The Total Economic Impact™ Of Airship

Amplified Cross-Channel Marketing Effectiveness With Airship AI-Enabled Native Experiences (Scenes)

Evidence and data. Interviewees said Airship improved marketing operations efficiency by reducing execution friction, centralizing cross‑channel workflows, and lowering reliance on engineering teams and third‑party agencies. Prior to adoption, campaign execution was slow, fragmented, and manual, which constrained scale and increased operational cost. With Airship, interviewees’ organizations enabled marketers to execute faster, reuse assets, and coordinate campaigns across channels with fewer handoffs and less technical dependency. This led to measurable lift across activation categories.

• The director of mobile experience at the logistics company shared: “Now that we’ve built our new app and with how we put Airship into it, we probably cut marketing and development costs by 90%. [Before Airship], I had to rely 100% on development to execute [and] the email marketing team had roughly 25 active [cross-channel] campaigns. [Now], they’re much more omnichannel, [and] there are between 70 and 80 [targeted campaigns]. About six months ago, we basically increased our marketing ability sixfold using Airship over what we had been doing. In terms of channel and placement, embedded content really gave us the ability to stay in front of the user at all times via the homepage on the app.”

• The digital experience leader at the retail organization shared: “As we grew our user base on the app, if anything, [we] only increased [our use of] push. As a marketing channel, it had become really, really critical to our success at that point. As we’ve adopted Airship to help us out with push, we have seen borderline exponential growth from the beginning to now. It’s certainly starting to taper off but we still see wonderful year-over-year growth for our app user base. And with Airship, it’s not just with push, because we’ve expanded since then, [and] Airship has been a big part of how we’ve been able to grow.”

The interviewees described many additional ways in which their investment in Airship directly impacted cross-channel marketing effectiveness, including:

• Centralizing and coordinating cross‑channel campaign orchestration. The interviewees described how Airship supported more centralized campaign execution and coordination across mobile, email, push, SMS, and on-site experiences. Interviewees noted that disparate teams previously operated independently, leading to duplicated messaging and inconsistent execution. With Airship, interviewees’ organizations improved coordination, reduced duplication of effort across marketing teams and channels, and streamlined workflows, which lowered operational complexity and improved campaign governance.

  • The product leader at the communications company noted: “We send notifications about breaking news, weather, [and] events [to multiple markets]. ... Airship provided us with an API [to] integrate the push notification functionality into our CMS directly. [Now with Airship], our editors don’t go into each of the dashboards anymore. [Whether] you have to send push notifications for 40 stations or whatever [the number], you literally put one notification and check the number of markets to which we want to send it.”
  • The director of mobile experience at the logistics company shared: “When we started rebuilding our new version of the app, there was an obvious need for us to take advantage of all of our first-party data and try to anticipate next best action scenarios. At the time, we were presented with two options to build something that would allow personalization. We could do it, but of course that would probably take a significant amount of time and resources. [Then], I met with the Airship team … and it presented an opportunity for us to jump ahead and [with] personalization utilizing a third-party tool that essentially did what we imagined we wanted to do anyway without having to build everything from the ground up.”

• Accelerating journey deployment velocity and time to value across channels. With Airship, interviewees reported a significant increase in the speed at which cross-channel journeys could be activated, empowering marketers and CX teams to act with the agility of product managers. Marketers executed directly using native, no-code solutions to deploy actual native app experiences and onboarding flows instantly without requiring development resources for routine changes. Teams were able to compress timelines and launch highly relevant, time-sensitive native experiences in near real time. Time-sensitive messaging was no longer gated by long planning cycles or technical feasibility checks; teams at interviewees’ organizations knew they could execute quickly and safely. As a result, campaign velocity translated into faster organizational alignment and greater confidence to respond immediately under dynamic conditions.

  • The director of digital experience at the travel company described building and deploying a new in‑app and web message in under two weeks after leadership identified a promotional opportunity, compared with much longer timelines previously. Faster execution optimized decision-making and enabled their teams to act on opportunities without extended planning cycles or backlog delays for faster overall campaign deployment. They noted that Airship became a trusted execution surface that leadership could rely on in the moment, which shortened approval loops and reduced hesitation to act on emerging opportunities: “We’ve reduced customer confusion on the servicing side because we’ve been able to provide more targeted messaging in the moment for people to be aware of new products and services. …The team built an app and a web Scene in less than two weeks and got it out the door because our chief customer officer [identified] an opportunity [to] drive profitability [using Airship to deploy] the first major message.”
  • The media and CRM leader in the hospitality industry shared that their organization was able to quadruple the volume of personalized Airship-enabled campaigns to their customers over three years, which the interviewee indicated was a crucial component of their organization’s ability to delight and provide value to their customers. They noted how Airship served to directly transform their customers’ experiences in real time, with measurable impacts ranging from improved conversions to improved revenue: “Every question counts. Every interaction matters and plays an impactful role [in growing that relationship].”

• Improving opt‑in and consent enrollment. Prior to Airship, early app experiences often dropped users into static content with little guidance, leading to weak first‑session value. With Airship, interviewees’ organizations were able to guide customers toward relevant content and actions shortly after download. Interviewees described onboarding that emphasized usefulness and reduced friction as the primary business objective, rather than sales. This served to improve early engagement and establish repeat usage patterns, which interviewees consistently associated with stronger retention and lifetime value. Furthermore, several interviewees indicated that push opt‑ins increased as app usage became more valuable rather than opt-ins driving app usage. Customers who adopted the app for utility or service reasons were then more willing to opt in to notifications, reinforcing activation depth and ongoing lifecycle interactions.
  The director of mobile experience at the logistics company shared how Airship streamlined A/B testing: “[We like] how quick and easy the A/B testing is. [Our marketers] are more willing to try something new because it doesn’t [require too] much work. [Now, because] they’re not as worried about failing and wasting resource time, there’s a lot more A/B testing. We hadn’t been doing that previously in the app, so that’s been a really neat tool that’s Airship provided us with.”

• Reducing dependency on engineering and IT resources. Airship enabled self-service capabilities for the interviewees’ organizations’ marketers to execute campaigns, modify messaging, and test experiences without developer involvement that would historically cause bottlenecks and opportunity costs. Interviewees described this shift as critical to improving productivity, as development teams were no longer required for every campaign iteration. This also reduced internal friction, freed engineering capacity for higher‑value work, and allowed marketing teams to operate more independently while maintaining governance.

  • The director of digital experience at the travel company shared how their organization used Airship for setting up native experiences, SMS and MMS communication, and live activity updates in ways that freed up developers for higher-value activities: “[The content teams] can self-service their own messaging stuff. [Prior to Airship], it was all custom engineering.”
  • The director of mobile experience at the logistics company shared: “[Prior to Airship], it was an absolute nightmare [coordinating with teams]. It probably took us four months to get a logo changed. [Using Airship] is the only way that we don’t have to worry about building a services layer architecture. At the end of the day, if digital marketing wants to change out a logo or put new content in, they need to be able to do that very quickly and see those results immediately.”

• Lowering transaction costs and third‑party spend for ongoing campaign work. In the prior environment, some of the interviewees’ organizations relied heavily on agencies for creative assets, SMS programs, and email templates. With Airship, interviewees’ organizations reduced dependency on external agencies by enabling in‑house teams to create, reuse, and manage content across channels, resulting in fewer agency engagements and campaign assets managed by significantly fewer internal staff.
  The head of digital banking at the financial services firm indicated that their team reduced costs by shifting away from SMS, email, and agencies, with one person managing reusable cross‑channel assets. Faster approvals and turnaround improved efficiency while keeping communications consistent and compliant. They shared: “We saved a lot of cost through the reduced reliance on SMS and email [with cross-channel marketing] in Airship. In the past, we would use agencies to create assets to send SMS, especially for our email templates. But with Airship, I have one person on my team who does all the templates … and the process is actually very quick.”

Modeling and assumptions. Based on the interviews, Forrester assumes the following about the composite organization:

• In the prior environment, the composite organization would have required an increase from five to 14 marketing resources by the end of a three-year investment period just to keep pace with increasing customer experience demands.

• In the prior environment, the associated development team would have needed to double from one to two resources to effectively support migration and management of an omnichannel customer experience program brought in-house.

• The average fully burdened annual salary for a marketer is $112,000.

• The average fully burdened annual salary for a developer is $221,000.

• With Airship, the composite streamlines cross‑channel marketing operations by centralizing orchestration, accelerating execution, and reducing reliance on engineering and third‑party agencies. As a result, the composite’s marketing and developer teams remains lean and reduces the need for additional headcount. This enables the composite to scale campaigns faster, lower costs, and increase marketing capacity through easier testing, asset reuse, and self‑service execution across channels.

  • Cross-channel campaigns experience an 80% improvement in marketing effectiveness with their initial Airship investment by the end of Year 3.
  • With the adoption of Airship native experiences, Airship’s conversational AI agent (Scenes), and full deployment live in Year 2, it benefits from additional incremental improvements of 15% in Year 2 and 35% in Year 3 for cross-channel marketing campaign effectiveness.

• Forrester assumes a 50% productivity recapture rate.

Risks. The following potential risks can impact this benefit:

• The type of solution and number of traditional channels used by the company prior to deploying Airship. Email-, SMS-, and mobile-driven sales at times depend on one another to create awareness and require a multichannel approach to successfully convert. Firms that do not fully engage consumers across the various channels may not see the same level of results

• The complexity and frequency of campaigns created annually within the company and the amount of time currently allocated to these tasks.

• The skill level, efficiency, and salaries of marketers, developers and related technical staff within an organization.

• The organization’s previous dependence on external third-party agencies to create marketing materials and how that strategy changes with its investment in Airship.

• The organization’s change management and user training.

Results. To account for these risks, Forrester adjusted this benefit downward by 15%, yielding a three-year, risk-adjusted total PV (discounted at 10%) of $1.7 million.

Expanded Digital Customer Activation

Evidence and data. Airship played a central role in helping the interviewees’ organizations turn mobile into a primary activation conversion destination. Prior to adoption, the interviewees noted that their organizations’ digital activation efforts often failed to demonstrate early value. With Airship, the organizations focused on strengthening permission based enrollment, accelerating time to value during onboarding, and making early interactions more relevant, with far-reaching customer-reported impacts.

• The director of digital experience at the travel company shared: “With our [Airship-enabled] app store optimization, we drove an increase in impressions by 11%; we increased first-time downloads by 30% with Airship. Conversions were up 1.5 percentage points from the store into our app. After we updated our metadata and then we updated short descriptions and increased conversions, we updated short descriptions and increased [app store] conversions by 4.7%. Airship drove up keyword ranking by 17%. [That is] all helping us acquire more customers through app store activation on the in-app space [and we have seen] overall monthly active users increase 17% versus year over year.

• The head of digital banking at the financial services firm indicated that their organization was able to revamp the UI/UX of their digital banking app with Airship and drove customer growth by 33% in the first year. With subsequent expansion of Airship, customer Net Promoter Score™ (NPS) metrics rose steadily to a total increase of 10 points within two years.³ Activity rates improved dramatically compared to SMS and email, driving active rates above 90%. Targeted messaging supported deposit retention, cross‑sell, and product conversion, materially increasing revenue while strengthening customer trust and satisfaction.

These changes expanded the active user base and established adoption behaviors associated with higher customer lifetime value, helping the interviewees’ organizations to:

• Optimize mobile application discovery and downloads. Using Airship, the interviewees’ organizations were able to reposition the app as a destination for utility and experience rather than promotion. Interviewees consistently described app adoption occurring when customers encountered high‑value operational moments, such as dispatch, transactions, service updates, or time‑sensitive alerts. In these moments, the app was positioned as the most reliable way to receive information or complete tasks, which naturally motivated downloads. This reduced reliance on traditional acquisition campaigns (e.g., reduction in paid media costs) and improved conversion from discovery to installation.

  • The director of digital experience at the travel company shared: “On the engagement side, in our app, we have about 13.5 million monthly average active users. For in-app impressions, we would run about 50 campaigns inside the platform and then those campaigns drove approximately 125 million impressions. We had about 10.7 million mobile wallet downloads, up about 9% and actually higher than our travel growth at the time, too. We are increasing beyond the scale — our month-over-month growth rate for that wallet is probably 4%, above the industry [benchmark set by Airship] at about 2%.
  • The product leader at the communications company noted: “Our apps are installed across about 4.1 million devices, and 50% of those devices are opted in to receive push notifications compared the 43% standard for local media, so, we are still higher compared to the local media.”
  • The media and CRM leader in the hospitality industry shared how their organization’s Airship environment helped integrate push and marketing efforts into an automated workflow for experiential campaign. This improved open rates to a range of 10% to 15% open rates, compared to the 5% industry benchmark. They also shared how their organization leveraged their Airship environment to maximize conversions on marketing activation through commercial messaging, with a 15% open rate on product launch and cross-sell messages.

• Improve early onboarding and frequent “feel-good factor” touchpoints. Before Airship, the interviewees’ organizations struggled to understand early user drop-off and to reprompt customers at the right moments. Using Airship, interviewees described faster testing cycles, more relevant messaging, and clearer visibility into interest and activity signals. Several noted that sending fewer, more targeted messages increased positive interactions and reduced negative behaviors, such as app uninstalls.

• Elevate customer experience. Interviewees also noted that Airship elevated their organizations’ customer experience primarily by focusing on high utility native interactions that established a continuous value exchange rather than purely transaction outreach. It enabled their organizations to replace generic outbound blasts with contextual in-app and push experiences, ensuring customers felt guided and supported through native app flows, which established trust and long-term utility.
  The head of digital banking at the financial services firm indicated that Airship also strengthened trust and confidence through nonrevenue messaging, such as scam alerts, fraud education, and market insights, positioning the bank as a proactive partner in customers’ financial well-being. By delivering information customers might not actively seek — but still found relevant — Airship drove higher conversions and long-term loyalty, contributing to a highly active and satisfied customer base. They noted that their response rates for Airship campaigns frequently reached 24% to 25% of users when content was highly relevant. Even lower priority or informational messages achieved interaction rates above 11%, significantly outperforming expectations. Traditional SMS and email campaigns historically delivered only 2% to 3% reach or engagement, highlighting a substantial improvement with Airship.

Modeling and assumptions. Based on the interviews, Forrester assumes the following about the composite organization:

• In the prior environment, the composite engaged 5 million digital customers, as defined by the total number of individuals who have visited the company site or engaged with any of the composite organization’s organic or paid media in the prior 12 months (held flat year over year for analysis purposes).

• After the Airship investment, the composite turns mobile into a primary activation destination by improving app discovery, downloads, opt-ins, onboarding, and early in-app interactions. This drive measurable lifts in metrics such as higher first-time downloads, more monthly active users, stronger opt-in behavior, and more predictable activation tied to higher customer lifetime value.

• With the improved campaign reach and an enhanced activation journey with Airship, the composite grows the volume of digitally activated customers by 15% by the end of Year 3 with the platform and AI experiences. This engages more than 1.8 million customers across channels with Airship after three years.

• The composite organization’s annual customer conversion value for a digitally activated customer in the prior environment was $200.

• The purchase conversion rate for a digitally activated customer is 8%.

• The composite’s profit margin is 12%.

Risks. The following potential risks can impact this benefit:

• The type of solution and number of traditional channels used by the company prior to deploying Airship. Email-, SMS-, and mobile-driven sales at times depend on one another to create awareness and require a multichannel approach to successfully convert. Firms that do not fully engage consumers across the various channels may not see the same level of results.

• The size of the digital audience the organization reaches and activates annually, goals in conversions (e.g., customer web page visits, subscriptions, purchases), profit margin, prior conversion rates, and the value of a conversion.

Results. To account for these risks, Forrester adjusted this benefit downward by 15%, yielding a three-year, risk-adjusted total PV (discounted at 10%) of $2.4 million.

Elevated Cross-Channel Customer Experience

Evidence and data. Before adopting Airship, digital customer experiences at the interviewees’ organizations relied on static, broad outreach that limited responsiveness to customer intent and constrained cross-sell, upsell, repeat conversions, and customer lifetime value growth. With Airship, interviewees’ organizations delivered more timely and relevant interactions across mobile and in-app touchpoints, increasing participation from digitally active customers and exposure to personalized experiences.

The interviewees consistently linked improved experience quality to increased downstream revenue opportunity overall. In particular, the interviewees highlighted how Airship helped their organizations to deepen revenue impact through meaningful customer relationships built on repeat interactions that build trust, to ultimately:

• Improve conversions at high-intent moments through context‑aware experiences. Interviewees noted that before Airship, purchase conversions depended on static placements and broad campaigns that could not adapt to customer context or timing. With Airship, the interviewees’ organizations engaged customers closer to moments of intent using in-app, push, SMS, and AI-enabled Airship in-app experiences. Interviewees repeatedly described clearer behavioral signals, faster testing cycles, and greater confidence in identifying which experiences drove action. Interviewees said Airship replaced intuition-based optimization with a repeatable, evidence-driven approach, enabling teams to test, validate, and scale effective experiences through fewer, more relevant interactions. Location-aware, in-the-moment touch points further reduced friction, increased participation, and supported long-term customer value over short-term sales.
  The media and CRM leader in the hospitality industry shared how Airship integrated with their CRM to orchestrate personalized, location‑aware guest experiences. Enhanced analytics, segmentation, and geolocation enabled real‑time, on‑site alerts and recommendations. These capabilities drove one of their company’s highest push open rates, lifted occupancy by 17 points after a product launch, and doubled conversion for a premium offering through timely, high‑impact interactions on site. This interviewee said, “Because of this scaled ability to provide a real-time, personalized experience combining the in-app and on-site experience, we were able to double our purchase conversion rate for this premium subscription.”

• Enhance cross‑sell and upsell efforts through personalization with real-time, first-party data. Airship enabled interviewees’ organizations to move from generic, static homepage wrappers or batch-and-blast email campaigns to personalize, continuous discovery and offers within active journeys that leveraged zero- and first‑party, real‑time customer context. Interviewees described moving from broad targeting to behavioral microsegmentation, aligning native experiences with low‑friction actions such as applying for products or completing transactions.
  With Airship, cross-sell and upsell became a natural, value-driven extension of the customer journey rather than a disruptive interruption, driving repeatable conversions and increasing trust. Interviewees noted that presenting relevant options during app and web experiences reinforced attentiveness to customer needs and reduced perceived sales pressure. This normalized ongoing discovery, deepened relationships, and shifted cross-sell and upsell from short-term tactics to sustained drivers of customer lifetime value grounded in experience quality.

  • The head of digital banking in the financial services industry said Airship enabled their team to drive significant revenue and conversions by delivering highly relevant, behavior‑based notifications. This helped grow digital channel revenue from approximately $3 million to $27 million, alongside expanded cross-sell activity and higher conversions. They also discussed how their campaigns for targeted credit card spend reminders achieved interaction rates of 24% to 25%, far outperforming SMS and email. By evolving from broad targeting to microsegmentation and aligning timing, context, and simple actions, their team observed double the growth in usage or revenue during Airship‑enabled campaign periods compared with noncampaign periods.

  • The director of digital experience at the travel company shared: “On the engagement side, in our app, we have roughly 13.5 million monthly average users. And then for in-app impressions, in the last 12 months, we would run about 50 campaigns inside the platform and then those campaigns drove roughly 125 million impressions.”

• Increase value for digitally engaged customers. Interviewees consistently linked higher engagement with Airship-enabled digital properties with higher customer value. Before Airship, limited engagement frequency constrained repeat revenue opportunities. With Airship, interviewees’ organizations expanded the active user base with sustained engagement through fewer, more relevant interactions that strengthened and improved customers’ time to value and built more durable customer relationships. Revenue impact was therefore discussed as cumulative and relationship‑driven rather than transactional, with CX quality acting as the primary CLV multiplier.

  • The director of digital experience at the travel company shared: “We are also one of the first [in our industry] to launch the brand new iOS 26 semantic tags with Airships’ help [so that our products and communications] have a lot more content on them like link to a map, a link to your ‘Find Me’ [and other] live activities.”
  • The head of digital banking at the financial services firm indicated that their organization accelerated revenue growth by using timely, personalized engagement to retain and expand customer value. Proactive fixed‑deposit reminders helped retain over $3.9 billion in deposits by reducing attrition to competing banks, while data‑driven cross‑selling generated nearly $1.6 billion in new deposit placements. Improved visibility into customer profiles enabled more precise targeting and deeper relationships. In parallel, automated spend‑triggered credit card notifications converted approximately $28 million in incremental sales by prompting flexible payment options at the right moment. Targeted product messaging also increased loan uptake, driving broader product adoption through relevant, context‑aware interactions. They indicated: “We started out with more broader targeting, but now we [are expanding into] microsegments, too. We believe that if we do it at the right time [and] context and we link it to easy processes like how customers can apply [for new financial products], when all the three factors go together, we see natural growth in our numbers from [a] usage or revenue standpoint. [When] we use Airship, we [can] see double the growth in numbers for that two-week period versus non-two-week period.”

Modeling and assumptions. Based on the interviews, Forrester assumes the following about the composite organization:

• In the prior environment, the composite engaged 5 million digital customers, as defined by the total number of individuals who have visited the company site or engaged with any of the composite organization’s organic or paid media in the prior 12 months (held flat year over year for analysis purposes).

• The purchase conversion rate for a digitally activated customer is 8%.

• The composite organization’s annual customer conversion value for a digitally activated customer in the prior environment was $200.

• Airship elevated the composite’s cross‑channel customer experience by enabling timely, context‑aware, and personalized engagement across the journey, improving conversions at high‑intent moments, scaling microsegmented cross‑sell and upsell, expanding active digital participation, and shifting revenue growth toward deeper relationships and higher customer lifetime value rather than one‑time transactions.

• With this improved Airship cross-channel customer experience, the composite organization’s annual customer conversion value for a digitally activated customer increases by up to 14%, or $28, by Year 3 with Airship native experiences, Airship’s conversational AI agent, providing an additional revenue boost (inclusive).

• The composite’s profit margin is 12%.

Risks. The following potential risks can impact this benefit:

• The likelihood of customer churn.

• The type of solution and number of engagement channels used by the company prior to deploying Airship. Email-, SMS-, and mobile-driven sales at times depend on one another to create awareness and require a multichannel approach to successfully convert. Firms that do not fully engage consumers across the various channels may not see the same level of results.

• The organization’s relative size, customer base, industry, and location of operations.

• The size of the digital audience the organization reaches annually, goals in conversions (e.g., customer web page visits, subscriptions, purchases), the organization’s baseline average order value and profit margin, the number of customers who make a purchase annually, and the lifetime value of customers.

Results. To account for these risks, Forrester adjusted this benefit downward by 15%, yielding a three-year, risk-adjusted total PV (discounted at 10%) of $2.7 million.

Targeted Retention Of Digitally Activated Customers

Evidence and data. Airship enabled the interviewees’ organizations to improve retention and lifetime value through dynamic lifecycle orchestrations, making customer interactions natively relevant, timely, and context aware across channels. Before adoption, reactivation was sporadic and churn risk increased due to outbound messaging and limited insight into customer behavior. With Airship, interviewees’ organizations focused on sustaining participation through highly relevant native experiences, smarter behavioral targeting, and capturing critical customer signals, which interviewees linked to stronger loyalty, higher active usage, more durable customer relationships, and reduced disengagement over time.

Retention gains at the interviewees’ organizations were not limited to commercial messaging. Interviewees described using Airship to deliver time‑sensitive alerts, reminders, and guidance during moments of uncertainty or friction. These experiences reduced confusion, built confidence, and reinforced the usefulness of digital channels. Customers stayed engaged because the experience helped them succeed. Retention improved because customers had ongoing reasons to return, trust the channel, and remain opted in, which sustained engagement even when no immediate transaction was involved.

In particular, the interviewees pointed out the importance of Airship’s ability to:

• Support more sophisticated segmentation and targeting to better inform reengagement and retention efforts. With the investment in Airship, the interviewees discussed how their organizations were able to improve audience targeting, which previously relied on broad segments with limited real‑time context. Airship introduced more granular segmentation and targeting, including microsegments informed by real‑time behavior, location, and lifecycle stage, yielding context‑specific interactions that felt timely and appropriate. These capabilities helped interviewees’ organizations tailor communications to customers’ current needs, reinforcing value and encouraging continued participation. Interviewees described this as critical to retention because it prevented irrelevant experiences that eroded trust.

• Proactively reengage inactive and at‑risk customers through improved marketing mix and quality. With Airship, interviewees’ organizations reengaged inactive or low‑frequency users using behavior‑informed outreach delivered at appropriate moments. The interviewees noted that by using Airship, their organizations ensured that customer communications reflected customer preferences for communication frequency, with fewer, more meaningful interactions. These enhancements stabilized and grew engagement by delivering content aligned to customer needs, including service alerts, reminders, and personalized updates. Interviewees repeatedly emphasized that Airship enabled tighter control over message timing, cadence, and context. This mattered because churn was previously driven as much by over‑communication as by under‑engagement. With Airship, interviewees’ organizations learned when to stay quiet and when to be present, which reduced customers’ contact fatigue and made interactions feel purposeful.
  The product leader at the communications company noted that improved targeting driven by Airship significantly increased conversions and sustained growth across a multimillion‑user base. AI Journeys drove over a 5x increase in reengagement, helping their communications brand reclaim user attention, stay top of mind, and compete more effectively for limited app space and time.

Modeling and assumptions. Based on the interviews, Forrester assumes the following about the composite organization:

• With Airship, the composite adds more than 1.8 million new digitally engaged customers (see Benefit B) and grows their conversion value to $228 by Year 3 (see Benefit C).

• Average percentage customer churn in the prior environment was 30%.

• The purchase conversion rate for a digitally activated customer is 8%.

• With Airship cross-channel retention and retargeting campaigns, the composite targets retention by using real‑time segmentation, context‑aware messaging, and controlled cadence to proactively reengage inactive and at‑risk users.

• This reduces customer fatigue and sustains higher active usage and loyalty through timely service and value driven interactions rather than generic outreach, increasing retention rates with Airship by up to 7.8% cumulatively over three years with Airship and native experiences, Airship’s conversational AI agent, deployed.

• The composite’s profit margin is 12%.

Risks. The following potential risks can impact this benefit:

• The type of solution and number of engagement channels used by the company prior to deploying Airship. Email-, SMS-, and mobile-driven sales at times depend on one another to create awareness and require a multichannel approach to successfully convert. Firms that do not fully engage consumers across the various channels may not see the same level of results.

• The organization’s relative size, customer base, industry, and location of operations.

• The scale of data flowing into Airship from which to draw insights.

• The number and salary of targeting and segmentation resources employed.

Results. To account for these risks, Forrester adjusted this benefit downward by 15%, yielding a three-year, risk-adjusted total PV (discounted at 10%) of $470,000.

Unquantified Benefits

Interviewees mentioned the following additional benefits that their organizations experienced but were not able to quantify:

• Avoided service costs enabled by in‑moment customer guidance. Before adopting Airship, customer support costs were inflated by confusion, delayed information, and limited real‑time guidance, leading to avoidable call center, on‑site, and in‑person service demand. Using Airship, the interviewees’ organizations delivered timely, context‑aware messages, such as alerts, updates, reminders, and guided instructions, directly within digital channels. These interactions addressed customer needs earlier and in less expensive digital channels, reducing reliance on higher‑cost assisted support.
  Interviewees said Airship also supported greater adoption of in‑app self‑service by guiding customers to complete actions digitally and navigate service processes more easily. Interviewees associated these improvements with fewer support inquiries, reduced on‑site staffing pressure, and lower follow‑up demand. While formal deflection metrics were not consistently tracked, interviewees’ organizations linked these experience improvements to meaningful cost avoidance by resolving issues closer to the customer and earlier in the journey.

• Empowered faster, more confident decisions at scale through journey analysis. Airship increased organizational flexibility by improving real‑time data visibility and the quality of decision‑making across teams. Before adoption, decisions relied on fragmented, delayed, or point‑in‑time data, which increased effort, required broader stakeholder involvement, and slowed alignment. With Airship, interviewees’ organizations gained shared, real‑time visibility into customer behavior across journeys, allowing teams to assess performance continuously rather than episodically. This reduced time spent gathering and reconciling data and increased confidence in customer experience and marketing decisions. From a TEI perspective, this created flexibility by lowering managerial friction and allowing the interviewees’ organizations to adapt priorities, retire ineffective initiatives, and scale successful approaches more quickly as conditions changed — without requiring additional tools, analysis layers, or process overhead.

• Enabled confident CX innovation with strategic guidance and partnership. Interviewees valued Airship not only for its technology but also for its guidance on when, where, and how to engage customers effectively. They noted that Airship’s expertise helped their teams adopt proven engagement patterns, test ideas with confidence, and align execution with customer expectations. This ongoing partnership supported more informed decision‑making and accelerated their organizations’ ability to evolve customer experience practices while maintaining governance and control.

• Supported application adoption due to trust and security framing. For interviewees whose organizations existed in regulated or high‑risk environments, the app was positioned as a safer, authenticated channel compared with SMS or email. Interviewees noted that steering customers to the app for security‑sensitive updates improved both downloads and sustained activation, as customers perceived the app as the most trustworthy experience.

Flexibility

The value of flexibility is unique to each customer. There are multiple scenarios in which a customer might implement Airship and later realize additional uses and business opportunities, including:

• Easier adoption of future AI and automation capabilities. According to interviewees, the most significant flexibility benefit was the foundation Airship established for future AI adoption. Early use of AI‑assisted workflows helped the interviewees’ organizations define governance, decision roles, and human‑in‑the‑loop practices. This reduced uncertainty and positioned teams to adopt more advanced AI‑driven automation later without major restructuring, enabling responsible scaling of personalization and journey orchestration over time.

• Enabling product teams to build faster with lower‑risk, AI‑informed experimentation. Before adopting Airship, product and marketing teams at the interviewees’ organizations operated in silos and lacked real‑time visibility into customer behavior, which slowed learning and constrained iteration. Airship unblocked these teams by exposing live behavioral signals, enabling native, no-code scene‑based experiments, and completely removing the reliance on engineering resources or app store update cycles to test changes. Interviewees noted that teams iterated instantly based on observed behavior rather than waiting for delayed feedback or development sprints. AI‑assisted insights and pre‑generated structures lowered the cost of exploration and helped teams validate ideas more quickly. As a result, product teams at the interviewees’ organizations improved roadmap prioritization and iteration speed, shifting toward continuous refinement aligned with real customer needs even when sprint or cycle reductions were not formally measured.

• The ability to scale engagement ambition without linear resourcing. Interviewees reported that AI‑assisted capabilities reduced the effort required to create journeys, segments, and content by providing structured starting points that teams could refine with human oversight. This enabled existing teams to manage greater engagement complexity and volume without adding headcount. As a result, interviewees’ organizations gained flexibility to scale future initiatives using the same resources, lowering long‑term dependency on specialized skills.

• Improved portability across use cases and customer scenarios. Interviewees highlighted the ability to reuse Airship‑enabled engagement patterns across diverse scenarios, including service, lifecycle, security, on‑site, and revenue‑related communications. Once established, these patterns could be applied to new use cases without retooling, preserving flexibility as business priorities evolved and reducing future switching or reinvestment costs.

Flexibility would also be quantified when evaluated as part of a specific project (described in more detail in Total Economic Impact Approach).