“Back to Stores” Trend Affects Mobile Usage During Black Friday 2021: According to Pushwoosh’s Research

Black Friday is traditionally one of the biggest growth opportunities AND a real challenge for the ecommerce industry. The boom of online shopping as a consequence of the pandemic has forced brands to rapidly change their marketing strategies, especially on mobile. How has Black Friday 2021 affected online shopping app metrics?

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Pushwoosh, a leading cross-channel customer engagement platform trusted by 80,000 clients from all industries,​​ and Net Solutions, a digital experience agency that helps brands leverage design, engineering and analytics, have gathered and analyzed the latest ecommerce industry data in the mobile landscape.

The research is based on 21,562,068 push notifications sent by 143 ecommerce apps in 11 languages and reveals the following insights:

• This year, “back to stores” and “in‑person shopping” trends are clearly reflected in mobile usage during the holiday season: the percentage of apps with high Daily Active Users rates decreased throughout November, with 30% of apps achieving 1–5% DAU.
• Big brands were at the center of the holiday rush, and their shopping apps (> 1M subscribers) demonstrated the best DAU during this period – 7.2%.
• With user acquisition budgets spent in advance to acquire new users, 21% of apps grew by less than 1% and the majority of ecommerce apps kept their growth at 5–10%.
• More than 30% of push notification senders avoided overwhelming users with their messages and distributed only one push per day; others sent two to three pushes daily.
• Both iOS and Android users clicked on push notifications more actively during the Black Friday week: 23% of the iOS devices and the third part of the Android devices got their CTRs between 5 and 10%.
• The analyzed data shows no strong correlation between an app’s opt-in rate and the CTRs its push notifications receive. In fact, there are apps with relatively low opt-in rates but high CTRs and vice versa.
• Rich media push notifications containing images got twice higher CTRs compared to the ones without them.
• This Black Friday, the most frequent discount announced in e-commerce push notifications was 25%. At the same time, a lot of brands offered high 50% and 70% savings.

The research findings will help forward-thinking brands to benchmark their key business metrics against the industry averages and make informed decisions about their app marketing strategies in the post-pandemic world.