Airship Study: No-Code Native App Experiences Double Purchase Frequency (+140%), Offering Path to Profitable Holiday Growth

New research quantifies the massive conversion lift from optimizing native app and web experiences, providing a critical no-code path for retailers to drive profitability

Mobile-first customer experience company Airship today released new aggregate data analysis findings showing that no-code native app experiences significantly increase conversion for key lifecycle events and more than double purchase frequency.

The Airship "Experience Impact” research, which studied over 1,000 in-app retail experiences and 1.7 billion device sessions, quantifies the impact of optimizing end-to-end customer journeys—not just sending messages—using no-code and AI-powered tools to drive loyalty and retention at scale, leading to sustainable profitability in a volatile economic environment.

Key Findings

Customers exposed to high-impact no-code native app experiences such as optimized onboarding flows, dynamic surveys, or embedded personalized offers, purchase 140% more frequently than app customers who don’t receive them.

These experiences, which product owners and marketers can create and adapt without developer resources, significantly increase conversion for key lifecycle events and act as a multiplier for purchase conversion rates:

• 2X greater purchase conversion for customers who receive special offer/discount experiences (115% conversion lift)
• 2.5X greater purchase conversion for customers served experiences soliciting their interests and preferences (+179%)
• 3X greater purchase conversion for customers guided to update apps (232%)
• 5X higher purchase conversion for customers encouraged to opt in to push notifications (432%)

The vast majority of retailers agree that app customers tend to make more repeat purchases, are more loyal compared to non-app customers, and are more willing to share their first-party data. Furthermore, Black Friday is the top day of the year for customers to install shopping apps for more than a decade.

Yet any Black Friday app acquisition advantage is typically erased by Christmas, because most retailers treat new holiday installers the same as other customers, essentially allowing them to remain transactionally focused. This results in new app customers acquired during the Cyber Week peak of holiday shopping having lower activation, engagement and retention rates than customers acquired at other times of the year. This is a decisive moment as recent polling from the National Retail Federation finds 63% of shoppers are waiting until Thanksgiving weekend to do most of their holiday buying this year. With consumer uncertainty high and acquisition costs soaring, brands cannot afford to lose these hard-won customers. The key to profitable growth lies in retention and increasing customer lifetime value (CLV).

The Challenge Most Teams Face

Across industries, marketers struggle to improve app experiences quickly because they’re dependent on developer queues, which slows onboarding, preference collection and experimentation, stunting both conversion and retention gains.

Airship solves this challenge by enabling non-technical teams to create, test and optimize these high-impact app and website experiences to quickly turn holiday acquisition into personalized onboarding and loyalty-driving journeys at scale. The Airship Experience Platform (AXP) empowers marketers and product owners to use a no-code Experience Editor to build and embed rich, native app and web content. New Airship AI Agents automate the entire creation-to-optimization process, with Scene AI Agent and Experimentation AI Agent closing the loop between testing, learning and action at a speed and scale that was previously impossible.

Recently Airship was recognized for the first time ever in the 2025 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Multichannel Marketing Hubs¹, which the company believes signals a market shift toward intelligent platforms that unify messaging, experiences and data. Get the full, complimentary report here.

Why This Drives Profitable Growth Now

Airship’s lifecycle benchmarks show the mechanics behind profitable retention: opted-in customers purchase more frequently, and identified users buy 41% more often than anonymous users, while apps running onboarding campaigns achieve 78% more identified users than their category average—amplifying downstream conversion and CLV. Additionally, campaigns that leverage customer preferences for audience targeting see a 59% lift in purchase conversion, with top performers reaching an impressive 91%.

With Airship, teams put seamless, mobile-first customer experience into practice faster: designing app and web experiences alongside cross-channel messaging to drive more conversions and preference capture, while continuously optimizing customers’ entire experience with AI.

“Cyber Week provides the attention, but profitable growth only materializes when brands convert those first purchases into durable, long-term customer relationships,” said Maria Robinson, CMO, Airship. “Airship is purpose-built to close that gap. By giving marketers and product teams no-code control of app and web experiences and the AI to optimize them continuously, we turn temporary holiday acquisition into repeat purchases and lasting loyalty.”

Frequently Asked Questions

Why is focusing on in-app experiences so important this holiday season?

With economic volatility and high acquisition costs, profitability is essential. Retailers cannot rely on acquisition alone, as value only accrues later. In the frenzy of holiday deal-hunting, in-session experiences matter most to long-term value. The data shows no-code, native app experiences are the key to retention and higher lifetime value, driving a 140% increase in purchase frequency and boosting opt-ins, user identification and zero-party data collection—all of which create more loyal, high-value customers.

What is the "Experience Gap" Airship solves?

The Experience Gap is the disconnect between what mobile-first customers expect and what brands deliver. Marketing teams send messages to customers, while separate product teams build experiences for them, with little connection between the two workflows. Airship's platform is purpose-built to solve this by unifying the creation of native app and web experiences with cross-channel messaging, optimizing the entire journey where value is actually created: on a brand’s app and website.

How do Airship AI Agents help marketers?

Airship AI Agents automate the creation, testing, and optimization of the entire customer experience. For example, the Scene AI Agent can instantly generate a multi-screen holiday onboarding flow from a simple prompt. The Experimentation AI Agent can then automatically and continuously test variants of that experience to optimize for conversion or any goal. This allows marketers to move at a speed and scale that was previously impossible.

About Airship

Airship is trusted by the world’s leading brands such as Alaska Airlines, BBC, and The Home Depot for mobile-first expertise powering seamless, cross-channel customer experiences that drive business outcomes and earn customer loyalty.

Airship’s mobile-first customer experience platform allows anyone to build, orchestrate, and optimize hyper-personalized end-to-end customer journeys across all channels: email, push notifications, SMS, RCS, mobile wallets, and more, through to app and web experiences where conversion results in value.

Airship’s modular network of AI agents accelerate marketing, product, and growth teams’ efforts to continuously enrich customer data and rapidly launch experiments, optimizing every interaction and business outcome from growing repeatable conversions and customer lifetime value, to fueling durable business growth.

For more information visit www.airship.com.

¹Gartner “Magic Quadrant for Multichannel Marketing Hubs,” by Audrey Brosnan, Tia Smart, Suzanne Schwartz, Greg Carlucci, Julian Poulter, Matt Moorut, Julia Multedo, 22 September 2025

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