Texas Governor Election Was Direct Marketing Coup

The mid-term elections, seen by some as a slap to President Barack Obama's policies, simultaneously saw politicos of all stripes warmly embracing the data-driven, digital marketing strategies pioneered by the President's team. A case in point is the successful 2014 campaign of Texas' newly elected Republican Governor Greg Abbott, points out Direct Marketing News Senior Editor Al Urbanski. Abbott spent about $7 million on digital marketing and data analytics in 2014, compared with the paltry $100,000 or so spent on digital by Rick Perry's 2010 Texas gubernatorial effort. Teaming with Targeted Victory, a digital agency focused on Republican clients, Abbott's election team worked to build an engaged online audience that could be called to action, moving supporters from Facebook fans to e-mail recipients to donors to voters via 74 different marketing campaigns of targeted content. Analytics and ROI even guided traditional offline canvassing efforts, so volunteers knocked only on the doors of pro-Abbott voters identified as needing a little push to the polls. One result of his data-driven strategy was that Abbott won a majority of male Hispanic voters, a coup in a typically Democratic demographic, by using statistical modeling and targeting to get pro-Abbott segments within the demographic into the voting booth. For more detail, read The Direct Marketing News story: http://www.dmnews.com/this-governor-elect-got-direct/article/382966/