Marketing automation lets you send the right message to the right person at the right time, without human intervention at every step. It is an appealing promise that takes a few hours of scoping to bear fruit. This article presents the logic of Odoo's Marketing Automation module and offers three concrete scenarios to put in place from the start.
Understanding the mechanics
An automation scenario is built around three elements. The trigger defines what makes a contact enter the scenario: for example a white paper download, a newsletter sign-up, a purchase of a certain amount, or an exceeded period of inactivity. The sequence defines the actions to perform: sending an email, sending an SMS, creating a task for a salesperson, adding or removing a tag, updating a field. The conditions and delays define when and under which conditions each action runs: wait three days, check that the contact opened the previous email, branch according to the engagement score.
Odoo's visual editor lets you build these scenarios by drag and drop, as a decision tree. Each step is configurable. You see the complete scenario in a single view.
Scenario 1: welcoming a new prospect
This is the basic scenario that any SME can set up quickly. When a prospect downloads a white paper or signs up for the newsletter, they enter the scenario.
- Step one, immediate: welcome email with the downloaded content and a quick presentation of the company.
- Step two, three days later: customer testimonial email highlighting a concrete case.
- Step three, seven days later: email inviting them to a demo or a discovery meeting.
- Step four, fifteen days later: exit from the scenario, the prospect moves to the general newsletter feed.
At each step, you measure: opens, clicks, unsubscribes. After a few weeks, you identify the content that works best and optimize it.
Scenario 2: reactivating dormant customers
Every salesperson knows that an existing customer is easier to reactivate than a new prospect. Marketing automation industrializes this logic.
Entry criterion: contact with the “customer” tag, with a last order more than twelve months ago.
- Step one: “it's been a while” email, with no commercial incentive, just a personalized check-in.
- Step two, ten days later, if the email was opened: email with a dedicated offer or a spotlight on new products.
- Step three, twenty days later, if no purchase: short SMS with a promotional code.
- Step four, thirty days later, exit from the scenario.
Our advice: for this type of scenario, plan a promotional follow-up budget that may seem generous at first glance. The cost of acquiring a new customer is generally five to ten times higher than the cost of reactivating a dormant one. A fifteen or twenty percent discount voucher to reactivate a high-potential customer pays for itself many times over.
Scenario 3: abandoned cart follow-up
For online stores, this is probably the scenario with the highest return on investment. A visitor adds products to their cart then leaves the site without completing the order. The scenario kicks in.
Step one, two hours after abandonment: discreet reminder email recalling the selected products, with no commercial incentive. Step two, twenty-four hours later if no purchase: email with a customer testimonial or additional product information. Step three, forty-eight hours later if no purchase: email with a limited benefit (free delivery, promotional code).
Abandoned cart recovery rates observed with this type of scenario are generally between ten and thirty percent. On an online store with a significant average basket, this is additional revenue that builds up quickly.
Pitfalls to avoid
First pitfall: starting too ambitiously. We have seen marketing automation projects bog SMEs down for months because they wanted to deploy eight complex scenarios from the start. Our advice: one scenario at a time, measured and optimized, before moving to the next.
- Second pitfall: forgetting exit conditions.
- A customer who has converted must no longer receive the seduction sequence.
- A customer who complained to support must above all not receive a promotional email the next day.
- Each scenario must explicitly provide exit conditions that remove the contact from the sequence.
Third pitfall: channel fatigue. If you activate four scenarios in parallel that touch the same contacts, they will receive an avalanche of emails and unsubscribe. Think in terms of architecture: who receives what, at what maximum frequency, with which capping mechanisms.
Fourth pitfall: never revisiting scenarios. Once activated, they keep running. But the business evolves. Block half a day per quarter to review your active scenarios: are they still relevant, are the emails still up to date, are the conditions still valid.
Measuring return on investment
For each scenario, track the main indicators: number of contacts entered over the period, number of contacts that reached the final goal (purchase, appointment, conversion), unsubscribe rate, revenue generated.
Odoo lets you view these metrics by scenario, with ready-to-use reports. You can thus compare the effectiveness of your scenarios against each other and focus your optimization efforts on those with the most potential.
Conclusion
- Marketing automation is not a magic tool.
- It is a discipline built progressively, scenario after scenario, measurement after measurement.
- Well implemented, it frees sales and marketing teams' time for high-value tasks.
- Poorly implemented, it generates a volume of emails that ends up as spam or unsubscribes.
Our advice to get started: choose one scenario, deploy it, measure it for a month, and only then move on to the next. Patience and rigor pay off far more than initial ambition.