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:

via Eric Stromberg — Increasing User Engagement in Emails.

But email, like everything else in life, has constantly evolved since the first email was sent over ARPANET in 1971.  No longer are we restricted to what Microsoft offers.   Today we have a wide variety of choices including the ever popular Gmail.  Instead of only having the paid Outlook for desktop emails, you can also choose from free and open source alternatives such as Thunderbird.  But email is perhaps now under threat from the rise of other forms of popular communication such as social networks and SMS text messaging.

Below is an infographic, produced by Microsoft, which shows the Evolution Of Email.   Let us know what you think of it and if there is another email fact not shown below.   Where do you see email heading in the future?   Can it fight off the likes of Facebook and Twitter?   Or is its days numbered?

EvolutionEmail_Vertical_web.jpg Image JPEG, 990×3580 pixels.

I remember four or five years ago, people, myself included, were asking if social media was going to lead to the end of email as we know it. In an ironic twist of fate, it turns out that email is social media’s secret weapon. And more and more social applications are leveraging the power of email to drive repeat usage and retention.

A VC: Social Media’s Secret Weapon – Email.