Many email distribution services offer automation tools – triggers. For many tasks, this functionality is indeed sufficient. But sometimes more complex tasks arise when it is necessary to ensure the most advanced data exchange between different web applications or between different cloud services. This is where webhooks come to the rescue.
Below is our material that dots all the i's and crosses all the t's. We will tell you what Webhooks are and how to use them in email newsletters to increase efficiency. Let's start with definitions.
What is Webhook in simple words
Webhooks – literally “web interceptor”. The word hook is translated as “hook”, “trap” or “capture”.
The webhook system is a model of automatic data exchange finland phone number data via the http(https) protocol, implemented using web handlers. There are notification sources that send a set of data when certain events occur, and web interceptors that are responsible for accepting this data on the external server side and subsequent processing.
This system is in many ways similar to the interaction of two different web services via an API interface (in some documents, webhooks are even called a “reverse API”), but in fact these are different approaches.
To exchange data via API, systems implement a model of polling an external server, this happens cyclically (i.e. continuously). If the server responds that it is ready, the sending/exchange procedure begins. APIs are usually bidirectional - "you to me, I to you".
Webhooks are simply sent to an external server without any cyclic polling. The sending is always initiated by a specific event - a trigger. Accordingly, the sending of data is actually performed only once - when the trigger is triggered.
If the data is not received the first time, the server may try to send the data at certain intervals. But if the receiving party does not respond for a long time, the sending is stopped - after a specified period of time or after a certain number of attempts.