It's Time for Marketing Automation!

CHARLINE: 0:01

We have a lot of customers who are thinking about the overall strategy, but you really need to think also about the touch point, the way you will target your customer and you know how you you will deliver your message according to the touch point. You can do marketing automation based on your customer behavior on your website activities, and you can have dynamic content in marketing automation thanks to dynamic placeholder in the email template. So it will help you to, for example, target the name of your customers.

AMY-CAROLINE: 0:33

Hey there Odoo lovers! It's great to have you back with us on another episode.

Today, we've got Charline, business Analyst at Odoo, joining us again for another episode, and we're going to get into something you've probably bumped into without even realizing it: 0:37

marketing automation. It's so part of our day to day that it's like it's playing hide and seek with us. Ever found yourself late night online shopping, piling things into your cart at your go to store, only to second guess yourself? You think, do I really need all this? You decide to sleep on it and then completely forget about it. Fast forward a couple of days and boom, you get this email nudging you hey, you left some goodies in your cart. Grab them now! Well guess what? There isn't a team of people sending those emails to you. It's all automated. Today we're diving head first into this topic. We're talking about why you'd want to use marketing automation, how to kick things off, how to set this up in Odoo, and we'll be throwing in some pro tips along the way. Ready to get the low down on marketing automation with Odoo? Let's go. Okay. So thank you for joining me today for another marketing conversation. So let's get started with the basics as we do in every podcast. Can you please tell us what is marketing automation?

CHARLINE: 1:45

Marketing automation refers to the use of technology and software in order to automate your marketing tasks, such as sending welcome email, uh, sending promo code and so on. So it really helps people to do automatically, uh, typical message that they will do every time, but not automatically. And then it will help people to save their time.

AMY-CAROLINE: 2:09

Great. And apart from the fact that it's obviously more convenient for for people, what is the real value behind this for customers or for companies?

CHARLINE: 2:18

So for companies, they can have many benefits such as time saving, like I've just said, uh, it's also uh, it also will give a better customer experience for their customer and also a better evaluation, uh, of their marketing ROI.

AMY-CAROLINE: 2:34

Okay. I mean, obviously, that's a great argument for getting started. Um, and so I think this is kind of a broad subject. There's a lot that can go into marketing automation. Can you give some tangible use cases for how this works?

CHARLINE: 2:49

Uh, yeah, of course. Uh, you can do marketing automation based on your customer behavior on your website activities. So one good example can be, um, when someone will submit a contact form on your website, then you can automatically send them an email saying, okay, thank you for your request. We will back to you soon. Um, uh, so it helps you to manage expectations. But another example could be, uh, when you subscribe to a webinar, for example, you will send an email to the customer in order to confirm the registration. And then if they open the email, you can send them, uh, other content to watch before the webinar. But if they don't open the email, you can send them a reminder in order to ask them to confirm the registration. So those are typical example.

AMY-CAROLINE: 3:39

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Those are some use cases that do seem very common. But just from what you were describing, it does sound like there really are a lot of options and a lot of different directions. You can go with this. Um, so that will lead me to my next question. Actually, how should a company integrate marketing automation campaigns into their overall strategy? Because of course there are a lot of details to consider. So where does marketing automation fit into that?

CHARLINE: 4:06

Marketing automation should really align with the overall strategy, but it will uh, it needs also to align with, uh, all the touchpoints that you have with your customers, such as, uh, email marketing, SMS marketing, social media posts and so on. Um, so yeah, if I can give an example about it, is that when a customer will subscribe to your newsletter, you can send them a welcome email. Then you can also send him a promo code like two weeks later in order to make him purchase a product on your website. And according to it, you can like, uh, get another touchpoint thanks to SMS marketing and send him an SMS in order to suggest him to leave with you about your product.

AMY-CAROLINE: 4:50

And I guess this is great too, because as you, uh, prepare all of these things to be sent in the different channels, you also keep your message consistent, and the content of what you're sending is remains the same overall.

CHARLINE: 5:02

Yeah, exactly. Because we have a lot of customers who are thinking about the overall strategy. But you really need to think also about the touchpoint, uh, the way you will target your, your customer and, and you know, how you, you will deliver your message according to the touchpoint.

AMY-CAROLINE: 5:18

Okay. That's really interesting. And more than just the touchpoint, if just to take a step, another step back if someone wants to get started, what is one of the first campaigns that could easily be adopted?

CHARLINE: 5:33

In Odoo, we have different campaigns such as welcome email, uh, abandoned cart email, and so on. So the first one will be the abandoned cart email because it's standard in Odoo you can have the configuration in your website settings. So it's just a checkbox to check so the.

AMY-CAROLINE: 5:48

Customer doesn't have to think about this and configure it. Odoo is like, hey, welcome here. We already have this set up for you.

CHARLINE: 5:54

Yeah, exactly. So you just have to check the box. Then you can choose after how many hours you will send the email. You can totally customize the email template for this abandoned cart. So yeah, this one is really easy. But you can also have another template that it maybe it's, uh, less easy. Um, so if you have, uh, travel blog, for example, and you want to get new subscriber, uh, then it's a success. You get new subscriber and your mailing list contact, but you really want to keep your data accurate and to know which, uh, email address are the right ones. So it, um, you want to remove the bounce one? Calling it like this in marketing the email address that are not, uh, that are not useful. And for this we have uh, also uh, an easy, uh, marketing automation template, which is called welcome email. So it will help you to send automatically an email. And then for the email that I will not well spelled or whatever it will be, it will be removed because it's a bounced email.

AMY-CAROLINE: 6:55

Okay. So it's super easy and clean and, it can it can get rid of some nasty bounced emails that annoys everybody.

CHARLINE: 7:03

Exactly.

AMY-CAROLINE: 7:03

And so here we talk a lot about more web related things like welcome emails when they're trying to access your travel blog or your shop. But I suppose we can do the same for any other, uh, reasons as well. We can target other segments too.

CHARLINE: 7:19

Yeah. So you can, uh, really choose the segment that you want to target thanks to marketing automation based on your customer behavior, based on demographic criteria, based on website activities and so on. So, yeah, thanks to marketing automation, you can target all the apps that you are using in Odoo. And according to this, you can target the customer behavior based on the apps that they are using. You know.

AMY-CAROLINE: 7:42

Okay, interesting. And when a customer or when a user I keep saying customer. But when a user is trying to, um, think about making a really good campaign, a really quality campaign, what are some of the things that they absolutely need?

CHARLINE: 7:56

Of course they need to have, uh, they need to have a clear objective, but they also need to think about three, three things. Uh, the first is the action. So it refers to the, the target in Odoo. So it will be, for example, uh, someone who is purchasing a bike on your website or someone who is submitting a contact form on your website, then you will want to know who you want to target. So, for example, a sale order, then, uh, you need to be to think about the filter that you want to apply the segmentation. Really. So okay, I want to target my sell order, but I want to, uh, target the sale order with the product bike. For example, if they purchase a bike and then think about the the activity that you want to do according to your segmentation. So if you want to send an email to those people, if you want to send an SMS, if you want to tag a contact or whatever. And yeah, so the notion of timing, because you have to know when you will send this email if it's two hours before or after someone has purchased something or two months later or whatever. So yeah, really think about the, the objective, the the target, the activity that you want to configure and the timing.

AMY-CAROLINE: 9:09

So it really does seem like this, uh, marketing automation application in Odoo is really flexible and you can really manage a lot with it. So in this case, the user really needs to think about exactly what it is that they want, exactly who they want to create a journey for. And if they think about it, there's a way to do it.

CHARLINE: 9:27

Exactly.

AMY-CAROLINE: 9:28

So speaking of this journey, then how do we actually create the journey in Odoo?

CHARLINE: 9:33

Of course you will use marketing automation application, and so your journey will refer to a marketing automation campaign in which you will configure, just as I just said, your target, your filter, your activity and so on and your child activity. And so for an example like the clustering strategy with the bike that someone can purchase on your website, if you want to target them, then you will put when you will open your your marketing automation campaign, you can choose first the target so the sale order. Then you will filter on two things. First, the sale order that is in the stage sale order because it can be in quotation, quotation sent or sale order. So it must be a sale order and also on the product name that is in the sale order. So the bike for example. And then once you have done your segmentation, your your perfect segmentation, you can add an activity that will be an email in order to promote a newsletter or whatever. And then you can add what we call a chat activity. So it depends on the customer behavior with your last activity. So if they have open your email, not open, click on a link or not. And then you can add a child activity. So another email or SMS or whatever.

AMY-CAROLINE: 10:44

And is it easy in Odoo to modify existing campaigns or let's say even duplicate campaigns, if they just want to change a slight detail from what they just built?

CHARLINE: 10:55

Yeah, you can totally duplicate a campaign and change a change whatever you want, but you have to duplicate it or stop it and then restart it.

AMY-CAROLINE: 11:02

Okay. But everything is manageable. Yeah. Again, very flexible, very easy to use. Um, so of course there are different campaign strategies that a customer can use. So they can go always on or choose an ad hoc. What are the difference between these two campaign strategies?

CHARLINE: 11:22

Uh an always-on campaign uh refers more to a long term campaign, more about the customer engagement. And ad-hoc campaign will be more short term and more about the specific promotion, for example. So for the ad hoc, let's say that you have a store and you are selling clothes and you want to say, okay, we have a big discount this weekend, you will send an SMS to your customer in order to say, okay, this weekend we'll do a big promotion, come and visit us. And for the always-on is more about all the campaigns around the customer. So okay, I will send an email, a welcome email. If they've purchased something, then I will send them a promo code in two months because they didn't purchase anything since the since two months and so on. So it's more related to long term relationship with the customer.

AMY-CAROLINE: 12:08

Okay, interesting. So then we will play with both of these strategies depending on as a business what we have going on.

CHARLINE: 12:14

Exactly.

AMY-CAROLINE: 12:15

Really cool. So something that I'm interested about as well is the dynamic content that we can manage with marketing automation. Can you explain what this is and how it works? Also why it's important.

CHARLINE: 12:28

You can have dynamic content in marketing automation thanks to Dynamic Placeholder in the email template. So it will help you to, for example, uh, target the name of your customer, say hello AC, uh, I, I want to welcome you in the community. You can also do this thanks to the new version of Odoo with email marketing, but it's more related to split the name and the surname of your customer. So it was a feature that was asked a lot of time before, and now it's, uh, it's possible. So it's a configuration in the email marketing configuration. And now you can split name and surname. So you can totally just say hello Charline and no, hello Charline Vanderschelde in your email. Just target the name. And it's really useful because your customer will see that everything is personalized. You will have a better customer experience. And it has also been seen that when you target, the customer needs, when you send them a personalized message, you will get a higher conversion rate. So it's really, really useful.

AMY-CAROLINE: 13:28

Okay, that is super useful. And when you say that, um, it has been asked for for a long time, or is it Odoo users who have asked for it or internally? Okay, so we listen to the people and we yeah, we've updated. Okay. That's important to know. So anyone who's listening don't hesitate to give us your feedback because it is taken into account. So I will then move on to my next question. Does Odoo provide templates for marketing automation campaigns? What do those templates look like? Is it just a base structure? Do people just go directly for the content that's built into the template?

CHARLINE: 14:02

Uh, so it's also a new feature. Uh, so when you open the marketing automation application, you will see six templates. It's more related to sales and marketing. So it's already built. And you can just, uh, start a campaign and everything is already configured, such as the double opt in, uh, campaign. It was also asked a lot of time before, because it's mandatory in a lot of countries, when someone subscribe to newsletter, you have to ask them if they really want to receive your newsletter and be sure that they agree to receive it. So it's a template that already exists, and you can just start the campaign. And then if someone doesn't want to receive your newsletter, it means that they didn't click on the link in your email and they will be removed from, uh, from your mailing list contact. Okay.

AMY-CAROLINE: 14:52

And can we create templates ourselves too?

CHARLINE: 14:54

Yeah, of course, according to the needs or to your needs, to the brand, to the companies and so on. You can totally, uh, create your own marketing automation templates.

AMY-CAROLINE: 15:03

Ah amazing! And what are some of your favorite features? I mean, you've worked a lot with this application and you've implemented it a lot working with Odoo users. What are some of your personal favorite features in the marketing automation?

CHARLINE: 15:18

Uh, of course it's the new templates, because I think that when you use for the first time marketing automation template, it's not so user friendly. So the fact that now we have templates that people have asked for, it's really it's really useful, especially the double opt in. I think it's one of my favorite because it's really easy to understand when you when you open it. And the fact that you can add chat activities, such as if someone has click on a link on your email as open it, and so on. It's really a powerful application, and you say.

AMY-CAROLINE: 15:48

That it can be a bit challenging to adapt to marketing automation, which we're working on, as you said. But considering this, if someone is just getting started with Odoo or perhaps it's a new business, would you recommend starting with marketing automation right away? Or are there other marketing strategies, tools, features that you recommend that a company get started with first.

CHARLINE: 16:09

Maybe with email marketing, and then check which target you want, which recipient you want, you want to target, uh, know the filter that you want to apply according to email marketing. And then it would be easier to use a marketing automation.

AMY-CAROLINE: 16:24

Okay. And then segue into into the the big app, the marketing automation. So previously we had. You on another episode. Data driven marketing. So what kind of data can we use? With marketing automation?

CHARLINE: 16:40

You can use a lot of data every day that are related to the other application in Odoo. So when you want to target a customer behavior on the website, for example, for someone who has submit a form, you can totally target him. Um, so yeah, you really you can target every, every data that you have, uh, according to the application that you are using in Odoo.

AMY-CAROLINE: 17:04

From your experience, do you feel that people kind of run with this a bit too far and then they create too many campaigns, or because there are so many ways to target, actually, as I'm saying, that it makes me think of something else. It's it possible that a customer can easily, uh, send too many emails to a customer? I guess they will try to choose their segments carefully, but there could be some overlap there. What do you recommend for businesses to avoid spamming customers?

CHARLINE: 17:33

Keep your data accurate, of course, but also when you are creating, um, marketing automation campaign, uh, we have a lot of customers who are creating a lot of different campaigns because they want to say, okay, I want to target this kind of people and, and, and then order one. But you can create one campaign and then filter again according to the activity that you want to set up. So okay, I want to send an email to those people. But then you can also filter in the activity. You can adapt the domain that you want to target. So sometimes you can do only one marketing automation campaign and not do three, uh, other ones.

AMY-CAROLINE: 18:10

So we need to be careful about that. And is it really easy to test? Is it safe to test.

CHARLINE: 18:15

It's safe. It's easy. But just one advice that I can give is like when you test you have to delete your previous test. So let's say that you want to test a marketing automation campaign for a new opportunity. In the CRM. You test it, you will have a smart button, uh, with your test, and you have to delete the test that you have done before because otherwise you can test it again.

AMY-CAROLINE: 18:38

Okay, that's a super good tip. That's a good thing for people to know. Have you have you had the case yourself or why isn't this working the way I expect? Oh yeah. Didn't delete my test. Do you have any other pieces of advice for our users as well? Just like this, things that they can avoid, um, when setting up their marketing automation campaigns? Um, some common pitfalls, maybe.

CHARLINE: 18:59

But the test is, uh, is a really good one because we have a lot of customers coming saying, okay, I can't test anymore or I don't know, I don't understand why. Be sure that you have email address on your contact because it happens a lot of time. Also that you don't have any email address on your contact.

AMY-CAROLINE: 19:13

And and a little tip for this as well. Not having an email address can impact other things that Odoo like not being able to, uh, let your customers pay online and could cause some other problems. So the email address for many reasons, very important.

CHARLINE: 19:29

Yeah. So be sure that you have all the data that you need when you are configuring a marketing automation campaign. When you think about your the objective, the target that you that you have to set up, be sure that you have every every data that you need.

AMY-CAROLINE: 19:42

Okay. That's good. That's important. And do you have any stories of implementations that you've done that have been particularly challenging or interesting? A specific use case that you have worked on?

CHARLINE: 19:54

Uh, yeah. I had a customer who wanted to implement email marketing and marketing automation, but he wasn't so user friendly with it and so on. So it was really challenging to make him understand when especially when you open marketing automation application, it can be a bit difficult to.

AMY-CAROLINE: 20:09

And when you say he wasn't super familiar with it, at what level are we talking about? What what? No, I shouldn't say what generation. But like, he was he, uh, or this person already familiar with working with the back end of Odoo in other ways, and it was more challenging to set up the structure or what kind of level of struggling with it.

CHARLINE: 20:29

Wasn't so familiar with Odoo at all. So it was it was really. And it took Odoo, uh, especially for marketing. So it was really challenging, uh, to make him understand, uh, the marketing automation application, the target and the filter, because it can be a bit difficult to know, okay, which target I have to put there, which filter I have to use in. I want to if I want to target my sale order products and so on. So it's really challenging to know what you have to put in those, uh, in those fields. But, um, yeah, at least it's, uh, it was a success because, uh, he's using a marketing automation application now for a lot of campaigns.

AMY-CAROLINE: 21:03

So, uh, a lot of campaigns. And did you manage to train him on, on the software and.

CHARLINE: 21:09

Yeah, exactly.

AMY-CAROLINE: 21:10

It's interesting because, um, Odoo overall is extremely user friendly. But as a new business owner, if you're just getting started with any software, obviously you can face some challenges. Um, so here I'll just plug a bit of Odoo information. We of course have e-learning videos, documentation, a lot of great resources online, amazing community answering questions on the forum. So. If anyone feels a little bit lost in the case of Odoo or how to get started, please refer to those beautiful resources that we have.

CHARLINE: 21:40

And we have Odoo Academy also that we are giving a the office in Louvain-la-neuve. And there is one about marketing.

AMY-CAROLINE: 21:47

Nice. That's, that's, that's really good to know. So definitely join that too. So we talked a little bit about the pitfalls and some advice in that case. But can you also say some of the best practices if you had to list a few.

CHARLINE: 21:59

So of course you need to have a clear objective. Uh, you have to segment your audience to understand your audience, to personalize your content according to your to your audience. Then you have to test it, thanks to the test button on the marketing automation campaign and optimize it if needed. And finally, keep your your data accurate because it's a big part of the success of your marketing automation campaign.

AMY-CAROLINE: 22:25

How much manual effort would you say goes into these campaigns? Of course, there's the initial setup, but how routinely would you recommend someone go and check that everything is running smoothly?

CHARLINE: 22:36

I would say once a week they can check if everything is fine, but once you have tested, test it uh, like 2 or 3 times to be sure that it's working well. And then once it's running, you can just check it.

AMY-CAROLINE: 22:49

You can just trust, yeah, trust that it works and then your life will be so much easier. Amazing. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me about marketing automation. This has been a really lovely conversation and thank you again.

CHARLINE: 23:02

Thank you.

AMY-CAROLINE: 23:03

And just like that, we've come to the end of today's episode about marketing automation with Odoo. Charline has been amazing sharing insights and tricks that make marketing not just smart, but super relatable and a bit like magic. Remember, it's all about making those connections with people without feeling like a robot. It's putting the auto in automation while keeping the human touch. If you're itching to try out some tips we've shared, or you've got stories of your own, marketing automation wins or funny fails, we're all ears. Drop us a line. Or better yet, let's keep the conversation going on our dedicated pad. The link is in the description. Also, don't hesitate to look at our already available webinars to learn how to set up a marketing automation journey inside of Odoo. Thanks for tuning in to planet Oodoers. Keep experimenting, keep personalizing your marketing, and most importantly, keep it real. I'll catch you in the next episode. Good afternoon, good evening and good night.