Seatfrog board · Wednesday 23 September 2026
Marketing update.
Sheran Gale, Head of Growth Marketing
Where we started, and what changed
Fragmented when I joined in March, and still fragmented for the customer
In Q3 we built the capability to be efficient and effective; it ships in Q4
Agentic, the AI one-to-one decisioning engine, follows in Q1 2027
Fragmented: the comms map of 13 August 2026 and Marketing’s record. The values are the Q4 2026 Marketing Model (20 Sep), net a year, each journey counted under the level of capability it needs; together £279k, and £379k with the acquisition tests.
How the journeys were built
Built in-house in a quarter, and it rebuilds itself when the data changes
Most companies buy this capability from an agency and keep buying it. The choice in March was to build it here instead: the people, the process and the tooling, so the capability stays with us.
- 1Audit every send
- 2Find where customers stop
- 3Hear why
- 4Map every moment
- 5Design the journey for each
One journey in depth · churn prevention, live since 17 September
Today a customer can go quiet for 49 days before anything happens, and then it is a timer, not a signal
Nothing at allDays 1 to 49
Nothing watches an active customer for the first 49 days of a slip. No score, no trigger, no message.
The slip is invisible to us while it is still cheap to fix
The same push to everyoneDay 50, on a calendar
A calendar timer, not a signal: it fires whether they slipped or not
The same email to everyoneDay 50, the same day
“Oh hey, let’s see what we’ve got for you...”
It has been a little while since you last said hello over on the app. You can still find mega savings on First Class seats, with over 750 different routes.
Generic, and the seasonal weekly lands on top of it: two voices in one week
The churn-risk model re-scores every active customer’s behaviour nightly. A shift in their churn band, never a calendar timer, is what opens the journey.
Churn prevention, the experience · the save, the knock, then silence; click into it to take control, click outside to move on
What ships next · Journey 4, turning losing bidders into returning bidders
Today every loser meets the same four things, whoever they are and however they lost
The pushesIn the auction
The same three, fired by the app’s own code, whatever they bid
The lost screenAt the close
One closed screen, the same for everyone, with no way forward
The recovery email30 minutes after
One message, whoever lost and however they lost
The campaignOn a schedule
Sent to everyone on a calendar, unrelated to the loss
Losing reads as a dead end. 81% of customers quit after one loss, and the one recovery email reaches about 20 of the 14,800 customers who lose an auction each month, because its entry rule is broken.
From November · each loser gets a straight account of the close and one reason to bid again, drawn from their own history: four segments, eight outcomes, five channel states. Click in to play; click outside to move on
What ships when
One journey is live. The rest of the engine and the acquisition tests ship by December, and together they drive £64k net in Q4, £43k of it inside the quarter.
Q4 2026 Marketing Model (20 Sep): net revenue driven by each month’s launches, the journeys and the acquisition tests together; the rest of the £64k phases into 2027 with the launch dates. Journey dates as the strategy page’s journey table carries them.
The marketing funnel
Every sign-up is organic and the engine now holds them; the gap is the middle of the funnel, where consideration is made, and nothing of ours works it yet
- AwarenessNothing paid. Word of mouth, press, our partners’ channels.
- ConsiderationOrganic social, unboosted; customers and creators make the content, we do not amplify it.
- Conversion29,665 sign-ups a month from the store listing and search; 19.8% buy within 30 days.
- Loyalty loopThe lifecycle engine: ten journeys by December, each behind a 20% holdout.
59 posts tag us on TikTok alone, none of them paid for. The biggest reached 752,000 plays.
Our own channels: 2,121 followers on TikTok (281 posts, 900 to 3,000 plays each) and 12,500 on Instagram (456 posts)
Sign-ups and the 30-day rate: the Data for Board Reporting sheet and the Q4 2026 Marketing Model KPIs tab, August 2026. The order is the plan’s: the loyalty loop first, consideration next, paid awareness once a month’s sign-ups clear the line set with Finance and Analytics.
Appendix
The November test as sized buys about 700 sign-ups a month (£2,500 at an assumed £2.50 an install, 70% registering) and about 140 first-time buyers; 10,000 a month is fourteen times that, and the test prices it before anything scales
Appendix
