The difference from Marketing Automation
These two apps get confused, so let us separate them.
Email Marketing sends a message to a list at a point in time. A newsletter, a product launch, a seasonal offer. One send, one audience.
Marketing Automation builds a journey with delays and branches based on behaviour.
Email Marketing is the simpler tool and the right starting point. Most businesses should master it before touching automation.
Building a mailing
Choosing the audience
This is the step that matters most, and Odoo’s advantage lives here.
Because the app reads your live database, your audience can be defined by real business facts:
- Customers who bought a specific product
- Contacts in a country or industry
- Leads at a particular pipeline stage
- Customers with no order in the last year
- People who attended an event
No export, no upload, no list that was accurate three months ago.
Narrower is almost always better. A message to 200 relevant people will beat a message to 2,000 vaguely related ones, on every measure including revenue.
FIGURE 1: AUDIENCES YOU CAN BUILD FROM LIVE DATA
By purchase history
- Customers who bought a specific product, or who have not ordered in a year.
By pipeline stage
- Leads sitting at a particular stage, or older than a set number of days.
By profile
- Country, industry, customer tier, or attendance at an event.
Writing the email
Odoo has a drag-and-drop editor with templates, or you can start from plain text.
Four things matter more than design:
The subject line. It decides whether anything else gets read. Be specific rather than clever. “Your March invoice is ready” beats “Important update from us”.
The preview text. The line shown after the subject in most inboxes. Most senders waste it. Use it to extend the subject line.
One clear action. What should the reader do? One thing, stated plainly. Emails with five links get no clicks on any of them.
Mobile. Most email is read on a phone. Preview it there before sending, always.
Sending
Send immediately, schedule for a time, or send a test to yourself first.
Always send a test. Check the links, check the images load, check it on a phone. The number of campaigns sent with a broken link is remarkable.
A/B testing
Odoo can split your audience and test variations.
Test one thing at a time. Two subject lines with the same body tells you something about subject lines. Two completely different emails tells you nothing useful, because you cannot say which difference caused the result.
Subject lines are the highest-return thing to test. Send time is worth testing occasionally. Colours of buttons rarely matter as much as people hope.
Deliverability
The unglamorous part that decides whether any of this works.
If your emails land in spam folders, nothing else in this article matters.
Authenticate your domain. SPF, DKIM and DMARC records. Your IT person or hosting provider sets these up. Without them, a growing share of your mail simply will not be delivered.
Never buy a list. It is the fastest way to destroy your sending reputation, and it is illegal in many countries.
Clean bounces. Odoo tracks hard bounces. Remove them. Sending repeatedly to dead addresses tells email providers you are careless.
Watch complaint rates. If people mark you as spam, you have a content or frequency problem. Fix the cause rather than the number.
Warm up slowly. If you have never sent bulk email from your domain, do not start with 10,000 messages. Build volume gradually over a few weeks.
FIGURE 2: DELIVERABILITY COMES BEFORE EVERYTHING ELSE
Authenticate your domain
- SPF, DKIM and DMARC. Without these, a growing share of your mail is never delivered.
Never buy a list
- The fastest way to destroy your sending reputation, and illegal in many countries.
Clean your bounces
- Repeatedly mailing dead addresses tells providers you are careless.
Warm up gradually
- Build volume over weeks, not in one send.
Consent
Legal requirements differ by country, and the principles are consistent everywhere.
Only email people who agreed to hear from you. A business card at an event is not the same as a subscription.
Include an unsubscribe link. In every marketing email, easy to find.
Honour unsubscribes immediately. Odoo handles this automatically once configured. Check that it is.
Keep a record of consent. When and how each contact opted in. If you are ever asked, you will need it.
Being careless here risks fines, and — more immediately — it wrecks your deliverability.
Reports worth using
Delivered. Sent minus bounced. Should be above 95%. Below that, look at list quality.
Open rate. Directionally useful. Modern privacy features inflate it, so treat it as a trend rather than a precise figure.
Click rate. More reliable than opens, because a click is a real action.
Unsubscribes. A spike means frequency or relevance is wrong.
Revenue. Because Odoo links mailings to your sales data, you can see orders that followed a campaign. This is the number to report, and the one most email tools cannot give you.
What usually goes wrong
Sending too often. The most common cause of unsubscribes.
Sending to everyone. Broad lists produce weak results and irritate people who did not want it.
Ignoring deliverability setup. Beautiful emails nobody receives.
No clear action. A pleasant email that asks for nothing achieves nothing.
Not testing on mobile. Most readers are on a phone. A layout that breaks there loses most of your audience.
Chasing open rates. Open rate is a soft number. Clicks and revenue are real.
Getting started
- Set up domain authentication before sending anything
- Clean your contact list and confirm consent
- Build one narrow, well-targeted mailing
- Send a test and check it on a phone
- Send to a small segment first
- Look at clicks and orders, not opens
- Improve one thing and send the next one
Then keep a simple habit: one campaign, one lesson, applied to the next. That compounds faster than any tool feature.
Want email campaigns that use your real order history?
Get in touch. We start with deliverability and consent, because a beautiful email nobody receives is worth nothing.
