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1% is also about how well this worked, according to the sender's blog post.

10 signups / 970 emails sent

Thats actually a very good rate. 1% conversion rate is drastically different from a 1% response rate

Kinda makes you wonder... why don't they just advertise with those odds?

Because that's an order of magnitude better than what you get from advertising.

Assuming signups = $, true. But not if there's some free trial or something and then you've got a conversion rate on top of that.