From Boom to Normalization: E-Commerce Mobile Apps Acclimated to the New Normal in 2021

The boom of online shopping as a consequence of the pandemic has forced brands to rapidly change their marketing strategies, especially on mobile. In 2021, with massive vaccination and partially lifted pandemic restrictions, the e-commerce industry seems to be stabilizing in the new normal. How have the new mobile marketing strategies impacted the key app metrics in 2021? What e-commerce app marketing trends do we observe at the turn of the year?

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Pushwoosh, the top 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 e-commerce industry data in the mobile landscape – app growth, user activity, CTRs, opt-in rates, most common content practices, including during Black Friday 2021.

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

-The average DAU rates prove the explosive growth of mobile apps usage in 2021. The majority of e-commerce apps witness high DAU rates in 2021, with a significant part of them — 24% — reaching an outstanding rate at above 20%.
-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 DAU rates decreased throughout November, with 30% of apps achieving 1–5%.
-In 2021 the majority of shopping apps grow an extra 5–10% of new installs per month. Compared to the same period of 2020, the year-over-year growth of app installs in January–November 2021 was 45.6%.
-With user acquisition budgets spent in advance to acquire new users, in November 21% of apps grew by less than 1%.
-Seems like the majority of e-commerce apps have adopted the ‘less is more’ rule: to avoid spamming, they send only 1–2 push notifications per day.
-The spike in mobile shopping in pandemic times is also reflected in app user engagement growth. It’s no news that Android users are way more engaged than iOS clients: 30% of Android devices get an average CTR between 5–10% (1–3% for iOS).
-Both iOS and Android users clicked on push notifications more actively during the Black Friday week. Especially, the iOS CTRs went up: the CTRs of 23% of the apps reached 5-10%.
-Push notification CTR depends on more factors rather than just sending frequency: message content, time of send, device platform, personalization, and segmentation.
-Rich media push notifications containing images got twice higher CTRs compared to the ones without them.
-The most common emotional triggers used by e-commerce apps to create the sense of urgency and incentivize app users to act ‘right here and right now’ are ‘Order Now’, ‘Shop Now’, ‘Coupon’, ‘Save’ and ‘Free’.
-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.

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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 2022.