Email open rates are dropping fast. Discover why push notifications are becoming the go to channel for Shopify merchants who want real engagement and more sale
You spent two hours writing the perfect email. Catchy subject line. Great discount. Nice design. You hit send to 10,000 subscribers and waited.
Two hundred people opened it.
That is a 2% open rate. And honestly, that is pretty normal these days.
Email inboxes have turned into the digital version of junk mail. People sign up, forget they subscribed, and either ignore or delete without reading. The promotions tab swallows your message. The spam folder buries it. Your carefully written email never even gets seen.
But here is the thing. People are still buying. They are still responding to offers. Just not through email.Shopify merchants using platforms like Moby5 are shifting toward push notifications and mobile apps because that is where customer attention now lives.
This article breaks down what is happening with email marketing, why push notifications are changing things, and which channel actually drives real sales.
Why Email Open Rates Are Falling ?
Think back to when you first started getting promotional emails. You probably opened most of them. A discount here, a new product there. It felt personal.
That was then.
Today the average person gets over 100 emails a day [source]. Work emails, newsletters, receipts, promotions, spam. Everything lands in the same inbox and your marketing email has to compete with all of it. Most people have developed what marketers call email blindness. They scroll past promotional emails without even registering they exist.
On top of that, Gmail, Apple Mail, and Outlook have gotten much better at filtering. Your email might never land in the main inbox. It goes straight to the promotions tab where open rates drop even further. Some emails get flagged as spam before anyone ever sees them.
And even when someone does open your email, they are usually sitting at a laptop in a browsing mindset. Not a buying mindset.
The numbers back this up. The average promotional email open rate in ecommerce sits between 15% and 20% on a good day [source]. Click through rates are even lower, usually around 2% to 3%. That means out of every 1000 people you email, maybe 20 actually click through to your store.
The channel has simply gotten too crowded.
What Push Notifications Are and Why They Work Better
If you have ever picked up your phone because a message popped up on your screen, you already understand why push notifications work.
Push notifications are small alert messages that appear directly on a phone screen, even when the person is not using the app. They show up instantly, they are impossible to miss, and they do not require the user to open anything first. The message comes to them.
For Shopify merchants, push notification marketing has become one of the most effective ways to improve mobile commerce engagement and bring customers back to a Shopify mobile app without relying entirely on email campaigns.
That is a completely different dynamic from email.
With email, you are hoping someone opens their inbox, spots your subject line among dozens of others, feels curious enough to click, and then reads what you wrote. That is four steps before they even see your offer.
With push notifications there is one step. The message appears. They read it right there.
And because the person already downloaded your app, they have shown a much higher level of interest in your brand compared to someone who just gave you their email address at checkout. App users are warm customers. They chose to keep your store on their phone. That relationship is already stronger before you send a single message.
The open rates reflect this. Push notifications average between 30% and 50% depending on the industry. Some well timed notifications like abandoned cart alerts or flash sale announcements go even higher [source]. Compare that to 2% email click rates and the difference is hard to ignore.
Push notifications also work in real time. You can send a message at 6pm on a Friday and people see it at 6pm on a Friday. Not tomorrow morning when they finally check email. Right now, when you want them to act.
Head to Head: Email vs Push Notifications by the Numbers
Sometimes the best way to understand something is to put the numbers side by side.
Open rate: Email sits at around 15% to 20% on average. Push notifications land between 30% and 50%. For every 1000 messages sent, push gets two to three times more eyes on your offer.
Click through rate: Email averages around 2% to 3%. Push notifications average between 8% and 15%. Push pulls well ahead when it comes to getting people to actually take action.
Conversion rate: Mobile app users convert at roughly three times the rate of mobile web users [source]. When someone is already inside your app and gets a push notification, the path to purchase is short and easy. One tap and they are on the product page. Two taps and they have checked out.
Delivery rate: Emails get filtered, flagged, and lost in promotions tabs. Push notifications land directly on the lock screen. Delivery is almost guaranteed as long as the user has notifications turned on.
Cost: Most push notification platforms offer unlimited sends at a flat monthly fee. Email platforms charge based on subscriber count, which means the bigger your list grows, the more you pay. Push scales without punishing you for growing.
Cart recovery: This is where push notifications truly stand out. Push notification cart recovery campaigns often outperform email-based recovery campaigns because they reach customers instantly on their phone screens. That is a massive difference in recovered revenue just from switching the channel.
The numbers are not even close. Push notifications outperform email in almost every metric that matters for driving sales.
But does that mean you should ditch email completely? Not quite
When Email Still Makes Sense ?
Before we move on, let us be honest about one thing. Email is not completely useless. But its role has shrunk dramatically and most merchants are still treating it like their main weapon when it should be more like a backup tool.
There are two situations where email still does its job reasonably well.
Transactional messages. Order confirmations, shipping updates, and receipts. People actually look for these because they are expecting them. This is the one area where email still earns its place without question. It is not marketing though. It is admin.
Re-engaging people who never downloaded your app. If someone bought once, never installed your app, and has gone quiet, email is sometimes the only way to reach them. A strong win back offer can bring a small number of these people back. But this is the last resort, not the strategy.
That is genuinely it.
Everything else that most merchants use email for, flash sales, product launches, discount codes, new arrivals, weekly promotions, all of it works dramatically better through push notifications. The reason is simple. Push notifications reach people directly on their phone screen in real time. Email lands in a crowded inbox and waits to be noticed, which increasingly it never is.
If you are still sending weekly promotional emails to your entire list hoping for results, the data is telling you clearly that it is time to Moby5 that approach. Move those campaigns to push notifications and watch your open rates go from 15% to north of 40% almost overnight.
Email keeps the lights on in two very specific situations. Push notifications are how you actually grow.
The Winning Strategy: Push Notifications First, Email Second
The merchants winning at mobile commerce in 2026 have stopped debating email versus push notifications. They have made a clear decision. Push notifications come first. Email fills the gaps.
This is not about balance. It is about where attention actually lives. Your customers are on their phones. Their lock screen is the most valuable piece of real estate in your entire marketing strategy. Moby5ing your store so you can own that space is the single most important move you can make right now.
Here is how the strategy actually plays out in practice.
When someone first discovers your store and leaves without buying, a push notification hits their lock screen within the hour. Not an email buried in a promotions tab. A direct message they actually see. If they do not have your app yet, that is when you send the email. One time. With a clear reason to download your app and never miss a deal again.
When someone makes their first purchase, your app sends them a personalised push notification a few days later with something they are likely to want based on what they bought. No waiting. No hoping they open an email. A direct tap that brings them back to your store while the buying feeling is still fresh.
When you have a flash sale or a limited offer, push notifications go out the moment it starts. Everyone with your app knows instantly. Email does not move fast enough for urgency. By the time someone checks their inbox the sale might be over.
When you want to recover an abandoned cart, push notifications recover between 15% and 25% of lost sales. Emails recover 5% to 8%. There is no comparison. The money is in the push.
When a customer goes quiet, a well timed push notification with a personalised offer cuts through in a way that another email simply cannot. If they have uninstalled your app and gone completely cold, then and only then does an email win back campaign make sense.
The pattern here is clear. Every high value, high urgency, high revenue moment belongs to push notifications. Email handles the edge cases. Once you Moby5 your store and start using push notifications as your primary channel, you stop relying on an inbox that nobody is paying attention to and start showing up exactly where your customers already are.
That shift alone is what the 3x revenue gap comes down to.
How Moby5 Helps Shopify Stores Use Push Notifications ?
If you are a Shopify merchant reading this and thinking “okay I want to add push notifications to my store, where do I even start?” that is exactly the problem Moby5 was built to solve.
Most merchants know push notifications work. The data is clear. But the traditional way of getting them meant hiring a developer, spending months building a custom app, and dropping anywhere from $10,000 to $30,000 before a single notification ever got sent. That is not realistic for most stores.
Moby5 changes that equation completely.
It is a Shopify app that lets you launch your own fully branded iOS and Android mobile app without writing a single line of code. Once your app is live your customers can download it, and from that point you have a direct line to their phone screen through push notifications whenever you need it.
The setup is straightforward. You connect Moby5 to your Shopify store, pick a theme, customize your colors, fonts, and layout to match your brand, add your products and categories, and preview everything before it goes live. The whole process takes hours, not months of custom development. And once you are live on the App Store and Google Play, push notifications become a tool you can use any time, abandoned cart alerts, flash sales, new arrivals, back in stock updates, all of it.
What makes it practical for growing stores is that it syncs with your Shopify store in real time. Products, prices, inventory, orders. Everything stays up to date automatically so you are not managing two separate systems.
It is not about replacing your email marketing. As we have talked about throughout this article, email still has its place. Moby5 simply gives you the push notification side of the equation so both channels can work together the way they are supposed to.
If you are curious, you can explore Moby5 and see how it fits your Shopify store.. They offer a free trial so you can see how it fits into your store before committing to anything.
Conclusion & Call to Action
Let us bring it all together.
Email marketing is not dead but it is definitely crowded. When everyone is fighting for attention in the same inbox, standing out gets harder every year. Open rates are falling, click rates are shrinking, and the cost of maintaining a large email list keeps going up. That does not mean you should abandon it. It means you should stop relying on it as your only channel.
Push notifications on the other hand are still relatively fresh territory for most Shopify merchants. Open rates are 30% to 50%. Cart recovery rates are 15% to 25%. Customers who have your app installed are already your most loyal and engaged buyers. Reaching them directly on their phone screen at the right moment is one of the most powerful things you can do for your sales.
The merchants who are growing fastest right now are not choosing one over the other. They are using email for depth, storytelling, and reaching people who are not on their app. They are using push notifications for speed, urgency, and capturing customers in the moment they are most likely to buy. Both channels doing their job. Neither one wasted.
If there is one thing to take away from this article it is this. Stop guessing which channel works and start using the data to let both channels work together. Your customers are out there. They are ready to buy. You just need to reach them in the right place at the right time.
The inbox is getting noisier every day. The phone screen is where attention actually lives now. It is time to show up there.
If you found this useful share it with a fellow Shopify merchant who is still relying only on email. It might just change how they think about their marketing. And if you have thoughts or questions drop them in the comments. Would love to hear what is working for your store.
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