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 2026: one message to everyone, and nothing measured

Efficient today: the specialists, the platform and the segments are in place, and the journeys built on them ship in Q4

Effective by the end of Q4, on the churn-risk score and real-time triggers; agentic in Q1 2027 with the AI one-to-one decisioning engine

March 2026when I joined
We are here todayTodaySeptember 2026
End of Q4 2026December
Q1 2027
Customer experience
The message
Channels
People and process
Data and models
FragmentedLaying the foundation
“You don’t know me”
One size fits all: one message to everyone
Email and push, each on its own
Teams operate in silos; no specialist skill set
Manual and siloed; no model behind a send
EfficientBuilding capability+£115k net a year, shipping Q4
“You know my stage, and what I just did”
Right message, right group
Email, push and in-app as one journey, on Braze
Specialist skills hired; a cross-functional team, processes starting to form
Life-stage segments, personas and recency-frequency-value scoring
EffectiveScaling efficiently+£164k net a year; churn prevention live
“You knew before I did”
Right message, right customer, at the right moment
Real-time orchestration across email, push and in-app
Established process and turnaround times; end-to-end delivery run with AI agents
Churn-risk score live, propensity Q4; every journey read against a 20% holdout
AgenticAutomated, continuously improvingNot yet sized
“My personal travel agent”
Right experience: one conversation across every touchpoint
AI orchestration across every channel
End-to-end agentic process; automated ways of working
Real-time data and ML automation; the AI decisioning engine (needed)

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.

  1. 1Audit every send
  2. 2Find where customers stop
  3. 3Hear why
  4. 4Map every moment
  5. 5Design the journey for each
The moment map, all 13 stages of the customer's life
Ours · 61 moments across the customer’s life, built in-house in a quarter and rebuilt from the live record. Open it live
Booking.com experience map, VML
The agency version · the same thing, built for Booking.com. Click to open it.

One journey in depth · churn prevention, live since 22 September

Before this journey, a customer could go quiet for 49 days before anything happened, and then it was 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

09:41
Seatfrog nowGot a trip coming up soon?

A calendar timer, not a signal: it fires whether they slipped or not

The same email to everyoneDay 50, the same day

Today’s day-50 email, the same to everyone

Generic, and the seasonal weekly lands on top of it: two voices in one week

1 in 4 active buyers goes quiet every month, 40,276 in August, and until this journey not one of them heard from us for 49 days.

Churn prevention, the experience · the churn-risk model re-scores every active customer nightly, and a shift in their churn band, never a calendar, opens the journey: one personalised save the day after the slip, one knock only if the save went unseen, then silence by design. Click in 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

17:41
Seatfrog nowYou’ve been outbid.
Seatfrog nowJust a few minutes left to bid.
Seatfrog nowBidding has ended.

The same three, fired by the app’s own code, whatever they bid

The lost screenAt the close

The app today after a lost auction

One closed screen, the same for everyone, with no way forward

The recovery email30 minutes after

Today’s first-auction-loser email

One message, whoever lost and however they lost

The campaignOn a schedule

Today’s Outbidophobia campaign email

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 · the close explained and one reason to bid again, drawn from the customer’s own history, for each of the eight ways to lose: outbid, knocked out, lost at the close, overtaken at the close, left mid-auction, sold out before the close, auction failed, closed early by the operator. Four segments, five channel states. Click in to take control, click outside to move on

What ships when

Two journeys are live. The rest of the engine ships in November and December, acquisition ramps through the quarter, and together they drive £64k net in Q4, £43k of it inside the quarter.

Live Ships Waits on a model or a date
October
November
December
Q1 2027
ActivateTurn intent into a first transaction£5.9k net driven in Q4
Turn losing bidders into returning bidders J4
Prompt the first purchase J5
Recover the abandoned upgrade J3
GrowTurn one win into a habit£4.7k net driven in Q4
Turn the first win into a second J1
Deliver the First Class experience, and referrals J2 and J6
Recognise returning customers on arrival J10
DefendCatch the first slip while a save is cheap£39.4k net driven in Q4
Churn prevention: catch the first slip J8
RecoverWin back the lapsed£3.5k net driven in Q4
Seasonal reactivation J9, wave 1
Seasonal reactivation J9, buyers
Win back lapsed customers J7
AcquireDemand generation: create consideration and awareness£1.9k net driven in Q4
Boosted organic social
Partner launch go-to-market
AcquireDemand capture: convert the demand that already exists£8.3k net driven in Q4
Search and AI visibility
App store page
Rebuilt website
Models and dataWhat the engine runs on
Churn-risk model, live
Propensity-to-return model
Live customer-data feed, warehouse to Braze
AI one-to-one decisioning engine
Net revenue drivenMarketing total, by month of launch
£13.7k
£20.3k
£29.7k
£64k driven in Q4, £43k landing inside it

Q4 2026 Marketing Model (21 Sep): net revenue driven by each month’s launches, the journeys and acquisition 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

The plan for the gap: partner with the creators who already make this content, pay them by referral, put boosted spend only behind the posts that travel, and read what a boosted view buys against a holdout before we scale it.

AwarenessUPPER FUNNELConsiderationMID FUNNEL · THE GAPTHE GAPConversionLOWER FUNNELLoyalty loopTHE CUSTOMERS WE HAVE
Awareness
Nothing paid: word of mouth, press, our partners’ channels.
Consideration
Customers and creators already make the content, and nothing of ours amplifies it.
Conversion
29,665 sign-ups a month from the store listing and search; 19.8% buy within 30 days.
Loyalty loop
The lifecycle engine: two journeys live, each behind a 20% holdout.

59 posts tag us on TikTok alone, none of them paid for; the biggest unpaid post about us, a creator’s reel on Instagram, reached 752,000 plays.

752,000 plays@holidayexpert on InstagramA creator with 660,000 followers on our Secret Fares with TransPennine Express: “I’ve found another secret train hack”
204,300 playsA customer on TikTokA customer’s first-class upgrade, filmed for her followers, with her own Seatfrog referral code in the caption, unprompted
63,500 playsA customer on TikTok“The only way I want to travel from now on. It made my trip so much better”

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

Appendix: the same funnel after a year of 10,000 more sign-ups a month

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

Appendix: from today to the north star
← → to move, N for notes, F for full screen
Draft 23, 21 September 2026, for review
Click anywhere, or press Escape, to close