution for your business needs.

Two terms that are commonly used interchangeably are “verification and validation.” While the two are related, they are distinct.

Validating emails and numbers will deal more with the formatting, whereas verification deals with ownership.

Verifying records protects both your business and your customers by standing as a first line of defense guarding against account takeovers and other forms of fraud.

It also ensures elevated CX by guaranteeing customers receive messages and can be kept in the loop throughout their customer journeys.

High ROI is another important part of verification by ensuring a more emails land in the appropriate inbox, get seen, and the desired customer actions taken.

By verifying phone numbers and email addresses, businesses excel at CX, keep ROI high,and fraudsters at bay.

When collecting new customer numbers at signup, you will want to focus on three critical areas:

To avoid any confusion, it’s best to put country codes in a dropdown menu next to the number collection field. This makes it easier to collect numbers in the recommended E.164 format.

Cross reference the country code with the IP address the user is signing up from. While mismatches could indicate legitimate practices (i.e. use of a VPN), it could also be indicative of fraudulent action.

We strongly recommend all phone numbers be formatted to the industry standard E.164 format.

Users will sometimes intentionally enter incorrect data. Avoid this by checking number validity at signup with Number Lookup.

Avoid sending confirmation codes to numbers that are unable to receive them like landlines or SIPs.

Send a one-time PIN to users in order to verify they have access to the number they’re signing up with.

This prevents actors from signing up with someone else’s number and helps your business ensure that you are collecting a unique, authentic sign-up.

If users are in an area with poor reception, they may not be able to receive your SMS or voice OTP.

Define rules and failover channels to ensure delivery of critical authentication codes – or use a solution that takes care of that for you.

Sometimes customers enter the wrong number by mistake – maybe they missed a digit or entered their number neighbor.

Display the number they entered and give them the option of correcting any mistakes instead of waiting for an OTP they’ll never receive.

Keep customers verified throughout their customer lifetime with you and store their preferred 2FA channels for quick and easy authentication.

And keep customers protected with silent mobile verification always on in the background to seamlessly authenticate them and keep their account secure.

These are some of the most common best practices to prevent email list contamination and maintaining proper email list hygiene.

Verify emails for validity at signup using a real-time API email validation tool to minimize the risk of invalid emails entering your database.

This tool should check for mailbox and syntax validity, as well as whether the email is a catchall, temporary or role-based address.

Confirm that the person signing up to your service has access to the email address by sending them a single use code, or even a simple link.

Performing either action can ensure that the customer has access to the email address.

When sending any code, take care to ensure that the code will not be visible in the email notification on a mobile device.

Potentially malicious users in possession of someone’s device may be able to see codes above the fold and use them for their nefarious purposes.

Keeping email subscriber lists clean by periodically performing bulk checks helps keep your costs down and, more importantly, your email sender reputation up.

We recommend cleaning lists at least twice yearly, or ahead of every big campaign. Remove any invalid, high bounce addresses from your lists.

Email verification is the process of ensuring that email addresses you are given are authentic and connected to a real person are genuine, up to date, and reachable.

You can check emails at signup or at any point throughout the customer journey – ideally, before they’re committed to an email list.

But even when you have lists – you should periodically clean them.

Without regular email list verification, invalid and abandoned accounts will begin to accumulate in your database, resulting in bounce backs and your content not being read.

There are a number of reasons why email verification is important. The first is fraud prevention.

A customer’s email address can serve as a piece of personally identifiable information, which can play a role in identity verification – and fraud prevention. Because of this, it’s important to verify that the user associated with the email address is in possession of and has access to the address. This can be achieved by sending the user a single-use code to help verify the person has access to the address being used at signup.

Next, you want to make sure that people are giving you their correct email address the first time. Unfortunately, this isn’t always the case. In older survey (from 2015), more than 60% of respondents said they will intentionally provide a fake email address.

This can be avoided by implementing email verification at signup to immediately spot incorrect email types.

Email verification at signup will also help to avoid pesky spam traps. These are email addresses used by mailbox providers and blocklist operators to identify senders who aren’t following best email practices. Getting caught in one of these traps can have critical, negative effects on your email sender authority.

Negative email sender authority could result in emails you send to customers landing in the dreaded spam box instead of the intended inbox. Customers will miss important emails, notifications, updates, offers, etc. resulting in lost opportunities, unhappy customers, and poor customer experience.

And last but not least important, verifying email addresses will help keep marketing ROI up. Since email is a cost-effective marketing channel, the cleaner your email lists are, the greater your marketing ROI will be. It should go without saying that emails sent to invalid addresses won’t result in conversions.

There are a few key ways in which email verification benefits businesses. Let’s take a look at the main ones.

Using email validation tools as a component of verification gives business a way to bulk clean invalid email records, or validate entries in real time.

Whether older email records naturally attritted or were incorrectly entered, email validation can help with both invalid record types.

By verifying emails and cleaning databases of invalid or unreachable email addresses, businesses avoid the cost of sending to invalid addresses – and with yearly list degradation rates nearly one quarter, your savings are easy to calculate.

Email verficiation helps protect against sign-ups by bad actors by identifying patterns in naming, address age, and domain validity. Through timely identification of potential fraudulent actors, businesses can protect themselves and their customers.

Email verification can be conducted in bulk by cleaning entire email lists – which experts recommend doing periodically due to natural email attrition – or live, one at a time.

Either way, email verification looks at email addresses for:

This method verifies email addresses before deploying messages by looking at the domain. Performing this check helps you to avoid hard bounces, preserve your sender reputation, and save money.

An example of an invalid or non-existent mailbox would be an incorrect domain, like @inbofip.com instead of @infobip.com.

This step looks for errors in the email structure or format made by recipients. Here you can get suggestions for possible corrections.

An example would be “did you mean @infobip.com?”

These are disposable, single use addresses set up for one-time events or for a limited time period. Identify these and remove them from your database to avoid triggering high bounce rates once they’re no longer in use.

These are emails associated with a company, department or group of recipients instead of an individual.

Anyone signing up to your service with a [email protected] probably won’t be a single recipient. Remove these from your database to ensure data cleanliness.

These are email domains that accept all emails sent to them, regardless of whether the recipient’s address exists. It can lead to a higher risk of sending emails to non-existent or invalid addresses, harming your sender reputation.

Following these steps is a best practice for collecting emails at signup, checkout, or any other point of the customer journey – as well as for purging existing email lists of invalid contacts.

In the next chapter, we’ll look at some more best practices.