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
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 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
A calendar timer, not a signal: it fires whether they slipped or not
The same email to everyoneDay 50, the same day
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
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 · 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.
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.
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.
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
