MailChimp adds Google Ads as it becomes a multichannel platform

MailChimp’s visualization of a marketer enticing a customer (the cat) via remarketing ads.

MailChimp took another step today toward becoming a multichannel marketing platform, announcing that users can now create and deploy Google Remarketing Ads within its dashboard.

With two clicks in the new feature, a marketer can connect her store to MailChimp and set up a campaign that shows a site visitor follow-up ads for a product left behind on your site, after the visitor had viewed it on a page or perhaps left it unbought in a shopping cart.

MailChimp automatically builds ads from the stores’ best-selling products, and the marketer can tweak the ad’s headline, content or product selection. The ad is then displayed on related sites in Google’s Display Network. Here’s a sample ad:

This new addition completes MailChimp’s hat trick of new ad tools, following the addition of Facebook ads in January and Instagram Ads in May. The company points out that the use of the ad tools has no additional charge, beyond the ads themselves.

In addition to its core email marketing, and now some digital ad capability, MailChimp said it plans to add other marketing channels at some point.

The Atlanta-based company, which has over 15 million small business customers, described its addition of Facebook ads at the beginning of this year as its “first major move from email-only to a marketing platform.”

CEO Ben Chestnut wrote in a blog post at the time of the Facebook announcement that customers reported the platform wasn’t just an email or newsletter tool, but “the thing that helps them look professional.”

This “gave us an insight,” he wrote, that “we don’t just have to do email.”