Email Marketing and Marketing Automation in Odoo 20

Of all the apps in Odoo, Email Marketing and Marketing Automation are the ones most marketers judge by a simple test: can I see what my campaigns actually did, and can I react to it without rebuilding everything by hand? Odoo 20, released in September 2026, moves both apps in that direction. The official release notes give Email Marketing one of its longest change lists in years — click-level tracking, conditional content, dynamic lists, and a proper template library — while Marketing Automation gains a drag-and-drop workflow builder, event-based triggers, webhooks, and an AI assistant for setting up campaigns. This article walks through what changed, drawn from the official Odoo 20 release notes and the 20.0 documentation.

Email Marketing: measurement gets specific

The most useful change is also the least glamorous. Odoo 20 adds click tracking to Email Marketing: you can now see which recipients clicked on which links in a mailing. Opens have always been a soft metric — image loading varies by mail client — but a click on a specific link is a deliberate act, and knowing which link each contact chose tells you far more about intent than an aggregate click rate. A product link click and a blog link click are different signals, and follow-ups can now be planned around that difference.

Attribution gets tidier at the same time. UTM handling now aligns with industry standards: instead of creating new sources on the fly, UTM details are mapped through a new “Reference” field. Anyone who has audited a CRM full of near-duplicate campaign sources — the same campaign spelled three ways because three people typed it — will recognise the problem this solves. Cleaner source data means the reports you build on top of it can finally be trusted.

One smaller option rounds out the tracking picture: link tracking can now be disabled directly in the HTML editor, for the cases where you would rather send clean, untracked links than route a recipient through a redirect.

Personalisation: conditional content and dynamic lists

Two changes move Odoo 20 mailings from “one email for everyone” toward genuinely segmented sends:

Conditional content. Blocks in a mailing can be shown based on conditions for individual recipients. One mailing can carry a block that only some recipients see — an offer for one segment, a different message for another — instead of forcing you to duplicate the whole mailing for each audience.
Dynamic mailing lists. You can create mailing lists whose recipients are calculated when the mailing is processed. A static list starts going stale the day you build it; a dynamic list is re-evaluated at send time, so the audience reflects the database as it is when the email actually goes out.

A faster design workflow

Most of the remaining Email Marketing changes are about the daily work of building mailings:

Full-screen editing. Mailing designs are now always edited in full screen, giving the drag-and-drop builder the whole canvas instead of a framed panel.
Mailing template library. Mailings can be saved as templates and reached through a dedicated menu — the difference between “we made a good newsletter once” and an actual reusable asset your team can find again.
Favorite blocks. Individual mailing blocks can be saved to reuse later, so a header, footer, or call-to-action you have perfected becomes a standard part.
New templates and blocks. Fresh starting points have been added to the library.
New fonts, with fallbacks. New fonts are available, and a fallback system handles mail clients or browsers that do not support the selected font — important because email clients are notoriously inconsistent about typography.
Product and event snippets. Drag a product or event snippet into a mailing and select the records; the snippet fills itself automatically, instead of you copying names, dates, and prices by hand and risking a typo.
Social media accounts. You can connect your social media accounts and customise how they appear in mailings, keeping the social row of your emails consistent without manual link wrangling.

None of these items is dramatic alone. Together they describe an editor that respects the fact that most marketing email is production work: the tenth newsletter should be faster to build than the first, and in Odoo 20 it is.

Contact management catches up

Three quieter changes fix long-standing friction around the audience itself. Contacts can be added to marketing mailing lists more easily, and — just as important — contacts can manage their own subscriptions. Self-managed subscriptions are the healthy pattern for consent-based marketing: recipients who can adjust what they receive are less likely to hit the spam button or vanish entirely, and the marketer keeps a list of people who actually want to be there.

Mailings can also now be sent to employees and suppliers, which acknowledges something many businesses already do with workarounds: a good chunk of “email marketing” inside a real company is internal announcements, staff updates, and supplier communications. Sending those from the same tool, with the same tracking, beats maintaining a separate process.

Marketing Automation: a visual workflow builder

The headline change in Marketing Automation is a drag-and-drop workflow builder, offering a more visual way to create journeys. Automation campaigns have always been logical structures — a trigger, then a sequence of activities with durations and filters — but assembling them as a form-based list made it hard to see the shape of a journey at a glance. A visual builder makes the flow itself the interface: you can see where participants enter, what happens to them, and where branches occur.

The 20.0 documentation confirms how campaigns are started in 20: when you create a campaign you can define a trigger from scratch, load a template, or choose “Ask AI” and create the campaign from an AI prompt. Odoo ships templates for common journeys — a welcome flow for new subscribers, a double opt-in flow, purchase follow-up, an anniversary discount, lead prioritisation — which pair naturally with the builder: start from a template, then reshape it visually. As with all of Odoo 20's AI features, the assistant runs on IAP credits, so AI-assisted setup is a metered convenience, not a free default.

Triggers that start journeys on their own

The deeper automation change is in what can start and steer a campaign:

Event-based triggers. Campaigns can now be triggered by events such as page visits and list subscriptions — behaviour, not just dates. A contact who visits a page or joins a list can enter a journey at the moment it happens.
More trigger types. Actions can be triggered by event, date, anniversary, webhook, or on demand. The anniversary trigger is the quiet workhorse here: renewals, yearly check-ins, and “it's been a year since your purchase” offers run themselves.
New actions. Two new actions join the toolbox: “Collect new activity” and “Wait for a value” — the latter letting a journey pause until a record reaches a state you care about, rather than firing on a fixed schedule regardless.
Webhook integration. External systems can connect to campaigns through webhooks to add participants in real time. A signup on an external platform, a registration in another tool, or an event in a bespoke system can drop a participant straight into an Odoo journey the moment it happens.

One dependency is worth knowing from the documentation: installing Marketing Automation also installs Email Marketing, because most of its features depend on it, and the CRM and SMS Marketing apps unlock the rest. Journeys in Odoo are cross-app by design — an automation that starts from a page visit can create CRM follow-ups and send SMS steps — which is precisely why the trigger improvements matter more than they would in a standalone email tool.

What this means for a small marketing team

Read together, the two apps' changes form a sensible arc. Email Marketing got better at the craft — measuring clicks per link, personalising blocks per recipient, computing audiences at send time, and reusing design work. Marketing Automation got better at the timing — starting journeys from real behaviour, waiting for the right value, accepting participants from outside systems, and letting an AI assistant draft the campaign you then refine in a visual builder. For a small team running its marketing inside the same database as its sales and invoicing, that combination removes the two most common reasons campaigns stall: not knowing what worked, and not having time to build the follow-up.