The problem Losing reads as a dead end.
Why it happens Outbid reads as out, and the close explains nothing. Comprehension and trust, not price, are the first blockers.
The behaviour we are driving While the auction runs, they raise the bid or hold with confidence. After a competitive loss, they come back within three days to search for an upgrade, bid or buy one.
The job to be done “Tell me where I stand in the auction in real time, and if I lose, give me a way forward rather than a dead end.”
Q4 marketing model, Business Case tab, exported 29 Sep 2026: volumes checked by Analytics 8 Sep 2026; organic and target rates measured against holdout and confirmed by Analytics; a buyer's month valued at £30 an upgrade, 1.29 upgrades in a first-purchase month and 1.67 after; net is gross at the 23% take rate.
| Model row | Worked volume a month | Rate | Value per active month | Gross a year | Net a year | Q4, driven | Q4, in quarter |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Engaged prospects who made a bid and lost (Active 0 to 60 days) ACTIVATE | 1,416 The number counts lost first bids a month. | 43% vs 33.1% organic | £30 an active month (one upgrade) × 1 months × 12 a year | £40,373 | £9,286 | £1,552 | £1,548 |
| Lost bid, existing bidder (won or bought before): about 14.3k a month, about 80% contactable DEFEND | 14,300 The number counts existing-bidder lost bids a month (14,300, the journey pack's measure). The row is sized on an ASSUMED +1.22pp repeat uplift (red cell); Ivi's measured rate replaces it once the rescue sends (item 20). | 1.22% vs 0% organic | £30 an active month (one upgrade) × 1 months × 12 a year | £50,244 | £11,556 | £1,931 | £1,926 |
Q4 2026: £3,483 net on the driven basis (Oct £0, Nov £1,713, Dec £1,770); £3,474 landing inside the quarter. Driven: months active credited to Q4, pro rata by days live from the launch, the basis the Q4 V2MOM carries. In quarter: only the months that fall in October to December (Tony, 10 Sep 2026: the forecast Marketing submits). Net is gross at the 23% take rate. Launch 1 November 2026.
Success metric Share of first-time bidders who lose an auction and make a first purchase within 30 days of the loss.
Still to confirm Rates are still the May benchmark, not re-measured on 8 Sep: re-read organic and target on the lost-first-bid cohort (item 6). Phase 1 live from November; the known-buyer rescue is audience-only, its revenue sits in DEFEND and RECOVER
Ladders to Drive the First Win: new user to first purchase 20.4%; existing user to first purchase 4.8%. Metric moved Bid→Sale %. Evidence B, benchmark. Shared The known-buyer lost-bid rescue sits in the model under Defend (its second row here); the first-time bidder row under Activate..
The planned case, a 30% lift in conversion, as presented to the board on 23 Sep 2026 (the Sizing tab behind the model's Business Case tab): volumes checked by Analytics (Ivi, 8 Sep 2026); organic and target rates measured against holdout and confirmed by Analytics; a buyer's month valued at £30 an upgrade, 1.29 upgrades in a first-purchase month and 1.67 in later months (the 20 Sep change; the earlier £172k counted one upgrade a month); net is gross at the 23% take rate (agreed 8 Sep 2026). Source: Q4 2026 Marketing Model, Business Case (output) and Sizing tabs, exported 2026-09-29 (the live model). Every figure is incremental of the customers who would have returned anyway: worked volume × (target rate − organic rate) × months active × times a year × value per active month.
Each engineering-row chip is coloured by the ask: APP AND JOURNEY OWNED COMPUTED TRAIT · ANALYTICS EXISTS · PIPE TO BRAZE READY · NOTHING TO BRIEF
| The moment | Phase 1, ships now | Phase 2, waits on engineering | Who builds it |
|---|---|---|---|
on the map: 1 · The in-auction status beat Bid status off the app | Nothing ships in Phase 1 | live activity (ios) The lock-screen status already runs for auction-engine auctions. | App engineering · new eventBraze · Braze buildDesign · copy only |
on the map: 1 · The in-auction status beat The outbid moment | email The outbid email keeps the price block it already renders, now guarded so a missing value shows nothing rather than a labelled blank, and gains the… braze push The push moves to Braze on the existing outbid trigger and shows the customer's own maximum against the current bid, the thing they misread today. | braze push A rejected bid stops being told it was outbid: its own trigger, its own push. | Backend engineering · native to braze migration, new eventBraze · logic changeDesign · copy and creative |
on the map: 1 · The in-auction status beat Knocked out | Nothing ships in Phase 1 | braze push, braze in-app message The push names the cause plainly and moves to Braze once the knocked-out event lands, and a guided message in the app follows it. Engineering rows D7 | Backend engineering · new event, logic changeBraze · Braze buildAnalyticsDesign · copy and creative |
on the map: 1 · The in-auction status beat Minutes to close, not in the lead | native push The time-left push stops nagging and says plainly that the auction closes in a few minutes and the customer is not in front. | braze push The five-minute time-left alert moves to Braze on a backend trigger that carries the winning flag, so its words and timing can change without a release;… | Backend engineering · new event, logic changeBraze · Braze buildAnalyticsDesign · copy only |
on the map: 1 · The in-auction status beat Minutes to close, in the lead | native push The winning-bidder push is kept and rewritten to a neutral in-the-lead note, so it can never read as a prompt to bid against yourself. | Nothing waits | Backend engineering · logic changeDesign · copy only |
on the map: 1 · The in-auction status beat No push permission, email held | email Nothing changes for them in this wave: the transactional outbid and last-chance emails stay the ruled fallback until the lock-screen status ships. | Nothing waits | Braze · Braze buildDesign · creative only |
on the map: 2 · The outcome box The close, in the app | Nothing ships in Phase 1 | native screen or modal, braze in-app message Today the app knows won, lost and sold out, but not why a close happened, so a technical failure and an operator's early close both render… | App engineering · native screen copyBackend engineering · new surface, new eventBraze · Braze buildDesign · copy and creative |
on the map: 2 · The outcome box The close, off the app | email Phase 1: the reworked loss email replaces today's loss email and drops the tips module; the buy-now email keeps firing as today, so nobody with a… Before this ships: De-stack the close moment; Never offer an upgrade we have not checked is there; the buy-now branch of the close email on expiry and on availability. | braze push The sell comes out of the notification text in Phase 1, and the send itself moves to Braze Push in Phase 2 on the close-cause event,… Engineering rows D1 | Backend engineering · copy only, native sendBraze · Braze buildAnalytics · logic changeDesign · copy and creative |
on the map: 3 · The education email A failure on our side | Nothing ships in Phase 1 | braze push, email One reassurance send, in two cause-named variants, replaces the silence that currently sends the anxiety to support. Engineering rows D1 | Backend engineering · new eventBraze · Braze buildDesign · copy and creative |
on the map: 3 · The education email Day one after a loss | email The day-one email drops the cheerleading and the sell and becomes education personalised to the customer's own auction: what happened and by how much they missed,… | Nothing waits | Braze · Braze buildAnalytics · computed traitDesign · copy and creative |
on the map: 4 · The recovery send Day three after a loss | email, braze push One recovery message goes only to the people who have not returned on their own, leading with the way back rather than a chase; the £5… | Nothing waits | Braze · Braze buildAnalytics · computed traitDesign · copy and creative |
on the map: 1 · The in-auction status beat The abandonment pushes | braze push Kept pre-close only and suppressed the moment the auction closes. Before this ships: De-stack the two abandonment canvases. | Nothing waits | Braze · logic change, data feedDesign · copy only |
on the map: 1 · The in-auction status beat The Avanti class cross-sell | braze push Separated out and treated as its own moment. | Nothing waits | Braze · Braze buildDesign · copy only |
on the map: 1 · The in-auction status beat Non-contactable | Nothing is sent, by definition rather than by choice. | Nothing waits | Marketing · copy only |
| Winner at the close | The journey exits at the close fork. | Nothing waits | Marketing · copy only |
| Came back on their own before the day-three send | No send. | Nothing waits | Analytics · computed trait |
on the map: 4 · The recovery send Power users | Suppressed outright from the day-three send, because 98% return organically within ninety days. | Nothing waits | Analytics |
on the map: 4 · The recovery send Loser whose auction did not run as intended | Owned by the reassurance send and the supply-returns track for that trip, because their auction never ran and you lost would be a falsehood. | Nothing waits | Marketing · copy only |
| Supply returns | Nothing sends. Engineering rows D12 | Nothing waits | Backend engineering · new eventBraze · Braze build |
The words are on the journey map above. A D number opens that row of the Engineering brief; the engineering board uses the same numbers. Live sends not named here continue unchanged. Engineering-only fixes on these moments, nothing to write or design: The lock-screen card can stall; A dead check on the closed-early push; The outbid pop-up misfires (the Engineering brief, app defects; dotted red on the map). Before anything in this journey goes live: Move conversion off app-open.
| The question | Owner |
|---|---|
| The last-chance email is restricted to one operator on the older system and unrestricted on the newer one, so it is quietly widening to every operator as auctions migrate. Is that intended? | Sheran |
| The lock-screen status stream has no opt-out, no preference and no quiet-hours check of any kind. Is that acceptable? | Sheran |
| Does the win receipt move to Braze, given it carries the barcodes? | Sheran |
| The outcome box is authored for a loss. Does the win branch get its own two jobs: what you actually won, and whether you still need your original ticket? | Sheran |
| Who owns reassuring a winner on price after the close, and does it belong on the win screen or in the win receipt? | Sheran |
| What is the split on each of the six campaign control groups? | Blocks launch Lisa, and the Braze developer |
| Can we change the conversion setting on the five auction campaigns from app-open to a purchase event, and which event should it be? | Blocks launch Lisa, and the Braze developer |
| Is there any suppression between the two abandonment canvases, and if not, can we add it? | Blocks launch Lisa, and the Braze developer |
Three things to launch, then the three loss-history traits added 5 Sep 2026 (Phase 2, in red). Everything else that used to sit here has moved to the board, and none of it blocks launch.
returned_within_7d · rename proposal: returned_since_closerfm_power_usersupport_contact_since_closeprior_loss_countloss_cause_countslate_bid_loss_countThe full working list, the test-cell sizing and the estate clean-up live on the analytics board above; the engineering-built events and feeds, with their contracts, are on the Engineering brief.
Neither exists yet for this journey, at the journey level or per send, so no test design, split, baseline or read date is stated anywhere in this pack, and no revenue claim is made before a measured read. When they are scoped, the designs are logged on the Test & Learn roadmap. Building both is the outstanding Analytics work for this journey.
Sources. 1 Analytics sizing, Ivi, 8 July 2026. 2 Previous tests read against a holdout. 3 Analytics return-curve pull and holdout sizing, Ivi, 5 August 2026. 4 Analytics day-3 cohort, baseline and holdout re-sizing, Ivi, 17 August 2026. 5 The code-sent communications audit, 12 August 2026, and Braze console pulls, 12 and 16 August 2026.