Activation program
A signup isn't a user. Activation is the program for the people who haven't crossed yet.
Most products treat the gap as a static measurement. "20% of signups activate." Mara treats it as something to write to. She knows what activation means for your product because she read the repo. The activation action is concrete, not "engagement."
When it fires
After the welcome arc, when the Cartographer flags a contact as inactive past the threshold you set. Day 7 is typical for B2B SaaS, day 3 for consumer products. Mara only writes if the contact hasn't crossed the activation event.
If they activate mid-program, the journey stops. No one needs a "complete your setup" email after they've completed setup.
What's in it
Two to four emails over seven to twenty-one days. Tighter than welcome, more specific. Each step targets one friction point.
The classic shape: a "here's what you're missing" framing on the first send, a "stuck on step X?" on the second, then either a check-in or an opt-out depending on the recipient's profile. The exact step count comes from the Journey Architect reading your repo and your previous activation data.
How she writes it
This is where reading the repo matters most. Mara knows the names of the things in your product because she read the README. She knows what your "create your first project" or "invite a teammate" or "ship your first deploy" actually means because she traced the events emitted in your code.
Activation is a higher-stakes journey than welcome, so Mara loads the contact's history. What did they click on the welcome? Did they reply? What did they sign up for in your form fields? The Copywriter folds those answers into a single qualitative sentence and writes from there.
What gets tested
The trigger threshold is the most important variable. Send too early and Mara nags. Send too late and they're already gone. The bandit doesn't tune this; you do, on the journey settings page.
What the bandit does tune: which friction point to lead with, which CTA copy converts, and whether the "stuck on X?" framing beats "here's how to get there."
The off-ramp
Activation programs without an off-ramp turn into nagging. Mara's has one. If a contact ignores three activation emails, the program stops. They get feature-adoption sends when relevant and nothing else activation-specific. They might come back later or they might not. But Mara's not going to be the reason they hate your inbox.
Related programs
Activation runs between welcome and feature-adoption. It also feeds re-engagement: contacts who never activated are different from contacts who activated and then went quiet, and Mara writes to each differently.