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.

This means that they totally blow Feedburner Email subscription away as far as features are concerned.

Apart from one important aspect.

Exclusive: Aweber Will Soon Report Email Sububscriber Numbers To Feedburner

In the announcement Justin Premick mentioned

This is just one of a number of enhancements we’ll be making to the Blog Broadcast tool. Stay tuned…

I probed a little deeper and we can expect to have counts reported to Feedburner in the near future, but no specific time frame.

What Does This Mean To The Blogosphere?

Internet marketers who concentrate on email subscriptions from their blog using Aweber will soon be able to benefit from the same social proof as if they were RSS subscribers. I know a few marketers that previously only had a few thousand RSS subscribers who will suddenly be propelled into similar subscriber counts as… Techcrunch 600k+

I think that shakes public perception up a little

A Confession About Feedblitz

Feedblitz also have this capability and a bunch of cool features, and I exchanged emails with Phil Hollows 1st December after an exchange of comments both here in the past, and on Problogger.
There seem to be a number of ways that Feedblitz could meet my needs for email in the same or similar way to Aweber, though it might take a little work with existing scripts

I really need to spend some time on full evaluation, but my house move and subsequent lack or intermittent connectivity has disrupted my workflow.

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*Originally published at APLawrence.com