Email is arguably one of the most stable channels in the recent history of digital marketing. Thirty years after emerging as a communication tool, it remains one of the main vectors of the relationship between a company and its customers. Yet few French SMEs and mid-sized companies measure the strategic stakes of fully controlling their email base and their sending capacity.
The illusion of specialized platforms
The email marketing market has been structured around a few dominant platforms:
- Mailchimp, Brevo, Klaviyo, ActiveCampaign, HubSpot.
- These tools have their merits.
- They are easy to pick up, functionally rich, and strong on deliverability.
- But they introduce into the company's value chain a dependency that deserves analysis.
The first point of attention is data ownership. When a French SME builds its email base on an external platform, it entrusts the core of its commercial assets to a third party. Contact attributes, preferences, interaction history, engagement scores: all of this lives in databases the company does not control. In the event of service termination or migration, data extraction is technically possible but the exported data is often stripped of its context.
- The second point of attention is the lack of unification with the rest of the information system
- The external platform's email base inevitably diverges from the ERP's contact base
- A customer who unsubscribes on the platform is still contacted by salespeople in the ERP
- A new customer signed by the salesperson does not instantly arrive in the email base
- These divergences create inconsistencies noticed by customers and undermine the quality of the relationship
The third point of attention is pricing. The business model of email marketing platforms is generally based on the number of contacts in the database or the volume of sends. As the company grows, the bill rises, without the functional value perceived by users progressing in the same proportions.
Odoo's integrated path
Odoo's Email Marketing module works on the contacts already present in the ERP. Having a single contact base changes the economics of the setup. Segments are built from real business criteria: customers who bought a given product, prospects in a given region, partners inactive for six months, subscribers to a given industry newsletter. No export to organize. No synchronization to orchestrate. No possible divergence.
The campaign tools match market standards. Visual editor to build emails in your brand style, management of reusable templates, A/B tests on subject, content or send time, send scheduling, tracking of open, click and unsubscribe rates, fine-grained consent management in line with the General Data Protection Regulation.
- The difference lies elsewhere
- Every interaction a recipient has with an email (open, click, unsubscribe) is fed back into the contact record in the ERP
- The salesperson who opens their customer's record sees the last email sent, whether it was opened, and which link was clicked
- Marketing management sees which segments campaigns perform best with
- General management sees the contribution of email to overall commercial activity
The critical question of deliverability
A professional email marketing platform typically handles two crucial technical functions:
- sender authentication (SPF, DKIM, DMARC) and IP reputation management.
- An SME moving to sending via its ERP must handle these topics seriously, or risk seeing its emails end up in spam.
On Odoo, several approaches are possible. The first is to use a specialized third-party sending service plugged into Odoo via a simple SMTP configuration: Brevo, Mailjet, Sendinblue, Amazon SES, or French players such as Tipimail or Sarbacane. This approach keeps the data under control in the ERP while benefiting from the technical expertise of a specialist in delivery.
The second is to set up your own sending server. This path is technically demanding and only makes sense for high-volume organizations with in-house technical skills. Most French SMEs and mid-sized companies will find an optimal balance in the first approach.
Sovereignty of transactional email
Beyond email marketing proper, transactional email (order confirmations, delivery notifications, appointment reminders, attached invoices) represents an essential part of an SME's communication. In Odoo, these sends are native to the module concerned. No third-party platform needed. No additional dependency.
The choice of delivery service is crucial here. For transactional emails that contain personal and sensitive commercial data, choosing a European, or ideally French, provider is particularly worthwhile. Players such as Sarbacane, Brevo (French despite its international name), Mailjet (French) or Tipimail offer a combination of technical performance and European jurisdiction that meets modern sovereignty requirements.
An architecture decision
Outsourcing or integrating the email marketing function is an information system architecture decision. Outsourcing brings some initial ease at the price of progressive data dispersion and growing economic dependency. Integrating requires a bit more technical effort at the start and in return brings a single source of data, a reduction in recurring costs and strategic control of the customer asset.
For French SMEs and mid-sized companies that want to build their growth around their own digital assets, the integrated Odoo approach stands out as an option to consider seriously.