At Airship, we believe that customer engagement is a completely meaningless metric if it doesn’t actually grow your business. Here’s why:

Legacy customer engagement platforms (CEP) focus on the wrong metrics: clicks, opens, and delivery volumes. But beneath these numbers lie glaring issues — disconnected data, engineering debt that slows teams down, and stagnant user growth. Investing in a platform built on vanity metrics eats away at your ROI. With Airship helping to unify orchestration, accelerate execution, and reduce reliance on engineering, the composite streamlines cross-channel marketing operations and avoids the need to double the headcount otherwise required to effectively scale an in-house omnichannel program

This is exactly why Airship focuses on driving real results for the world’s leading brands — measurable outcomes like revenue, retention, and customer lifetime value. This approach was evaluated in The Total Economic Impact™ of Airship, a commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Airship, July 2026.

The framework of the study was built on in-depth interviews conducted by Forrester Consulting with six enterprise Airship customers (spanning retail, logistics, hospitality, and financial services), aggregated into one composite: a global, multibillion-dollar B2C conglomerate with 10 million total customers.

Forrester’s financial model designed a composite organization based on the combined experiences of six real Airship enterprise customers — a global, multibillion-dollar B2C conglomerate with 10 million total customers, 5 million of whom are digitally activated.

The baseline numbers are grounded in real enterprise scale. The model evaluated performance using a $200 annual conversion value per digital customer, an 8% purchase conversion rate, and a 12% profit margin.

Weighing total, risk-adjusted benefits against implementation costs revealed a net present value (NPV) of $6.0 million. Here is where those financial returns were realized across the composite organization.

For the composite organization, the annual customer conversion value increased by 14% — adding an estimated $28 in value per customer by Year 3.

The framework indicates that this growth is driven by context-aware, personalized journeys and Scenes — powered by conversational AI. Instead of flooding users with irrelevant noise, the composite organization used real-time behavioral signals to deliver utility at windows of high intent. A digital experience director in the travel sector highlighted the conversion impact:

The study outlined how the composite organization turned mobile apps into primary conversion destinations by refining app discovery, onboarding flows, and permission-based opt-ins.

This optimization added more than 1.8 million additional digital customers to the composite active user base. Shifting an app from a broadcast channel to an interactive destination created long-term value. One retail digital experience leader explained the connection:

The study found that using native, no-code solutions removed development barriers entirely, letting non-technical teams deploy actual app experiences instantly.

The composite organization unlocked an 80% productivity improvement from orchestrated journeys, alongside an additional 35% efficiency boost by Year 3 via AI-driven Scenes. Teams scaled campaigns and ran safe experiments without waiting on engineering backlogs. A logistics director summarized the operational relief:

Using Airship’s granular segmentation and precise cadence control, the composite organization sustained higher active usage, keeping over 314,000 at-risk customers from disengaging and lifting retention rates by 7.8% over three years for the composite organization. A communications product leader described the impact:

The Forrester study also highlighted critical areas where Airship changed how the composite organization ran daily operations — driving impact across the entire organization.

• Avoided service costs via in-moment guidance. Proactive, in-the-moment alerts and in-app self-service resolved customer friction points early for the composite organization. This digital resolution directly deflected call volume and lowered call center demand.
• Faster, more confident decisions at scale. For the composite organization, Airship replaced siloed metrics with shared, real-time journey data. Teams gathered data faster, reduced internal alignment loops, and pivoted roadmaps based on clear behavior signals.
• Confident innovation with built-in governance. Airship provided the composite organization the strategic guidance and platform guardrails teams needed to test ideas and experiment safely.

To maintain absolute credibility, the study balanced the $7.3 million in benefits against an explicit cost breakdown.

For the composite organization, total risk-adjusted costs over the three-year horizon equaled $1.3 million.

The primary investment broke down into $1.1 million in platform fees. This included flexible cross-channel credit consumption, dedicated professional services, and specialized AI features. The composite organization deployed Airship’s native AI experience architecture — Airship Scenes — during the first year of the investment to maximize early value.

The remaining overhead involved $127,000 dedicated to deployment and ongoing administration. Teams completed setup using a phased, four-month implementation window that required 680 cross-functional labor hours across three years. After adoption, ongoing platform management required just 312 hours per year — demonstrating that sophisticated journey orchestration did not scale internal resourcing costs for the composite organization.