Mobile-first customer experience platform Airship has published new data showing that no-code native app experiences dramatically increase key retail performance outcomes more than doubling customer purchase frequency and accelerating conversion across crucial lifecycle moments. The findings highlight a critical opportunity for retailers heading into the high-stakes 2025 holiday shopping season, where winning depends less on customer acquisition and more on sustained engagement and retention.
The “Experience Impact” research analyzed more than 1,000 in-app retail experiences and 1.7 billion device sessions, quantifying the measurable business gains when marketers optimize end-to-end customer journeys with no-code tools instead of relying solely on messaging tactics.
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Key Findings
The data reveals that customers who receive high-impact no-code native app experiences such as tailored onboarding, dynamic surveys, or embedded personalized offers purchase 140% more frequently than those without similar experiences.
Additional conversion lifts include:
- 2X increase in purchase conversion for users exposed to special offer or discount experiences (+115%)
- 2.5X conversion lift when customer preference collection prompts are used (+179%)
- 3X lift when experiences guide customers to update their app (+232%)
- 5X higher conversion when customers are encouraged to enable push notifications (+432%)
Retailers widely acknowledge that app customers are more loyal, return more frequently, and share more first-party data. Yet the surge in Black Friday app installations is often lost within weeks because new users are treated like one-time transactional shoppers rather than nurtured through onboarding and loyalty flows.
With 63% of shoppers planning most holiday purchases during Thanksgiving weekend, according to the National Retail Federation, brands cannot afford to lose these newly acquired customers especially as acquisition costs rise and competition intensifies.
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The Retention Challenge
Many marketing teams say they struggle to create impactful in-app experiences quickly because they depend on limited developer resources, slowing experimentation and optimization.
Airship addresses this challenge with the Airship Experience Platform (AXP), which allows marketers to build, test and scale high-impact native app and web experiences without engineering support. Using no-code tools and AI agents, teams can orchestrate real-time onboarding, preference capture and loyalty experiences that directly improve customer lifetime value.
Airship’s AI capabilitiesincluding Scene AI Agent and Experimentation AI Agent now automate creation, iteration, and optimization of experiences at scale, turning performance data into continuous improvement loops.
Driving Profitable Growth
Airship lifecycle benchmarks show:
- Identified users purchase 41% more often
- Onboarding campaigns increase identified users by 78%
- Preference-driven targeting drives 59% conversion lift (top performers achieve 91%)
“Cyber Week provides the attention, but profitable growth only materializes when brands convert first-time buyers into long-term loyal customers,” said Maria Robinson, CMO, Airship. “By giving marketing teams no-code control and AI optimization, Airship turns short-term acquisition into durable, repeat revenue.”
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