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Voter data is critical to winning the election

Data can play a really big part in the general election. So we thought we’d be topical and explain how, and why it can apply to your business too.

By:

Hi everyone! Zarte here! Nope, my place here isn’t for public debate, you can’t get rid of me via an election.

And it’s the election I’m talking about today. I know, topical, right? It might seem peculiar, considering our focus this month is on our Business Data Toolkit, to bring up the general election, but actually there are more parallels between how the Business Data Toolkit works, and how electioneering operates than you might imagine.

Imagine if you will, that you’re a political party. Probably one of the ones outside of the big two. You know, when you go into an election period that you don’t have the financial clout of either of the two biggest parties, so when it comes to working out who to campaign to, and where, you’re going to need to give yourselves a head start.

This is where data, and perhaps more importantly data management comes in to play. The canvassers of a political party will spend time knocking on doors, delivering leaflets, in areas where they believe it likely to be effective – usually marginal areas – this itself an example of data management.

They collect data from these meetings – they already have the names, telephone numbers and addresses and to this they can add their feelings about how you might vote. Whether there’s no chance of you voting for them, or an absolutely certainty, or anything in the middle.

If you appear at the higher end of their probabilities, they may well use the information they’ve acquired to then get in touch with you closer to the election period, trying to make sure that you’ll definitely go out and vote for them.

When it comes to election day, each party is allowed to have a teller – this person’s job is to look at the polling numbers of those who’ve attended a polling station to vote, so that they can be correlated with the information they hold on those voters. This allows them to work out which of those people who said they would vote for a particular party actually turned up to vote.

All of this information then gets added to the party’s database and improves their data to aid the decision who / where to target next time.

Can you imagine how much more difficult it would be for these parties to campaign without this data? Or even worse how much of a disaster it would be for them if they didn’t have an effective way to input and view this data. Or even if it were stored in such a way where it was open to attack, or one technical issue could wipe the lot.

Well it’s just as bad for a business. First of all, are you collecting data about your potential customers? If someone calls, asking questions about a product, but doesn’t wish to go through with a purchase at that time, are you putting yourself in a position where you can call them at a later point to remind them that you’re there? If you are collecting that data, is it in an easily searchable and customisable form? Or are you simply thumbing through bits of paper, or trying to search aimlessly through a spreadsheet? And if that data becomes damaged, are you available to view it from somewhere else?

These are all potential issues that we designed the Business Data Toolkit to solve. It allows you to store all the available and relevant data about your customers safely, securely, and use that data to make your marketing and promotions more efficient – advising existing customers about offers your running that may be of interest to them based on products they’ve previously bought from you, and convincing potential customers about why yours is the product they should be buying, and not your competitors’.

So, if you’re interested in how our Business Data Toolkit could benefit your business, why not get in touch with us to find out how we might be able to offer the perfect individualised solutions to the issues that you and your business face. Give us a call on 023 9298 8855, or send us a message.

Until next time,

Zarte