When it comes to customization per user, meaning how you are able to access and communicate with the user in a more personalized level, you must customize with them how you communicate by email or phone as well as any other method. When it comes to manual marketing, it's obviously a better method because you are actually doing everything manually, which means you physically make a phone call or write an email, that is more personalized but that can take way longer, so it's great for customization but this method can be very slow. 

In automated marketing processes, there's also the possibility of doing a lot of high customization, and even though it will take a lot more time to set up, once it’s done, it's going to be much faster because everything is done automatically. In that sense it's better to have an automated marketing process in the long term.

When it comes to segmentation, which means filtering and dividing the contacts that might be potential clients from the rest, doing it manually can be very time consuming especially if you are using excel sheets. You need to know how excel well, it’s filters and if you want to import your contacts from your phone or email, it’s going to be really hard. On the other hand, if you have a CRM (customer relationship management), which we recommend you do as part of your marketing automation, the segmentation of creating different types of lists based on what we usually call tags on your CRM is going to be much more efficient. You can tag all your contacts in different ways and then you'll be able to segment them into different groups in a matter of minutes.

How many people can you reach when you are doing manual marketing vs automated marketing? Well naturally, manual marketing is limited to the amount of contacts you can physically reach out to either by phone or by email everyday. If you are using automation with the help from a computer and its resources, you can have greater reach.

Lead scoring is the ability to assign a numeric value to a potential client, in this case assigning a score to each of your leads based on how much they interact with you or whatever means of communication you create. The most typical process when it comes to marketing automation or lead scoring, is assigning a value to each web page that a user visits within your website. We encourage you to use a CRM so you can track exactly how many pages on your website are being visited.

For example, let’s say that every web page is worth one point, so every time somebody goes from one page to another they get one point, but let's say they go to the How It Works page, which you consider only a user really interested in your business would visit, so you increase its worth to 20 points. Then let’s say that you establish that after a user reaches a hundred points, a user might become a potential client, because he has engaged with you and is interested enough to visit your website and achieve that lead score. So now, you need to be alerted about this person through an automated form of communication like an email, that alerts you saying Hey! You should probably pick up the phone and give them a call to see how you can help them! 

When you manually assign a lead score, of course, it's much slower because you have to figure out the point system by giving them a manual score which takes a longer time to do for every person that you manually call or email, but when we are doing this through automation, basically you can automatically track when and what people are visiting on your website and definitely doing it through automation is much better and faster. 

Doing lead management manually again through an excel sheet or through your contacts on your email it's going to be really really slow. It's definitely incomparable to a CRM, which is why a CRM was invented to begin, so when it comes to lead management, if you are using a CRM you can quickly search the name and google all the notes of that lead, you can look at all the emails sent to that person, related tasks and any opportunities or potential sales, so doing lead management through a CRM, which is more automatic, is again much better.

Manual processes are going to take lots of time to do and naturally, marketing automation is less time consuming. In terms of hiring staff to track your marketing leads, you would need less people if you are doing marketing automation because a computer would be doing the work faster unlike manual processes, where you would need a team to do it for you.

There's definitely a benefit of doing things manually because these days it's very rare to find companies that actually pick up the phone and call customers, because we want to reach as many people in the least amount of time possible.

So taking the time to figure out who is worth reaching out to, is actually a good thing as long as you really targeting a potential client.

When it comes to cost, there is a much higher cost per lead or per sale when you are doing things manually simply because you take longer to do everything and you know your time is worth money, so the longer you take to reach people, the higher the cost of acquisition. When it comes to marketing automation, the cost per lead or sale acquisition is much lower because you've saved time doing a lot of these processes automatically. 

So this is the diagram that shows you, you know what happens when you are doing it manually. First you attract the customer with advertising, then the customer is hopefully interested enough to contact you, then they're going to either call you or come physically into your store and they'll either buy or not buy, right. If they buy, well great, you've made a sale. If they didn't, then you are going to figure out, hey did we get the contacts information? Their phone number or email? And hopefully you did because then you'll be able to call follow up with a call or an email, but, if you didn't get their contact information your kind of out of luck because it’s possible you'll never hear from them again. So this can also be a problem if you do things manually.

Lastly, here's a small diagram talking about very basic marketing automation in this case, a marketing automation workflow. What you do is you want to attract customers to your website or to a landing page or whatever form of reach you are using. Let's pretend you are doing a Facebook ad and people click on your ad, leading them to your landing page or website, usually because you're offering something valuable like a lead magnet, an offer or an access to a webinar or something that interests them. In the landing page, you're asking the user to read a bit about what you are offering, and then you usually ask them to click the CTA or call to action button to either sign up or fill out a form with their name and email, and if they do sign up, then you automatically follow up by email, through automation process.

In those emails you should choose to use a link that drives them back to your website to buy something else from you or subscribe or whatever you want, so if they do click on the link and they buy something from you, great, if they don't, you still have their contact information, and you already have them in an automation flow so you can put them back into the sales funnel and send them another email until hopefully they'll become clients.

If the visitor does not enroll or sign up, and they do not convert from an anonymous user into an engaged user who gave you their name and email, there's really nothing you can do because they chose not to engage with you and they did not give you their contact information.

So I hope that was helpful. I'm trying to keep these Marketing Fridays episodes short but I definitely encourage you to ask me any questions that you have and will definitely be answering them in the comment area below.

This is Jaime again from Bloominari Marketing Agency in San Diego California, hoping you have a great weekend. Bye Bye!