Integrating email and other channels such as Twitter and Facebook is very important to your email marketing efforts. However, it’s not just about sharing content and cross-promoting your email marketing. It’s also about generating ideas and involving your subscribers.

If you are using Sailthru then you already have a huge advantage when it comes to knowing your subscribers. However, now that you know them, are you involving them?

The really interesting stories to tell which will help you build a community and drive more conversions are the stories about how someone used one of your products or services to add value to their lives. It doesn’t matter what technology can do. What matters is what people do with technology. Find those stories and tell them and you make a direct connection with people.

We’ve never had this opportunity before in marketing! Traditional channels forced marketers into strict format rules which ensured that advertising was costly and flexibility was minimal. Now, for the first time since people barked out their wares in public market places, you can tell these stories the way you want to.

This is a somewhat silent revolution which seems to have gone mostly unnoticed by marketers. That’s not surprising when you consider that humans have a habit of applying old strategies and tactics even in new environments. Or as historians often say, we fight each new war with the tactics of the last and the result (at least initially) is slaughter.

Reach out to your customers! Hold a contest for the best example of how your product enriched someone’s life. Let people tell their own stories. Perhaps you might consider even recruiting guest bloggers from your subscriber list. Use your imagination; perhaps run a video contest asking people to show you how they use your products or what they like most about them.

Today’s interactive world means you can even run a contest to ask people to help you design a contest. How cool is that?

What’s really awesome about social media is that you don’t just have customers anymore, you have community members who want to participate. All you have to do is invite them to do just that.