You know the hardest part about (and therefore the secret of) good email marketing? Telling a good story. Those quarterly newsletters you write should all come together to tell the story of your brand. If your story is all about saving money, then your daily email coupons should tell that story. Starving artist? That automatic email campaign you hooked up to your flickr or dribbble should tell your story (in pictures).

But curating a story for your emails is hard. Sometimes, I want to make a point in my email newsletters, and I end up spending days just writing the back story for it on our blog. Other times, the story is scattered across Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, Flickr, etc. Finding them, bookmarking them, clipping and saving them into your story can be a pain.

There’s now an app for this painful process. It’s called Storify. And Storify now integrates with MailChimp…

How Storify Works

Here’s an example of what Storify does. I saw a tweet the other day from a father helping his daughter use MailChimp and Twitter to raise money for a charity. I thought it might be fun to donate some money, and see if he’d notice. The story took place on Twitter, Facebook, Posterous, Youtube, MailChimp and his blog. I assembled it all with Storify here:

http://storify.com/benchestnut/go-kayla

Drag and Drop Curation

I built it by just dragging and dropping tweets, and Facebook posts from within the Storify interface:

You can even search different sites, like Youtube, to drop videos into your story:

After my story is complete, I can publish it to Twitter, WordPress, Posterous, Tumblr, or MailChimp:

When I hit “publish” in Storify, it’ll send the story over to my MailChimp account, and setup a draft campaign:

Still Developing

There are lots of potential use cases for this. The one that comes to my mind first is for people who send breaking news. Perhaps you’ve setup an RSS-to-email list, and it sends out daily. These are your subscribers who want up-to-the-minute news, and Storify helps you build stories for them — fast. I think this is just the beginning of something really exciting.

Storify is currently in public private beta right now. MailChimp users who are interested in giving it a try can request an invitation on their website, and use the invite key: mailchimp.

It’s still early, so we’d love to hear your feedback about where you’d like to see this integration go.

Related:

• Building the next big thing? Need a little funding, but want to keep all your equity? Check out MailChimp’s $1million Integration Fund.