PORTLAND, ORE.-- April 28, 2023 -- Earnings reports and industry research show mobile apps are the digital center of customer experience, generating more than three times greater revenue from app customers than non-app customers. Despite this value creation opportunity, many brands haven’t improved app retention rates in years. App teams remain too reliant on precious development resources to make improvements that would change this dynamic. It’s a big problem:

· Every week nearly three-quarters of marketers and mobile product owners think about enhancements to better onboard, activate and understand app users, but 48 out of 50 rely on developers to make improvements happen.
· Nearly 40% of enterprise developers say requests from marketing and product teams take “a month” or “multiple months,” and only 12% of enterprise marketers say all their requests are implemented.
· Despite all marketers and mobile product owners agreeing that feature tutorials and opt-in flows significantly impact app user behaviors, nearly 50% of enterprises only improve these critical first experiences quarterly or less often.

To solve this bottleneck and help unleash more value, mobile app experience company Airship today announced major innovations to its App Experience Platform including a new foundational no-code native app editing engine simply called App Experience Editor. Together with Airship’s enhancements in email marketing, cross-channel journey orchestration and intelligent content creation, app teams can quickly design, deploy and iterate native app experiences and campaigns without ongoing developer support or app updates. They can also unify the customer journey inside and outside of the app to seamlessly enhance customer experiences, freeing developers to focus on the next market-differentiating app features.

After a year of brand marketers’ success with Airship’s first no-code native app experiences, the App Experience Editor opens up ever-expanding, flexible creation capabilities with A/B testing and experimentation, full design control, precise previews and dark mode support. Marketers and mobile product owners can now skip making enhancement requests to development, waiting for app updates, or settling for disjointed HTML web views, and instead create and optimize high-value app experiences themselves with full native performance, accessibility and measurement.

Airship is also introducing a new experience called Stories that automatically progresses users through rich, multi-screen walkthroughs, bringing a familiar social media experience to any in-app experience, message or interstitial. Plus, brands can now combine Surveys with Scenes to collect first- and zero-party data while onboarding and activating app customers.

“Airship’s no-code editor made it possible for our entire team to create and optimize several multi-screen app onboarding experiences in minutes not months, without developer resources or app updates, which is absolutely critical for apps like SXSW GO that serve a very defined time period,” said Michael Brown, Vice President of Innovation, SXSW. “Previously, app experiences were locked and loaded months in advance and in-flight changes had to be critical to even be considered. Now, with Airship’s innovation, numerous pre-built layouts, and full design control, it’s very intuitive and flexible to optimize a wide range of engaging use cases. Native support means we can forget about HTML and trust that performance, measurement and accessibility are baked in.”

“Olio is an app that lets people pass on food and household items to others nearby. With over 7 million users and 120k tonnes of CO2 saved so far, it helps avoid waste by encouraging people to share or borrow instead of throwing things away or buying brand new,” said Gareth Main, Director of Growth & Business Intelligence at Olio. “Our mission is to drive behavior change at scale, and for this a deep understanding of users is crucial. Airship's App Experience Editor has played an important role in allowing us to build that understanding, enabling us to rapidly deploy in-app surveys without the need to involve developers. With consistently high-completion rates, these surveys give us invaluable data at multiple points across the user lifecycle.”

Airship Journeys provides one place to orchestrate customer journeys across app experiences and campaigns, offering at-a-glance visualizations of performance and easy access to make changes in a few clicks. To scale content testing and optimization, Airship has enabled OpenAI within its message composer to instantly create endless content variations including localized content in different languages. For marketing offers, Airship Email received major enterprise-grade upgrades to support complex segmentation, personalization and testing strategies, as well as deliverability monitoring, suppression management for compliance and email rendering across hundreds of email clients, browsers and devices. Marketers now have full design control utilizing Airship’s no-code, drag-and-drop email editor interface.

Airship Coupons now supports individualized promo codes for highly segmented offers delivered to any channel — from persistent in-app message centers and mobile wallets, to ads, emails and inside physical stores. The NBA’s Phoenix Suns are going paperless for special promotions with its official gaming partner FanDuel using multiple unique capabilities of Airship’s no-code App Experience Platform.

“For the entirety of the playoff season, in-stadium fans will receive a $10 bonus bet for FanDuel if the Suns score more than 30 points in the first quarter,” said Tramon Thomas, Vice President, Brand Digital & Social, Phoenix Suns. “With Airship’s platform, we can create and optimize the end-to-end experience without requiring development resources; from onboarding experiences that drive opt-ins, to delivering individualized redemption codes for easy retrieval in our in-app message center or through Google Wallet or Apple Wallet.”

Airship is also proud to extend its market-first support for iOS Live Activities by innovating on Android to ensure consistent and scalable live update experiences across both mobile platforms. Airship Live Updates for Android enables a brand’s customers to pin dynamically updated information to both their lock screen and notification tray. Marketers can now offer all of their mobile customers a similar experience and keep their brands’ real-time updates front-and-center for hours at a time.

Finally, Airship is introducing a Partner Configuration Tool, offering a no-code UI wizard to easily integrate Airship with other solutions, connecting data and customer journeys across digital ecosystems. Between out-of-the-box connectors with third-party solutions, open APIs and composable inbound and outbound integration recipes, brands can get up and running fast and never miss a beat in meeting customers’ real-time expectations.

“Airship is on a mission to make life better with better mobile app experiences. Consumers have high expectations for apps to offer utility and personalized experiences that simplify their lives and save them time, yet many businesses struggle to provide this. Too often half of the app team is reliant on the other, slowing everyone down. As a result, app teams fail to extend relationships from acquisition and activation through to engagement and loyalty, where real value accumulates,” said Brett Caine, CEO and president, Airship. “We’re changing that dynamic with the unveiling of Airship’s no-code native app experience editor. Marketers and product teams can now finally take charge of both app experiences and campaigns to form critical first impressions and substantively grow and sustain value over time. We’re entering a new era of customer experience at the speed of mobile, inside and outside the appTM.”

To learn more about Airship’s platform enhancements and its new no-code native App Experience Editor, please register for a May 4 webinar, “Dream. Design. Deploy. Done.”