Email marketing remains one of the most profitable channels for a French SME. Used well, an email costs a few cents to send and can generate several euros in revenue. Used badly, it triggers a cascade of unsubscribes and damages the reputation of your sending address. This article shows you how to use Odoo's Email Marketing module in a concrete and effective way.
Preparing your contact base
Before the first campaign, take the time to qualify your contact base. In Odoo, each contact can carry several pieces of information useful for segmentation: category (customer, prospect, partner), custom tags, sales status, date of last order, language, country, and any other characteristic you consider relevant.
The more qualified your base, the more targeted and effective your campaigns will be. An email sent to a poorly segmented list generates open rates of around fifteen to twenty percent. An email targeted at a relevant segment can reach forty to sixty percent opens.
Our practical advice: spend a day cleaning and enriching the base before the first campaign. Identify duplicates, remove invalid emails, tag contacts according to their commercial category. It is the most profitable investment of any email marketing project.
Building a segment
In Odoo, you create a campaign by first selecting the recipients. You can use a mailing list (a group of contacts you send to regularly) or a dynamic filter on the contact base.
The dynamic filter is particularly powerful. For example, you can target: all customers who bought a product from family X in the last six months, who are based in France, and who have not unsubscribed. The segment is calculated in real time: each new customer matching the criteria enters automatically, each unsubscriber leaves.
Our advice: start simple. Three or four segments are enough for most SMEs: active customers, qualified prospects, partners, inactive contacts to reawaken. As you measure performance, you refine.
Writing an email that works
A good email follows a few simple principles. The subject line is short (under fifty characters), precise, and gives a reason to open. Avoid spam trigger words like "free", "urgent", "exceptional offer" at the start of the subject.
The preheader, that small text displayed after the subject in the inbox, should complement the subject rather than repeat it. Odoo handles it clearly in the editor.
The body of the email must have a clear main message, a visible call to action (usually a button), and remain readable on mobile. Most emails are read on a phone. Test your email on mobile before sending.
Our advice: don't overload it. A single-message email converts better than an email that tries to get several ideas across at once.
A/B tests to improve
Odoo lets you run A/B tests on two main variables: the subject and the content. The principle is simple: you create two versions, the tool sends each version to ten percent of your target, measures open or click rates, and sends the winning version to the remaining eighty percent.
Our advice: test one variable at a time so you can interpret the results. If you change the subject and the content at the same time, you won't know what made the difference. And keep the history of your tests in a note: after a few months, you will identify constants useful for your target.
Measuring what matters
For each campaign, Odoo tracks the classic indicators: deliverability rate, open rate, click rate, unsubscribe rate, complaint rate. These indicators can be viewed in a dedicated view per campaign and in an aggregated view across all campaigns.
The most important indicator to watch is not the open rate but the unsubscribe rate. A rate above 0.5 percent per campaign is a warning signal: your targeting or your content is poorly calibrated.
- The other underestimated indicator is deliverability.
- If your emails end up in spam, no open metric will be good.
- Monitor soft and hard bounces.
- Regularly clean up emails that bounce.
- And configure SPF, DKIM and DMARC correctly on your sending domain.
Regulatory compliance
- The General Data Protection Regulation imposes several strict rules on email marketing.
- You must have explicit consent from your recipients (except for B2B prospecting under certain conditions).
- You must offer a clear unsubscribe link in every email.
- You must process deletion requests within reasonable timeframes.
Odoo handles these obligations natively: double opt-in can be enabled on sign-ups, the unsubscribe link is inserted automatically, and unsubscribes are recorded in the contact record and prevent any further mailing.
Our advice: have your email templates validated by your data protection officer or your legal counsel before the first mass campaigns. A few minutes of preventive investment avoids weeks of potential crisis management.
The sending service
- For moderate volumes (up to a few thousand emails a day), the SMTP server built into Odoo may be enough.
- Beyond that, you will benefit from connecting Odoo to a specialized sending service: Brevo, Mailjet, Sarbacane, Amazon SES.
- The connection takes a few minutes via Odoo's SMTP settings.
- This radically improves deliverability.
Conclusion
Odoo email marketing is rich enough to cover the needs of the vast majority of French SMEs and mid-sized companies. Its strength, as everywhere in the Odoo ecosystem, is native integration with the rest of the ERP. No more need to synchronize an external platform. Customer data is unified, interactions flow back into the CRM, and the salesperson gets a complete view. For very high-volume or very sophisticated needs, specialized platforms will remain relevant as a complement, but the standard covers the essentials.