In marketing, the concept of a marketable base is often misunderstood. While, in theory, you could market to the entire world, the actual targetable audience—your Total Addressable Market (TAM)—is much smaller.
More importantly, brands must focus on their prospect TAM and the actual data they can market to—their marketable base.
A marketable base consists of customers whose data a brand has collected and who have interacted with the brand. Many brands realize the importance of capturing customer information too late, missing key touchpoints that could help reduce marketing inefficiencies and improve customer engagement.
By tracking a customer’s journey—whether online to offline or vice versa—brands can improve retention, measure engagement, and enhance the customer experience.
Table of Contents
1. Why Capturing Customer Data Early is Important?
Many brands realize the need to collect customer information too late, missing crucial touchpoints in the customer journey. Delayed data collection means losing valuable insights into how customers interact with the brand across online and offline channels.
Read more – Importance of 1st Party Data and Organic Ways to Build it
Capturing customer data early helps reduce marketing inefficiencies and allows businesses to track repeat purchases, engagement levels, and customer experiences. This deeper understanding enables brands to refine their strategies and create more meaningful interactions.
A strong marketable base is essential for measuring metrics like Net Promoter Score (NPS) and overall customer satisfaction. It represents the size of a brand’s first-party data and is built on customer identity—typically a name, email ID, or phone number. Having at least one of these identifiers ensures effective communication and engagement.
Read more – Strong Customer Experience is the Biggest Growth Driver
Additionally, brands must obtain clear permissions to use customer data across different channels like email, SMS, and WhatsApp. Without explicit consent, businesses risk compliance issues and poor engagement rates.
First-party data is the foundation of customer trust and personalized marketing.
2. Different Marketing Channels and Their Benefits
Once a brand has established its marketable base, the next step is to effectively communicate with customers using the right channels.
Each marketing channel has unique advantages and limitations, and brands must choose the ones that align best with their audience and business goals.
2.1 SMS (Text Messaging)
SMS (Text Messaging) is one of the most direct and effective ways to reach customers. It is affordable and does not face issues like spam filters, ensuring that messages are delivered successfully.
However, SMS has a character limit, which restricts the depth of communication. It can also be moderately expensive compared to email when used at scale.
2.2 WhatsApp
WhatsApp has emerged as a powerful marketing channel due to its high engagement rates. Customers are more likely to open and respond to messages on WhatsApp compared to traditional SMS or email.
The platform supports rich media, making it easy to send images, videos, and interactive messages. However, the cost per message is higher than SMS, which can be a drawback for brands with a large customer base.
Read more – All About WhatsApp Marketing for Business: 101, Best Practices & Measurement
2.3 Email
Email marketing remains an essential tool for brand communication. It allows businesses to send long-form content, promotional offers, and newsletters while maintaining a professional brand image.
Top brands achieve email open rates of over 30% and click-through rates of 2-3%. However, poorly optimized emails can end up in spam folders, reducing their effectiveness.
Read more – Why Should Brands Not Ignore Email?
2.4 Push Notifications
Push notifications are another way to engage customers, particularly for businesses with a mobile app.
These notifications provide instant updates and reminders, helping brands maintain a strong presence in customers’ daily lives.
However, they require users to have the brand’s app installed, and many users disable notifications, which can limit their reach.
2.5 RCS (Rich Communication Services)
RCS (Rich Communication Services) is an advanced version of SMS that allows for more interactive and visually appealing messages.
It provides higher engagement compared to traditional SMS, with open rates of 20-30%. However, RCS adoption is still in progress, and not all mobile networks and devices support it yet.
Read more – How RCS Can Help Improve the ROI of Retention Marketing?
3. How to Improve Your Marketable Base?
Today, businesses must create smooth and engaging customer experiences to boost loyalty and conversions.
Whether online or offline, capturing customer interest and maintaining interaction is key. Here are five effective strategies to enhance engagement and drive growth.
1. Encourage Users to Sign Up or Log In on the Website/App: One of the best ways to build a strong customer relationship is by encouraging users to sign up or log in on your platform. A simplified registration process ensures a hassle-free experience, reducing friction for users. Offering incentives such as discounts, loyalty points, or exclusive access to deals can further increase sign-ups.
Additionally, using social media or Google-based logins can make the process even quicker and more convenient, enhancing user engagement from the start.
2. Enable Push Notification Permissions for Web and App: Push notifications are a powerful tool to keep users engaged and informed. Prompt users to enable notifications for timely updates on promotions, new arrivals, personalized recommendations, or cart reminders.
These real-time alerts help drive traffic back to your platform, increase conversions, and keep your brand top-of-mind. However, it’s crucial to strike a balance—overloading users with too many notifications can lead to opt-outs. Offering personalized, relevant, and well-timed notifications ensures higher engagement rates.
3. Utilize QR Codes for Seamless Offline Engagement: QR codes bridge the gap between the offline and online world, offering a seamless way to engage customers. Businesses can place QR codes in physical stores, advertisements, product packaging, or even receipts to drive digital interactions. Scanning a QR code can lead users to product pages, exclusive offers, loyalty programs, or even personalized recommendations. This easy-to-use feature enhances the customer journey, making it effortless to access more information or complete a purchase.
4. Capture Customer Identity at Every Touchpoint: Personalization is the key to customer retention, and collecting customer data at every interaction helps tailor experiences.
Encouraging users to provide their email, phone number, or social media logins enables businesses to create targeted marketing campaigns, offer personalized recommendations, and improve customer support.
This strategy enhances engagement by making interactions more relevant while also helping brands build a database for future outreach.
5. Implement Paperless Billing in Stores for Convenience: Sustainability and convenience go hand in hand, and paperless billing offers both. By providing digital receipts via email or SMS, businesses can improve the checkout experience while reducing paper waste.
Digital receipts also allow for easy returns and warranty tracking, enhancing customer satisfaction. Additionally, they create an opportunity for brands to stay connected with customers post-purchase, offering further promotions or loyalty rewards.
4. Best Practices for Growing and Measuring the Marketable Base
To effectively scale marketing efforts, brands must adopt a structured approach to managing their marketable base.
4.1 Establish a Strong Data Baseline
Establishing a solid baseline by identifying where all customer data is stored is key. Whether in a CRM, email lists, WhatsApp contacts, or other databases, having a clear view of the existing data is crucial.
Brands should assess the quality, completeness, and consistency of this data to uncover gaps and areas for improvement.
4.2 Integrate Customer Data for Better Insights
Once the data sources are mapped, the next step is integrating customer data into a centralized platform such as a Customer Data Platform (CDP), CRM, or data lake. Consolidating customer information in one place eliminates silos and ensures seamless access across teams.
4.3 Measure and Track Marketable Base Growth
Tracking the growth of the marketable base is essential to measuring success. A growing marketable base indicates an effective customer acquisition and retention strategy.
Ideally, this base should expand at a rate equal to or faster than revenue growth. Stagnation in the marketable base suggests missed opportunities in capturing and engaging new customers, which could impact long-term business growth.
4.4 Ensure Customer Opt-Ins for Compliance and Engagement
Ensuring customer opt-ins is a fundamental best practice in email and messaging campaigns. Every communication channel—email, SMS, WhatsApp—must be permission-based to maintain compliance with privacy regulations and avoid being marked as spam.
5. Conclusion
A well-established marketable base is the foundation of effective marketing. By capturing customer data early, brands can track engagement, refine strategies, and improve customer experiences.
Choosing the right communication channels—whether SMS, WhatsApp, email, push notifications, or RCS—ensures better reach and higher engagement.
To maximize the impact of marketing efforts, brands must integrate customer data, measure marketable base growth, and ensure compliance with opt-in regulations.
A proactive approach to data collection and management not only enhances customer relationships but also drives long-term business success.
If you’d like to discuss how we can help enhance your marketing strategies, we’d be happy to set up a consultation call. Feel free to reach out to us at alibha@daiom.in
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