Marketing: Email Marketing Overview

The purpose of this document is to walk you through the processes for setting up and using Odoo’s Email Marketing application. We’ll be covering setting up Mailing Lists, adding contacts to those lists, setting up Mailings, and reviewing the results of your mailings. 

To get started, navigate to the Email Marketing app. 

Once there, go to CONFIGURATION > SETTINGS.

Under the settings screen you’ll see the available options: 

Mass Mailing Campaigns: This allows you to manage your email campaigns using a kanban view to move each campaign through to the next stage at a certain point in it’s lifecycle. This also gives you additional options for your email campaigns like A/B split testing.

Show blacklist buttons on unsubscribe page: This allows recipients of your emails to not only unsubscribe their email from your list, but to also add their email to the blacklist which will block all mass email campaigns from being sent to them. They will still receive all emails sent out by Odoo in regards to orders or other inquiries that they initiate with your company. 

Emails on the blacklist that are also your customers will receive a visual indicator that they are on the blacklist. 

Specific Mail Server: If you have a designated mail server that you would like to send mailings from, you can specify that here. Once you select this option, you can choose from the list of configured email servers on your database. 

We will not be covering setting up a mail server in this article, if you need help configuring a mail server for your mailings, contact Hibou Support for assistance.  

Website Popup: Select this option if you are using the Odoo Website application and you would like to create a pop-up window on your website that suggests visitors join your email list. 

Once you have your options selected, click the Save button. 

Mailing Lists are pre-built groups of contacts that you can use to send mass email campaigns without needing to build out rules for filtering your contacts every time you want to send it out. 

To create a new Mailing List, select MAILING LISTS > MAILING LISTS. 

Here you will see all of the mailing lists that you’ve previously made. To create a new one, click the CREATE button. 

You simply enter in the Mailing List Name and then decide if you want this mailing list to be on the public “unsubscribe” page of your website so that your users can manage their subscription preferences. 

Once those details are filled in, click CREATE.

You will now have your mailing list created and can begin adding contacts to it. 

Adding Mailing List Contacts

Navigate to MAILING LISTS > MAILING LIST CONTACTS.

Click CREATE and you will be prompted to enter in the contact details for this subscriber. The only required field for a mailing list contact is their email address. 

In addition to the subscriber’s contact details, you will also be able to track how many emails have bounced back, if they have opted out of receiving your emails from this list, and which email lists they are subscribed to. 

Mailing List: To add a new Mailing List to a contact, click ADD A LINE and then choose the mailing list that you would like them to receive mail from. 

Unsubscription Date: You can set an unsubscribe date that will automatically unsubscribe this contact from the specified mailing list on a certain date.

Opt Out: If there is a checkmark in the box, then this subscriber has opted out of receiving mail from this list. 

Once you have all of the necessary details for this contact filled in, click SAVE.  

Repeat this process for all of your mailing list contacts. 

If you have extensive email contacts, you can also opt to Import them into Odoo. 

We will not be covering importing contacts in this article, if you need help importing contacts for your mailings, contact Hibou Support for assistance. 

The next step in configuration is setting up your Mailings. These are the actual email campaigns that will be sent out to your subscribers. 

Navigate to MAILINGS and click the CREATE button to make a new mailing. 

You will be presented with the following options. 

Subject: Input the subject line for your message. 

Recipients: This is where you will select the contacts that will receiving this mailing. You can select from the following options: 

• Mailing List: With this option selected, you can choose from the Mailing Lists that you’ve created to send this message to the right subscribers. 

• Applicant: This selection will send this mailing to all contacts that have submitted a job application through the Recruitment app. You can target specific recipients by using filters, which we will cover below. 

• Contact: This selection will send this mailing to all of your database contacts. You can target specific recipients by using filters, which we will cover below. 

• Lead/Opportunity: This selection will send this mailing to all of your leads/opportunities. You can target specific recipients by using filters, which we will cover below. 

• Sale Order: This selection will send this mailing to all of your Sale Orders. You can target specific recipients by using filters, which we will cover below. 

To add filters to target specific contacts, select which group you want to start with from the recipients dropdown menu and then click the  ADD FILTER button to add a filtering rule. 

You will see a filtering rule appear that will allow you to choose how you want to target specific contacts. You can have as many rules as you want and they can target a large array of fields within Odoo. 

We will build out a few rules to give you an example of how to use these rules to select the correct recipients for your mass mailing. 

When you have more than one rule set, Odoo will default to search for contacts that match all of the rules that you have set. You can easily change this to filter for any of the rules instead. 

Once you have your rules set, you will see how many customer contacts will receive the mailing by viewing how many Records appear in the top right of the filters. 

If you click on the Record(s) button, you will see which contacts are being targeted to make sure that these are the correct contacts that you want to receive this mailing. 

Once your filtering rules are targeting the correct recipients, you can move onto selecting the email template that you would like to start filling in for the content of your email. 

In the MAIL BODY tab, you can select a template that you can use as a starting point for your email content. When you select your email template, you will see the contents of the tab change into a website editor that will allow you to drag and drop the different elements onto the template. 

By clicking on the text and images on the template you will be able to edit the content to your liking and format it as you see fit. 

We will not go in depth on how to use the editor in this article, if you need help with configuring an email template, please contact Hibou Support for help. 

Once your email content is correctly configured, you can edit your mass mailing options on the OPTIONS tab. 

Under the Mailing section, you can modify the From and Reply To email addresses and the names that will display alongside of each and  attach any documents that you want sent along with the email content.

Once all of your options are configured, click SAVE. 

Once you have all of your options configured and your email body put together to your liking, the only thing left to do is to send it out to your list. 

We recommend using the TEST button to send yourself a copy of the email, check the links, make sure the images and text render as you would like them to and then once you’re happy with the way it’s configured, you can use the SEND NOW button to immediately send the email out to your list. 

You can also use the SCHEDULE button to input a future date and time that you want the email to be sent. 

Once you see the status of your email change to SENT, it has been sent out to your recipients and you will see your mailings stats across the top of the page. You can also see your campaign’s stats on the main page of the Email Marketing application.