In the post-election analysis, there has been great discussion about polls, voter data and state-by-state numbers. In the weeks leading up to the election, the Republicans were predicting a big win for Governor Romney, while the Democrats were predicting an equally big win for President Obama. It left most in the media to shrug their shoulders with a ‘we don’t know what’s going to happen’ look on their faces. It also left most Americans in a slight panic with the fear that it would take another trip to the Supreme Court to determine the winner.

We have since learned that President Obama’s campaign team had the real numbers the whole time. Why? Part of the answer sits with their data driven campaign and online marketing tactics. It’s not the whole answer, but digital marketers should take note. The Obama campaign’s marketing strategy is a significant reason why the President will be in the White House for another four years. As reported in Bloomberg BusinessWeek, “This is seen as the best-run campaign ever,” says Google (GOOG) Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt, an informal campaign adviser. “And there’s a lot of carry-over from political tactics to business tactics.”

If you can wrap your head around this, the campaign raised approximately $690 million through online marketing and most of that money was raised through email marketing. That said, it wasn’t email marketing in the form of a daily blast to millions of Americans, it was targeted digital marketing that was rigorously tested, adjusted and then executed.  Yes, millions of Americans received daily updates from the Obama campaign, but not before 18 variations of multivariate testing took place on every email campaign. As a corporate marketing director, I cringed when I read the October 30 email with the subject line, “Get his back – make some calls,” but in the world of digital marketing, opinions are far less important than data. The data said that was a winning subject line. 

And speaking of data, it’s difficult to underestimate the role of data analytics in their campaign. After discovering that half of their target [age 29 and under] group could not be reached by phone, most were reached through marketing on Facebook. As reported in Bloomberg BusinessWeek, the responses from their social campaign represented a higher number of people than Obama’s overall margin of victory.

What happened when the digital team in Obama’s campaign saw that 25% of their clicks were coming from mobile devices? They raced to redevelop a mobile optimised website and release an innovative program that enabled subscribers to make one-click donations from their mobile phones. From Bloomberg Business Week, “The 1.5 million one-click donors gave $115 million, or about $75 million more than tests indicated they would have otherwise.”