Thank for ur suggestion Flyguy,

I agree that the documentation is lacking and marketing campaigns come across as unnecessarily complicated. However Odoo will have better email templates soon and the mass mailing campaigns module can be used to create simple mass mailings. Admittedly the tracking of opens and clicks is not as sophisticated as mailchimp, but it is getting better. For autoresponder campaigns odoo's marketing campaigns module can quite simply be set up to deliver a sequence of emails after a customer signs up to an odoo mailing list. It would be really useful to have online examples of different marketing campaigns like this.