For any consumer application, email is an important tool to drive engagement. Last year, Fred Wilson went as far as calling it “Social Media’s Secret Weapon.” After optimizing the Hunch weekly recommendation emails for a few months last summer, I thought it might be useful to share some of the key lessons we learned to increase user engagement in emails and acquire new subscribers.
As background, while Hunch had transitioned from a consumer destinations site to more of a B2B approach (that eventually led to an acquisition by eBay), we found that sending weekly emails with personalized product recommendations was an effective way to showcase our technology and drive interesting partnerships. So we wanted to make them good. We ran countless A/B tests on groups of 10,000 users to see what worked best. For each test, we tried to constrain by cohort and keep all other variables constant. Below are a few things we learned along the way: