Late last month, we looked at a Google AdWords feature the company is testing, which allows advertisers to promote their email newsletters and actually get subscribers right from the ad. It has tremendous potential for email marketing, and illustrates a great cross-platform strategy between email and search.

Email marketing service provider Aweber, which boasts over 110,000 small businesses as clients, started using the beta in December.

Justin Premick, AWeber’s Director of Education Marketing, tells WebProNews, “In December 2011, AWeber began using Google AdWords’ email subscription beta through our account representative. We started out using it only for a segment of our campaigns, to minimize the risk of it cannibalizing link clicks and not providing valuable, converting traffic. Thus far, we haven’t seen a ton of traffic from the campaign, but we’ve learned a few things along the way to shape our future use.”

“Like other companies, we started using the ads to build our email list,” he adds. “While this is one way the service can be used, I believe the tool is most useful for sales teams in capturing and distributing leads among a team of sales representatives. In a situation with sales managers and representatives, the manager would presumably distribute leads among the representatives for individual follow up.”

“This is helpful for advertisers and prospects because it cuts one step out of the information request (and lead generation) process,” says Premick. “Instead of clicking through to the site, then filling out a form, prospects can fill out the form directly in the search results.”

The company said that after using the new AdWords feature for a month, it plans to continue testing and experimenting, moving away from automated follow up and towards individual outreach.

“Most importantly, this new AdWords feature points to the fact that email remains a key ingredient to marketing success, serving as a valuable tool for building relationships with both current and prospective customers,” an Aweber spokesperson said.

Indeed.