The marketing for your business should be making sales superfluous.

Your marketing should be designed to appeal to your target market. It should be in touch with their pain points and it should be answering those concerns and problems.

So your marketing automation should be an efficient and effective way for you to respond consistently, regularly and intuitively to the needs of your customers, clients or prospects.

Marketing Automation is the opportunity for your business to be more responsive to customers, utilise staff much more efficiently and keep you at the forefront of your valued customers.

Marketing automation will help your business streamline your lead generation, segmentation, lead nurturing and lead scoring, customer lifecycle marketing, cross-sell and up-sell, customer retention, and marketing ROI measurement.

Marketing automation promises big things; more leads, conversions and sales, all with less work. Businesses that use automation have seen increased leads and sales, driving a 14% in sales productivity and a 12% reduction in marketing overheads. (digitalmarketinginstitute.com)

So when you decide to implement marketing automation into your business what should you be looking to achieve?

Here are the 7 Outcomes that Marketing Automation needs to deliver to your business​

1. Drive More Leads

Every business needs to drive more leads and bring in new clients to their business.

You should segment your list to avoid sending the same message to your entire database. If you want really good engagement from your list, then segmentation is your key.

A common way of segmenting is based upon lead demographics, interests, behaviours and lead source. Your segments should be based upon your business and the types of customers you have.

Ultimately your segmentation should allow you to move your customers and prospects along your sales funnel.

You can use marketing automation to drive your pipeline by sourcing the hottest leads, creating customized campaigns (such as email campaigns) to target ideal buyers, and moving leads through the sales cycle to maximize the ROI of marketing programs.

Your marketing automation will allow you to connect sales and marketing. Sales will know which leads to follow up with first and be able to focus their time on what matters most: closing deals.

There is extensive evidence supporting the value of marketing automation. According to a report by VB Insight, 80% of marketing automation users saw their number of leads increase, and 77% saw the number of conversions increase. Further, Companies using marketing automation see 53% higher conversion rates from initial response-to-MQL and a revenue growth rate that is 3.1% higher than non-users. (sharpspring.com)

2. Convert More Leads To Sales

One of the best ways to increase conversion is to create a very focused sales funnel.

You limit your prospects’ choices by giving them the exact information they are looking for and guiding them to the action you want them to take.

With lead scoring and grading, you can determine how engaged a prospect is based on activities like interacting with website content or emails.

You can see how closely they match the profile of your ideal buyer. Lead scoring and grading features also make it easier to prioritize which leads to follow up with first.

With powerful features like lead nurturing you will make sure that your business won't miss out on an opportunity that isn't ready to close. For instance, prospects who aren’t ready to interact with sales teams can be automatically added to an educational email journey, which can deliver relevant, dynamic content based on their preferences.

You can automatically run A/B tests of email campaigns to find the message that inspires the most engagement and conversation. This means you can test and gain feedback quickly on what works.

When you see what is working more quickly you can implement improvements faster which means improving your conversions and ultimately sales.

In a benchmark study by eMarketer, the research found that B2C marketers who are using automation- including everything from birthday emails to cart abandonment programs – have seen conversion rates as high as 50%.       (marketo.com)

3. Optimise Marketing Spend

Marketing automation offers a number of specific benefits for small and medium businesses (SMBs).

It helps you monitor the effectiveness and ROI of your digital marketing campaigns, so you can find out what’s working and what’s not.

Then you can automate many activities – like lead follow-up, email campaigns, list segmentation, lead scoring, etc. – saving you tons of time and effort.

Marketing automation can support drip marketing campaigns. This enables you to build quality emails and landing pages, and then track your campaigns from start to finish to see how leads are moving through your funnel.

The power of Marketing Automation is that it informs you quickly as to what’s working and what’s not.

To maximize your success you need to make adjustments as needed based on the data you collect. This way, you can focus on the marketing tactics that work.

According to Nuclear Research, 95% of companies reported some benefit from marketing automation. They found that companies can expect to achieve an increase in marketing staff productivity between 1.5 and 6.9% and increase sales productivity by an average of 4%.       (marketo.com)

4. Grow Your Business

Leakage is what occurs when good leads leave your sales funnel.

Marketing Automation will allow you to easily plug the hole in the funnel that causes those leads to leave.

Your first step is to map out the life of a lead. Take it from cold to close, trying to identify those points in the funnel where the lead is falling off.

You can identify a point where leads are pouring or just trickling.

When you have identified the holes or leakages you then can work on ways to fix these problems. By fixing them you will keep more customers and close more sales.

So your business will grow from being able to identify where customers are leaving your business

This can all be done not by spending more money but by analysing your data and customers reactions.

5. Improve Value To Customers

Marketing automation makes it easier to send personalized, 1:1 targeted messages.

This means your communication to customers is much stronger and valuable.

When you automate your marketing, you can focus more heavily on the quality of your campaigns and messaging. You have a consistency of message, consistency of when a message is delivered.

You have the ability to add more personal touches to your campaign – by collecting data on a prospect’s interests and goals, you can custom-tailor future offers so that they are more relevant.

Marketing automation will empower your organization to do the following:

Add dynamic content based on an individual’s specific user profile. You can send targeted offers based on website patterns.

Categorize customers and prospects by common behaviours, interests, and demographic details. These will form the basis for segmenting your customers.

Develop optimal marketing patterns. Marketing automation can help your company test different variables like email send times, subject headings, and ideas for personalization.

Integrate marketing channels to deliver a comprehensive, cross-platform user experience.

Make sure that every touchpoint is carefully planned for optimal conversion optimization.

Marketing automation connects multiple touchpoints and marketing channels including social media, email marketing, and content marketing. One of the core goals of marketing automation is to nurture prospects for the long-term, which mean focusing on goals beyond the first sale but build for long term sales

6. Personalise Communication With Customers

By far, one of the biggest benefits of marketing automation is that it helps sales and marketing teams work more efficiently.

People love personalized content; sending out personalized emails generates six times more revenue than sending non-personalized emails. But manually sending out customized messages to contacts simply isn’t practical.

Marketing automation platforms handle the mundane and repetitive work that goes into delivering personalized content, giving sales and marketing professionals more time to focus on things that are more interesting and challenging.

Marketing automation creates relevant content and messaging at scale across many channels. Send email messages with dynamic content that personalizes far beyond sticking a customer’s first name in the subject line.

Integrate mobile messaging with your email and social campaigns through SMS/MMS, push notifications, and group messaging. Generate digital ads that appear for the right person at the right time. Plus, recommend the right products on your website for each individual user — automatically.

Without personalized messaging, you’ll miss out on a significant number of conversions.

Leverage marketing automation’s tracking capabilities to tailor your conversations with your contacts. Personalization works: 88% of U.S. marketers reported seeing measurable improvements due to personalization — with more than half reporting a lift greater than 10%.       (sharpspring.com)

7. Adapt To Changing Needs Of Customers

With marketing automation, you can reach customers along their journey no matter where they are in the customer lifecycle — from acquisition to advocacy.

Deliver timely, relevant content that reaches customers when, where, and how they prefer — converting prospects into lifelong brand advocates.

Marketing Automation is built around feedback loops. With every action, there’s a consumer-driven reaction.

It is important to monitor these feedback loops with an objective eye.

This way you can adapt to the changing needs of your customers.

It’s important to monitor your data—Unsubscribe rates, spam complaints, open rates, and click-through rates—on email campaigns. Watch every customer service complaint. Listen to everything that your customers are telling you.

 And respond accordingly

Marketing automation is not a nice to do. In today's world, it really is a necessity. It is how your business can respond and react to the needs of their customers and be there to help them solve their problems.

It will help a business acquire new leads but more importantly help a business to nurture the relationship with an existing customer building a long term relationship.