Stello

Messages not received

If you suspect your messages are not being received, it's first important to confirm whether they are truly not being received, or they are just not being opened by the recipient. Please consider each step below:

1. Does Stello say it has sent it to the recipient?

Stello should show a green tick next to the recipient when viewing the sent message in Stello. If there's no green tick then you'll need to resolve that.

2. Has the email been sent by your email account?

Stello sends each recipient an email using your email account. Some accounts don't actually record these emails, but many do, such as gmail. So open your sent messages folder in your email account (not Stello) and see if there is an email to the recipient the same date you sent your newsletter.

  • YES: The email has been sent successfully to the recipient's account. So they either didn't notice it, didn't open it, or it disappeared (very rare). Please continue reading below.
  • NO: If your account simply doesn't record any sent emails from Stello, it's safe to assume Stello did send it. If some were recorded but not others, please contact us.

3. Is it unusual for someone not to open the message?

Mailchimp previously reported that the average open rate for messages with them is only 20%. So it is very normal to have only a small portion of your readers opening your messages.

(Mailchimp's rate is these days artificially inflated because modern email software automatically triggers open stats for privacy reasons; Mailchimp's real open rate is much much lower.)

Also note that Stello only measures when people actually open the main message, not just glance at the email. If someone glances at a Mailchimp email and dismisses it, it will still count as an "open" in Mailchimp. If someone glances at a Stello email and dismisses it, it will not count as an open in Stello.

From our experience, if you are in Christian ministry and send a newsletter to friends and family you can expect a real open rate of around 40-60%. Better than that, if you send several messages over several months you should expect an even higher rate of contacts at least reading one of your messages during that time. You can analyse this with Stello's "Disengaged" section of the contacts list.

Increasing the open rate

There is no silver bullet but you can try the following:

  1. Personalise the email
    • Include an invite image that has a picture of you
      • It will make the message look more interesting
      • It will signal to readers that the message is unlikely to be a scam
    • Personalise the invite text to sound like it's from you
    • Change the invite image and text for every message
    • Write an interesting subject line for the message
      • Rather than "March Newsletter" write something actually interesting that's in your message
  2. Follow up disengaged contacts
    • If someone hasn't read your messages for a long time, you either need to confirm they are ok, confirm they haven't changed address, or remove them
    • It is common for people to be too polite or too distracted to unsubscribe to things they aren't reading, and keeping them on your list only serves to depress you by reducing your open rate for every message
  3. Consider other delivery methods
    • Email is full of spam or boring receipts and announcements, so it is not always a great way of staying connected with people
    • Stello messages can be sent manually (with effort) via any messaging platform (such as social media) by giving contacts no email address
  4. Focus on long-term engagement rather than short-term
    • It is very normal for even the closest of contacts to:
      • Not notice your message amongst many others
      • Plan to read your message later and forget about it
      • Be too busy to read messages during a certain period
      • Be on holiday or a break from emails
      • Not be interested in that particular topic
    • Instead focus on having a high open rate across the last x messages or last x months

4. Can the recipient find the email?

If you are still concerned that someone may not be getting the email, there are a few possibilities:

  1. They are receiving it, but are too polite to tell you they didn't read it
  2. It went to spam (if so, see our instructions)
  3. It got filtered into an alternate folder/tab
  4. It disappeared (very rare)

If a recipient insists that they are not receiving your newsletter after checking their spam folder or alternate inbox (such as the "Promotions" tab in gmail), please do the following steps. It is best to do these with them in real-time and using the same email address you use for Stello:

  1. Send a regular email to them (not with Stello)
    • If that fails to go through, then it's a problem with your email account
  2. Send a test message in Stello to them
    • If that didn't work, then:
  3. Open the test message in Stello, and next to the recipient's name in the dots menu, click "Copy invite". Paste that link in a regular email (not Stello) to them.
    • If that didn't work, then their email account may be automatically flagging messages with Stello links. Either way, you can contact us to share the result.

Please note, if you don't do these steps with them in real-time, it's highly unlikely we can look into it, as there would be too much ambiguity.