Mailchimp<\/a>, a bootstrapped startup out of Atlanta, Ga., is known best as a popular tool for organizations to manage their customer-facing email activities \u2014 a profitable business that its CEO told TechCrunch has now grown to around 11 million active customers with a total audience of 4 billion (yes, 4 billion), and is on track for $700 million in revenue in 2019. (Note: Slack\u2019s previous quarter was around $133 million, and it\u2019s operating at a loss.)<\/p>\n To help hit that number, Mailchimp is taking the wraps off a significant update aimed at catapulting it into the next level of business services. Starting today, Mailchimp will start to offer a full marketing platform aimed at smaller organizations.<\/p>\n Going beyond the email services that it has been offering for 20 years \u2014 which alone has led to multiple acquisition offers (all rebuffed) as its valuation has crept up reportedly into the billions (depending on which multiple you use) \u2014 the new platform will feature a number of new products within it.<\/p>\n They include technology to record and track customer leads; the ability to purchase domains and build sites; ad retargeting on Facebook and Instagram; social media management. It will also offer business intelligence that leverages a new move into the artificial intelligence to provide recommendations to users on how and when to market to whom.<\/p>\n The latter of these will be particularly interesting considering the data that it has collected and will collect on 4 billion individuals and their responses to emails and other services that Mailchimp now offers.<\/p>\n As of Wednesday of this week, Mailchimp also plans a pretty significant shift of its pricing into four tiers of free, $9.99\/month, $14.99\/month or $299\/month (up from the current pricing<\/a> of free, $10\/month, $199\/month) \u2014 with those fees scaling depending on usage and features.<\/p>\n (Existing paid customers maintain current pricing structure and features for the time being and can move to the new packages at any time, the company said. New customers will sign up to the new pricing starting May 15.)<\/p>\n The expansion is part of a longer-term strategic play to widen Mailchimp\u2019s scope by building more services for the typically underserved but collectively large small-business segment.<\/p>\n Even as multinationals like Amazon and other large companies continue to feel like they are eating up the mom-and-pop independent business model, SMBs continue to make up 48% of the GDP in the U.S.<\/p>\n And within the SMB sector, the opportunity has totally changed with the rise of the internet.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat\u2019s really key is the role digital apps, digital publishing and social media have played,\u201d said Ben Chestnut, Mailchimp\u2019s co-founder and CEO. \u201cWe can have a 10-employee company with a customer base bigger than 1 million. That\u2019s a combination you couldn\u2019t achieve before the growth of online.\u201d<\/p>\n And within that, marketing is one of those areas that small businesses might not have invested in much traditionally but are increasingly turning to as so much transactional activity has moved to digital platforms \u2014 be it smartphones, computers, or just the tech that powers the TV you watch or music you listen to.<\/p>\n