A Marketer’s Guide to Push Notification Benchmarks

Push notifications capture customers’ attention on today’s most valuable and visible real estate — smartphone lock screens — and bring them back to the app for conversion. The role of push notifications in a cross-channel strategy has only grown as consumers increasingly reject blunt promotional email and social media marketing. But with the sheer volume of notifications delivered daily, how do you ensure your messages cut through the noise and drive customers to take high-value actions with your brand? Short answer: push notification benchmarks.

Since 2009, when Airship sent the first commercial push notification, we’ve made it our business to help brands harness the value of notifications across the customer lifecycle. Our new Mobile App Push Notification Benchmarks for 2025 are designed to do just that — offering insights to help you understand how your campaign performance compares to the broader industry and best practices to maximize engagement and conversions. Up-to-date industry benchmarks are mission-critical to keep pace with shifts in how brands and consumers interact today. 

Read on for a guide to push notification benchmarks to help you unlock the most value out of our new research.

What Are Push Notification Benchmarks?

Push notification benchmarks are standardized metrics used to evaluate the effectiveness of your content and strategy. They offer a framework for understanding whether your campaign is performing above, below or on par with industry averages. 

Why Do I Need Push Notification Benchmarks?

Consumer behaviors evolve daily, and Apple and Google continue to introduce new features that change the way push content is displayed and consumed. As the push landscape evolves, your strategies must adapt to win over and retain today’s consumers. Here are a few ways you can leverage benchmarks to stay relevant:

• Put Your Performance into Context: Assess your push notification performance with a competitive lens. Is your campaign exceeding expectations, falling short or just on par with others? 
• Set Realistic Goals: Inform achievable goals for your push notification campaigns. Instead of guessing what a good open rate is, you can use benchmarks to set data-driven targets.
• Identify Areas for Improvement: Understand where you need to optimize your strategy if your performance falls below benchmarks on a certain metric. A low opt-in rate, for example, suggests you may need to create content highlighting the value of opting in to push notifications.
• Justify Investments: Demonstrate the impact of your push notification campaigns. As marketers face increasing pressure to prove ROI, you can showcase how your efforts are contributing to overall customer engagement.

What Push Notification Performance Metrics Should I Prioritize?

Airship identified three priority push notification performance metrics to consider when assessing campaign effectiveness: 

• Opt-in Rate: The percentage of users who have opted in to receive push notifications. A healthy opt-in rate indicates that users are interested in hearing from you.
• Direct Opens: The percentage of total sends within a month that triggered an app open. This metric measures the immediate impact of your push notifications on driving users back into your app.
• Average Monthly Sends Per User: The average number of push notifications an app sends to its users per month. This metric reveals the frequency of your notifications and helps you avoid overwhelming users, which can lead to notification fatigue and unsubscribes.

How Can I Use Airship’s Push Notification Benchmarks to Improve Campaign Performance?

Airship’s push notification benchmarks aggregate customer data for the key metrics outlined above from January to December 2024, spanning thousands of apps and billions of users. We share averages for each metric in the following verticals: Charities, Foundations and Nonprofits; Education; Entertainment; Finance & Insurance; Food & Beverage; Gaming & Gambling; Media; Medical, Health & Fitness; Retail; Social; Sports & Recreation; Travel & Transportation; and Utility & Productivity.

Here’s how you can start leveraging our 2025 benchmarks to increase conversions and effectively communicate the impact of your efforts on overall customer engagement goals:

1. Compare your push notification performance against the benchmarks. Identify areas where you are exceeding or falling short of expectations. Airship’s benchmarks are broken down into high (90th), medium (50th) and low percentiles (10th), allowing you to get an even more granular understanding of how your performance stacks up to the industry.  
2. Use these insights to optimize your push notification strategy. We share a number several best practices in our new report to help you improve performance across each metric, including:
   • Prioritizing Onboarding: App onboarding offers a chance to convey your app’s value proposition, key features and the benefits of opting into push notifications.
   • Scaling Personalization: Tailor your messages to individuals based on their past interactions and preferences.  
   • Refining Targeting: Don’t send notifications to the masses; segment your messages based on who is most likely to engage with it. 
   • Embracing Experimentation: Test different variations of your push notifications to identify what works best and carry those insights into the future.  
3. Benchmarking your performance is an ongoing process. Continuously monitor your push performance and iterate on your strategy based on how the industry evolves for optimal results.

Unlock More Value from Your Push Notification Campaigns

Download Airship’s Mobile App Push Notification Benchmarks for 2025 here. Questions about the data? Not sure where to find your own results? Book a meeting with our team of industry experts and we’ll share how you can leverage these benchmarks to improve push notification performance and, in turn, drive more app engagement.