SAN FRANCISCO -- Mobile-first customer experience company Airship 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.