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Jan 27, 2018
If you’re a Wix user, you’ve probably heard about Wix ShoutOut, their newsletter service. Launched a few years ago, ShoutOut is designed to be a simple, easy-to-use add-on to any Wix website.
Funnily enough, you don’t need a Wix site to use ShoutOut. But it is very much designed to make Wix users’ lives easier. Contacts collected via Wix sites (for example, store customers and contact form submissions) are automatically funneled into ShoutOut, meaning you can run email campaigns to these contacts with just a few clicks. ShoutOut can also automatically add store products and blog posts from your Wix site into your newsletters.
Sounds amazing, right? We thought so too – which is why we decided to try it out for ourselves. And we found some things we really liked – but some things we also think need more work.
So here’s our summary of the 12 things you absolutely need to know about Wix ShoutOut. We hope it helps you decide whether it’s right for you!
Here are the top reasons why we’d recommend Wix ShoutOut:
The main thing to stress about ShoutOut is that its features are basic. You won’t find any segmentation, personalization, deep-level reporting or advanced automation here (at least not yet). So if you’re a bigger business that needs these features, it’s simply not for you. Instead, we’d recommend checking out other more advanced newsletter services here.
Yes, you can! Wix ShoutOut has a free plan that lets you send out 3 ShoutOuts (that is, 3 different campaigns) and up to 5,000 emails per month. It’s not a massive allowance, but if you have a smaller list and only send out a few newsletters a month, it will do the job. If you need any more than this, you can upgrade any time to one of their Premium plans (see #3 below for more info).
Emails sent on the free plan will include Wix branding
Of course, nothing is ever completely free – your emails will display with Wix branding. Also note there are other providers offering free plans, so if you’re absolutely set on using a free service, it’s worth checking them out too.
Wix ShoutOut offers three different paid (or ‘Premium’) plans, which can be paid for on a monthly or yearly basis:
| Basic | Business Essential | Pro Unlimited | |
|---|---|---|---|
| # of ShoutOuts (campaigns) per month | 5 | 20 | Unlimited |
| # of emails per month | 9,500 | 50,000 | 1,000,000 |
| # contacts | 10,000 | 25,000 | 200,000 |
| Remove ShoutOut ads in email? | No | Yes | Yes |
| Newsletter URLs on your own domain | No | Yes | Yes |
| Monthly plan | $4.90/month | $12.90/month | $44.90/month |
| Yearly plan | $4.35/month | $8.60/month | $32.75/month |
Find more details on ShoutOut's pricing here.
If we’re just looking at price in relation to number of contacts, you’ll find that Wix ShoutOut’s pricing is very competitive compared to other providers. But you have to consider all the features you aren’t getting for this price (which we talk about in greater detail below).
ShoutOut is built for sending simple campaigns – if you have bigger plans for your email marketing, you’ll definitely need a more complete email marketing service.
If you’re familiar with Wix, you’ll have no trouble making your way around ShoutOut, as it’s managed from the same main menu that you use to manage your website. You’ll find it under ‘Marketing Tools’ > ‘Email Marketing’.
If you’re not a Wix user, the main menu is a little different, but you’ll still find it easy to use. It’s one of the benefits of having such a simple, pared-down tool – with just a few menu options available, navigating to where you need to go is super clear.
The email editor feels a lot like Wix’s site editor, with all your text and image editing done inline. Sections, such as images, buttons and columns, can be added by clicking the ‘Add’ icon on the left, and dragging and dropping them in.
Usability has always been a strong point for Wix, and with ShoutOut, they once again pass with flying colors.
Wix are famous for their stunning website designs, so if you’re expecting the same of their email templates, you might just be a little disappointed. Sure, the templates they do have are clean and modern, and mobile-responsive too. But there aren’t that many to choose from (around 20, on our last count).
That being said, the templates are very easy to customize, and styles, backgrounds, colours and layouts can all be changed. So all in all, not too bad. And being Wix, we wouldn’t be surprised if they continued to add to their template library in the future.
Available templates include:
Adding contacts is easy enough. You can bulk import contacts by uploading a CSV file, or even connecting your Gmail account. Contacts can also be added manually, so it’s pretty similar to most other tools.
If you’ve got an existing Wix site, there is one huge advantage to using ShoutOut – integration. In fact, your site and ShoutOut will share the same contacts module (Wix Contacts). For example, if you have a Wix store, all your CRM contacts (including your customers) will automatically be accessible from ShoutOut. Same goes if have a contact or subscription form on your Wix site – you’ll see all form submissions go straight into ShoutOut.
What’s more, each contact will have an automatically-assigned label telling you where they came from (such as ‘Contacted me’ or ‘Customer’).
This lets you do some very cool things – for example, send welcome emails to new sign-ups, promote your latest blog post to subscribers, or send special promotions to your customers. You can even assign your own labels to contacts (and assign multiple labels), if you want to categorize your contacts even further.
It’s all quite manual though – apart from the auto-assigned labels, there’s no way to add labels to contacts who have similar characteristics (e.g. have bought a specific product). And there’s no other way to group contacts aside from using the labels, so it’s a very simple method of segmentation.
You can add custom fields to your list, but again, these are pretty basic – your only options are to add text, number, date and URL field types. Instead, it’s better to use Wix Forms to manage custom fields (see #9).
Yes – at a basic level. If you have a Wix site, you can use the ‘Automated emails’ function within your site to set up autoresponders, for when someone signs up on your site or makes a purchase, for example.
You can even specify when you want the email to be sent (for example, 1 day after the contact has taken the action), and whether it should only be sent once or multiple times.
One big thing that’s missing is the ability to add personalization. For example, you can’t even add the recipient’s first name to a salutation in the email. This could be added using the ‘Triggered Emails’ feature in Wix Code, but it requires a bit of technical knowledge. We think it should be a much simpler process.
As you can see, Wix’s automated emails are really designed to benefit those who have a Wix site. If you don’t have a Wix site but do need to use autoresponders, then there are better tools out there for you.
Just the bare essentials, really. For each email send, you’ll get basic stats such as total emails sent, opens, clicks, and total emails undelivered. You’ll also be able to see who opened, clicked etc.
It all comes in a clean visual summary, so it’s very easy to read. If you’re not bothered by the lack of more advanced reports (such as click heat maps or geolocation), this level of reporting should be adequate.
The standalone version of Wix ShoutOut (for those without a Wix site) offers just a single subscribe form, which can be added to any website with a bit of embed code. There’s not a lot of customization available, apart from being able to edit some of the text. You can’t add new fields, and only three come as standard (email, name and phone).
Curiously, subscribe forms can be ‘added’ to an email, but it results in a pretty weird user experience (users click what appears to be the form embedded in the email, but then get redirected to another webpage with the actual form). We think it would be more useful to have a proper landing page editor built into the tool.
It’s clear that ShoutOut wasn’t built for creating and managing forms. Instead, if you have a Wix site, we’d recommend using the Wix Forms app, which provides more flexibility, and will also integrate with your ShoutOut contacts.
We were pleasantly surprised with ShoutOut’s deliverability, based on the handful of deliverability tests we ran. Even on the free plan, we were able to use our own domain email address as the sender address, and deliverability averaged around 87% (that’s pretty high compared to other tools we’ve tested!).
We did test with a relatively small list, though, so we can’t say for certain that you’d get the same result with bigger lists. And we always recommend authenticating your domain as well.
Note that you aren’t able to use email subdomains as the sender (e.g. yourname@subdomain.domain.com), or emails from public domains like Gmail or Yahoo – instead, ShoutOut will use its own authenticated email domain (e.g. yourname@wixshoutout.com).
We figured you’d want to know how ShoutOut stacks up to other more popular newsletter tools, such as MailChimp. We’re not really sure we can compare the two, though. MailChimp is a fully-fledged email marketing tool, while ShoutOut does only a fraction of what MailChimp does. No prizes for guessing who the winner would be!
It’s perhaps more useful to take a look at the features available in each service, to get a feel for how complete MailChimp is compared to ShoutOut, and understand whether ShoutOut would meet all your requirements.
| Feature | Wix ShoutOut | MailChimp |
|---|---|---|
| Drag and drop editor | Yes | Yes |
| Responsive templates | Yes | Yes |
| Plain text emails | No | Yes |
| Personalization | No | Yes |
| A/B testing | No | Yes |
| List management | Yes (basic – labels only) | Yes (advanced segmentation) |
| Double opt-in | No | Yes |
| Email automation | Yes (basic autoresponders, only with Wix site) | Yes |
| Landing pages | No (but you can build these with Wix’s website builder) | Yes |
| Registration forms | Yes (just one – better to use Wix Forms instead) | Yes |
| Reports | Yes (basic) | Yes (advanced) |
| Use your own email domain address | Yes | Yes |
| Spam and design testing | No | Design only |
| Bounce management | Yes | Yes |
| Social media integration | Yes | Yes |
If you want a full picture of what MailChimp offers, check out our in-depth MailChimp review.
We want to love ShoutOut as much as love Wix’s website builder, we really do. And it definitely has some great perks – affordable pricing, ease of use, responsive email templates. Its strongest point, though, is its seamless integration with Wix Contacts, allowing you to effortlessly run email marketing campaigns to your website contacts.
But would we recommend it over other tools? No – and certainly not if you don’t have a Wix site. The only exception would be if you wanted a newsletter tool that’s really, really easy to use, and don’t care about all the extras. Otherwise, you’ll find there are other more complete tools that do a much better job of email marketing.
If you are a Wix user, we’d definitely encourage you to give it a go on the free plan. You might find a few useful automated campaigns you can set up, which could really help to boost your customer engagement and improve your website’s success.
Do you have any other questions about Wix ShoutOut? Ask us by posting in the comments below!
