A crazy stat behind those times you have to send a “correction” email.

The other day an email came across one of our inboxes. The title, “CORRECTION: Tons of Snow and…” caught our eye, but what really got us thinking was that we didn’t remember seeing the original. Sure enough, there it sat just a few messages below. Could it be, we wondered, that a “correction” email gets more opens than the original? Here’s what we found.

The Goods
To find our answer we looked at 20 resort and hotel email campaigns that each had a follow up “correction” message sent to the same recipients within a day of the original. The only difference between their subject lines was the word “correction” at the beginning or end. Combined, these campaigns were sent to 1,700,000 recipients.

The original emails in the sample averaged an open rate of 14.3% and a click rate of 6.8%. The corrections, however, averaged an open rate of 16.7% (a 17.3% increase) and a click rate of 5.4% (a 20.6% decrease). Only 1 of these 20 campaigns saw a higher open rate from the original.

What This Means
Many of the people that opened the original likely opened the follow up to see what was being corrected. But there appears to be another group that only opened the correction email. These people were intrigued by what the mistake was, even though the message itself wasn’t interesting enough to open in the first place.

There are a couple points to take away from this. First is support for the concept of not giving away the plot in your subject line. Remember, the intrigue aroused by the word “correction” can only be satisfied by opening the email. But most of all, realize that hope is not lost when you send a campaign that needs to be corrected. On the contrary, if the message is important, a mistake might be just the excuse you need to help it get the reach it deserves.