Mogo / Senior Marketing Operations Manager / 2024 – Present
Building the behavioral trigger layer
The activation sequence ran on time. The real question was whether it could respond to what users actually did instead.
The read
Funded-idle users were sitting at 0% conversion to first trade. The lifecycle program was running. Emails were going out. Nobody was trading.
I looked at what was actually happening in the product. Users were funding their accounts and stopping. The lifecycle was sending scheduled emails about why to trade. The users had already decided to fund - they were stuck on the next step, not the first one. The messaging was solving the wrong problem.
The read: the lifecycle was timed, not triggered. It had no relationship to what the user had actually done in the product. A user who funded yesterday and a user who funded six weeks ago were getting the same email at the same time.
The decision
Rebuild the trigger layer around real product events. Funded-idle is a specific signal. It needed its own journey, its own timing, and its own messaging logic - separate from the general activation sequence.
The decision was to treat funded-idle as a distinct lifecycle stage, not a variation of onboarding.
The metric I chose
Funded-idle to first-trade conversion. Not activation broadly. Not engagement. The specific transition from funded and dormant to first real product action. That was the number that proved whether the trigger layer was working.
The build
Instrumented the funded-idle event in Braze as a behavioral trigger. Built a dedicated journey that fired on account funding, not on a time schedule. Designed messaging around the specific barrier a funded user faces - not why to trade, but how to make your first trade right now.
Built separate branches for users who funded and did nothing, users who viewed the trading interface but did not execute, and users who started a trade and dropped off. Each branch had different logic and different timing.
Pulled in Product to confirm the event instrumentation was clean. Validated the trigger timing against actual user behavior before scaling the journey.
0% → ~24%
Funded-idle to first-trade conversion
~22%
Yearly average engagement improvement
Funded-idle to first-trade conversion went from 0% to ~19% within two months of launch, and reached ~24% by the end-of-year read. The first-trade nudge push held a ~22% interaction rate. The behavioral layer proved that responding to what users did, rather than how long they had been in the funnel, was what moved the revenue behavior. It also validated the next step: branching the whole Canvas by product intent.
Tech
Braze, multi-channel Canvas architecture
Product event instrumentation, behavioral triggers
Push deep-linking, suppression and frequency logic
Miguel N. Monzones
Vancouver, BC, Canada
