Associate Director, Lifecycle Marketing (Retention Program)

We are looking for a highly analytical, commercially-minded Associate Director who is motivated by the challenge of building a retention program for a high-growth consumer technology company. You will lead a team of lifecycle marketing experts to drive subscriber growth and revenue, and partner with cross-functional colleagues to go deeper on customer behavior — with a specific focus on activation, loyalty, and long-term customer value.

You are building this program from the ground up rather than optimizing one that already exists. The list starts near 20,000 and scales rapidly behind a significant acquisition investment. Sending volume ramps to 40–60 emails a month, and increasingly granular segmentation is what drives that output. Automation is the engine: lead capture, welcome series, and the first-conversion funnel come first, then subscription activation, loyalty, and repeat purchase. The program runs on enterprise tooling — Braze, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Iterable, Customer.io, or comparable.

You own the top-line retention revenue number for your client. You build the forecast, defend it, and lead the team that hits it.

A day in the life

• Serve as the senior point of contact for your client, meeting weekly to review performance and shape current and future initiatives.
• Own the retention revenue forecast — build it, update it, and bring the recommendations that close any gap to plan.
• Set the segmentation and lifecycle strategy that drives the program's output, and prioritize the roadmap of flows, campaigns, and tests behind it.
• Own subscription activation and retention: the trial and onboarding journeys, the conversion moments, and the loyalty, repeat purchase, and win-back programming that extends customer lifetime.
• Conduct weekly 1:1s with your direct reports, manage workload and capacity, and train the team to help them grow into experts.
• Develop the strategic campaign calendar and partner with your specialists to deliver it at volume.
• Review all client briefs and creative for approval before they reach the client.
• Set the client's KPI framework and work with the team to turn results into insights and actionable recommendations.
• Coordinate cross-departmentally with the Performance Marketing and Strategy teams so that acquisition investment and lifecycle programming reinforce each other.

You should apply if this sounds like you

• You are a growth marketer first and a lifecycle marketer second. You think in cohorts, conversion rates, and payback periods. You are energized by a program that does not exist yet and a list that is about to grow 10x.
• You have 7+ years of experience in digital, growth, or lifecycle marketing, including time spent on subscription or SaaS products.
• You have owned a revenue or subscriber target and built the forecast behind it — you can model list growth, conversion, activation, and churn and explain what moves each one.
• You have scaled a lifecycle program through a period of rapid list growth, and you know what breaks when volume goes from a handful of sends to 40–60 per month.
• You have built the funnel that matters here: lead capture, welcome series, first conversion, and subscription activation. You know the difference between a welcome flow that greets people and one that converts them.
• You are fluent in subscription economics — trial-to-paid, activation, free-to-paid, upgrade and downgrade paths, involuntary churn, and win-back.
• You have developed loyalty, referral, or rewards programming that measurably improved repeat purchase and LTV. Driving loyalty and repeat purchase is a core outcome of this role, not a side project.
• You have worked in an enterprise-grade ESP such as Braze, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Iterable, or Customer.io, and you understand what these platforms make possible: complex segmentation, event-driven journeys, in-app and push alongside email, and integration with a real product data stream.
• You love making data-driven decisions and excel at turning analysis into lifecycle strategy that drives revenue. You are comfortable building the reporting yourself when you need to.
• You are used to a fast-paced environment and can project manage multiple workstreams for yourself, your team, and your client.
• You have had at least one direct report before, or exceptional leadership skills working with cross-functional teams.
• Excellent verbal and written communication and presentation skills, plus the ability to articulate complex and sometimes technical ideas to a wide variety of people at any level.
• You dedicate time to staying on the cutting edge of consumer technology, subscription, and lifecycle marketing.