Study: Retail app notification opt-in rates decline

Portland, Ore. – Opt-in rates among consumers for push notifications from retail apps are on the decline. A new study from Urban Airship shows that average opt-in rates for retail apps fell to 37% in 2014, compared to 46% in 2013.



In 2014, retail apps doubled their notification send volume on the key shopping days of Thanksgiving, Black Friday and Cyber Monday, and consumer response rates also doubled, despite the majority of those notifications being general sales promotions sent to all users.



Urban Airship analysis suggests that had retail apps focused more messaging on pre-shopping activities where consumer engagement rates were higher, they could have determined shoppers’ interests to tailor subsequent notifications and achieve four to seven times greater response that highly targeted notifications receive compared to messages broadcast to everyone.



The study focused on iOS apps, as Android users are automatically opted in to notifications on app download. Retail results were taken from customer data in aggregate to identify apps with at least 5,000 downloads that had sent at least 1,000 cumulative pushes in one month. Analysis included 2,946 apps that had collectively sent more than 93 billion notifications to more than 533 million users.