By Maura DeBartoli
Media Manager

As it turns out, there’s no perfect plan or guaranteed anything when it comes to reaching out to your potential customers and hoping for a great return on investment (ROI). It stands true that marketing ROI can be defined in a few ways, more than just dollars back. Here are some ROI’s that are important to keep in mind:

1. Brand awareness and recognition
2. A friend referral and word-of-mouth
3. And yes, best case, a paid customer account!

I recently received an e-mail from HubSpot talking about marketing statistics and how to best capitalize on the most popular online mediums. Here are some of the stats I learned that will help when marketing our free file storage, plus some of our suggestions on how to track the ROI.

1. 17% of the top 1,000 search terms on Twitter ‘churn over’ on an hourly basis. (Source: Twitter)

It makes sense that if you publish relevant timely content, your users are more likely to interact with you and become a loyal follower or paid user.

Here’s how to track the ROI. Use Google Analytics to track referral pages to your site from Twitter, Facebook and any other social pages your business has. Look at the number of shared posts and give those followers promo codes if you work online, or in-store promos if you’re local as a thank you. Now you’ve got a possible paid customer.

2. U.S. consumers send 2.304 trillion text messages per year, up from 2.052 trillion in 2010.

People are on their phones! Does your business cater to the local community? Use Google AdWords to add your business location information as a possible result for those who are on-the-go.

Here’s how to track the ROI. Use Analytics to easily break down what’s working and what’s not. Be sure to add your business phone number to the ad, so mobile users can just click on it to call you. Optimize your search terms, meaning be specific as to what you specialize in.

Show off your ROI achievements. Want an easy way to keep track of content strategy documents, reports and spreadsheets? Get a 30-day free trial of CX for Business. Give us feedback, too. We’ll make it work for you.

3. 61% of e-mails received at professional e-mail accounts are non-essential.

Sure, marketing e-mails still work because they keep you in your customers’ minds and allow you to re-market your best customers with value and benefits. Keep track of personal attributes if you can, such as birthdays, sign-up dates and what they buy. This way, you can continue to give them what they want.

Here’s how to track the ROI. Use A/B testing for subject lines and body copy. Then test again, and again, and again for best results.

At CX, direct customer feedback is critical for us to improve our product for our valued users. Be sure to let us know in the comments any ways you’d love to be rewarded by our marketing team for using CX.