Odoo, as a product, is incredible. Whether it's for CMS/eCommerce or for managing your operations (CRM, point of sale, inventory, HR, etc.), Odoo software goes far beyond traditional competitors. But, even though we're three years ahead of the game compared to other enterprise apps when it comes to the technology, unfortunately we're three years behind in terms of visibility. Too few companies know about Odoo.
Marketing is our biggest challenge for the coming years. We can't fight with the same weapons as our competitors - SAP, Ms Dynamics or Magento Commerce. They're marketing budgets are much bigger than ours. To win this battle, we'll have to leverage our strengths - the main one being our ability to develop great applications.
This blog gives you a tour of our open source marketing apps, developed over the past 4 months.
SEO optimized website
Our initial focus has been to make Odoo the most SEO-friendly website builder (Search Engine Optimization). We worked on tools to promote pages, on best SEO practices and speed optimizations.
The promote tool, accessible at the top of every page, allows you to match your content with the related frequent searches on Google. It helps you better target topics of your posts or use the right wording according to what people search for on Google.
All SEO best practices are implemented by default on every page of the website (static or dynamic ones). This way, you don't have to worry about setting everything manually. Odoo CMS implements Sitemap, schema, clean URLs and efficient 301 redirects in case of renaming.
A lot of effort as been made on speed optimization. Not only because Google gives a ranking bonus to faster pages but also because it's better for the user experience. Changes that had the biggest impact on the page loading time are: smart cache optimization, using a CDN, only one CSS and one Javascript file to load for every page (whatever the dynamic features included in the page), minification and compression of every resource (images, HTML, CSS, Javascript).
As a result, Odoo gets 90% on the Google Page Speed test, much better than other open source CMS.
To speed up the page loading time, we even developed a pre-fetch of the next page when the user hover a click. This way, we load the content 0.8s before the user even clicks on the link. But we did not put this module in production as it didn't work well with Google Analytics.
Content is king
Odoo has a huge community and content is spread through a number of different channels such as presentations on slideshare, Q&A on stackoverflow, mailing lists on launchpad and events on eventbrite.
To capitalize on this content, we use it to drive traffic back to our website, attracting even more visitors to odoo.com. This way, we can easily convert visitors into leads with good call-to-actions. That's why we developed an open source stackoverflow clone for our community Q&A, an open source eventbrite clone (used Odoo for mailing lists) and released a slideshare clone to host content.
These 4 sections together attract already YYY% of visitors coming from a search engines. (yyy/day).
To boost the volume of content, we translate the website into 4 languages. Maintaining a continuously evolving website in multiple languages can be a nightmare. To ease the translation process, we developed an integration with Gengo - every piece of content that is created or modified is automatically sent to professional translators. (It costs $0.10 / word and takes on average 24 hours to be translated).
Leverage communities
By consolidating community discussion channels, we were able to ease contribution and retain community members. You can now subscribe to community mailing lists in one click (versus a complex onboarding on launchpad), the gamification on the forum boosted contributions and partners can publish their presentations (e.g. Success Stories) on our website.
In numbers:
- Forum: xxx posts / day resulting in yyy visitors / day
- Mailing lists: zzz emails / day, AAA subscription per day
- Presentations: BBB visitors per day, from CCC presentations
- 500 events organized per day with minimal administrative effort
Call-to-actions
Of course, getting visitors is only the first step in the funnel. We also need to convert these visitors into leads. We developed a series of building blocks in our content builder so you can put in pages using just drag & drop.
(Screenshot / animated gif on left, text on right)
Start a free trial
This building block is the only one that isn't part of Odoo's official offering as it's soley for our own use. It's mainly used on landing pages.
Avg conversion rate: xxx %
Subscribe to our content
We write blog posts and pages on lots of different topics: Sales, Accounting, Marketing, Finance, Design... We designed a building block that allows us to get readers to subscribe to a specific mailing list. This building block is mostly used in the bottom of blogs.
Avg conversion rate: xxx %
Tweet to get an answer
To leverage contributions on the forum, we built a tool that suggests you tweet when you post a new question or answer. (Feature inspired by Quora)
Avg performance: xxx% of the posts are shared.
Quick create a free trial
This building block adds a foldable top-bar to suggest a new visitor quickly test Odoo by creating an instance. (Inspired by manycontacts) It's mostly used in the forum and the documentation.
Avg conversion rate: xxx%
Popup on exit
We did not want to put too much call-to-actions on blogs to keep a pleasant readability. But, having just a newsletter subscription on the bottom of a post, our conversion rates where low. So, we implemented a popup that appears when the user exits a page.
Avg Conversion Rate: xxx%
Affordabnle A/B testing
A/B testing is a great practice to optimize your landing pages. But we only did a few A\B tests in the past because, with third party apps, its complex and it takes too much time to launch tests.
Developing an A/B feature was very similar to implement versioning support in Odoo CMS (just 4 extra days of development). With the Odoo integrated A/B testing tool, we can now launch A/B tests super fast to optimize landing pages.
Google AdWords Optimization
We invest around $15.000 per month on paid advertising. To boost the performance of our marketing campaigns, we developed a series a algorithm to optimize google AdWords. Their performance were so good that we also decided to launch an online service: AdSpike.
Every detail matters
We still have a lot of features to implement to make Odoo CMS the perfect one-stop inbound marketing plateform. We are working on every single details to maxime visitor acquisition and conversion.
The latest app we released is an URL shortener that you can use on your own domain. (an open source Bit.ly clone) The CTR of your links are higher if the domain is the right brand. You can use it to track clicks on URLs you publish on external websites.
It also has the advantage to be linked to your UTM campaigns, source and medium. It only requires 2 clicks to get a short link of a page with the right utms.
This way, you can track the performance of campaigns, sources, medium or individual links. You get statistics in Google Analytics (visitors, conversions) as well as in Odoo (leads, opportunities, invoices)
You can do it too
While we needed these apps for our own needs, we also designed thhem as finished products. This way, every Odoo CMS user can enjoy these features with just a few clicks. Now, it's your turn to skyrocket your website with Odoo marketing apps.
