Ever sift through your personal email inbox and come across a great sale at Target, a sizzling handbag on Gilt.com or an unbeatable Click 'N Save deal from Southwest Airlines that you want to share? As creatures of habit, the natural thing to do is to hit the forward button - a pretty "old school" move in this age of social media. Much to the dismay of marketers, most of these email messages wind up stuck in our personal email silos because even if we do happen to find that needle in the haystack, there’s no easy way to broadcast the contents of the message to your separate social networks.

Email's rocky road is something ZigMail's CEO Richard Gerstein, former chief marketing officer at companies like Sears Holdings and HP, thinks about a lot. He describes the past five years as an evolution, from email being used for personal communication to primarily transactional communication, the central nervous system for our transactional identity and repository for messages we want from businesses (deals, receipts, account alerts and newsletters). It’s no wonder open rates are declining and consumers are afraid to give out their email address. Richard estimates these messages – not SPAM, they’re the ones we opt-in for – represent as much as 70 percent of our inboxes today.

Earlier this year, ZigMail disrupted the email market with ZigMail, a free solution to combat this overload by scanning and organizing all those messages and shrinking them into a single daily digest. This week marks another step in redefining the email paradigm.

The next generation of personal communications is on tap at the DEMO Spring 2012 conference this week, where venture capitalists, journalists and tech aficionados will see the debut of Zigit – the new solution from ZigMail that makes email social. In one click, anyone can “Zigit” and share their favorite deal, catalog or product from email to their Facebook or Twitter walls.  

If you're in Silicon Valley this week, swing by DEMO and see ZigMail execs on stage throwing a bon voyage party for email messages lost in the wasteland of our personal inboxes. We’re expecting consumers to cheer this new way to share the brands they love. Don't be surprised if a few email marketers and marketing managers crash the party once word gets out their email campaigns will no longer hit a dead end!

Here are some snapshots of us getting ready at the conference, including a pic backstage in rehearsal and at our booth in the pavilion.

(above) ZigMail President Michael Kennedy at rehearsal.

Read more about our Road to DEMO in the series of blog posts and look for #DEMO12 on Twitter.

Photos: (top) Flickr user The DEMO Conference, (bottom) ZigMail.