Director of CRM, Go City

• Significant experience leading CRM, lifecycle or retention at a senior level in a consumer / ecommerce business, with demonstrable ownership of customer value and retention outcomes (not just campaign delivery)
• A track record of building genuine lifecycle programmes - segmentation, value-based contact strategy, loyalty or retention - that moved a commercial metric
• Strong commercial and numerical literacy: comfortable with LTV, cohort and margin analysis, and able to translate them into strategy
• Experience owning a CRM / lifecycle platform and the data, consent and deliverability that underpin it
• Experience leading and developing a team, and operating as a peer to other marketing leaders
• You have a clear strategic view and can articulate a position — not a series of “it depends” caveats - and you can defend it under challenge
• You think in customer value and trade-offs, not channel activity, and instinctively reach for data rather than assertion when you don’t know an answer
• You understand that a transactional relationship is not CRM, and can explain what real relationship building and value creation look like in our category
• You can answer questions like: how would you measure the CRM channel if signup volume wasn’t a metric? What’s the LTV gap between a discounted and a full-price customer, and how would you find out if you didn’t know?
• You have a forward view: you can say where the channel should be in 12–18 months and what structural risks we’d be foolish to ignore
• You’re genuinely “can-do”: you turn a strategic position into a concrete plan and get it moving, rather than only critiquing

Desirable

• The Director of CRM owns the relationship between Go City and the people who buy from us - before, between and after every purchase
• This is the most strategically important growth lever we have that isn’t paid media: as customer acquisition costs rise across our OTA-driven channels, the value we extract from each customer we already have is what protects our margin and our long-term growth
• We are explicit about what this role is and isn’t
• It is not running a transactional email calendar, sending the same discount to everyone and reporting on open rates
• It is building genuine customer relationships across the lifecycle - understanding who our customers are, what they’re worth, what makes them come back, and designing the programmes that move them up the value curve
• The difference between a CRM that sends transactional messages and a CRM that builds relationships and lifetime value is the difference between this role done badly and done well, and it's the single most important thing we are hiring for
• You will sit alongside the Director of Paid and the Head of SEO as a peer in the marketing leadership team, owning the retention and value side of the growth equation while they own acquisition
• You will be expected to hold your own in strategic debate with them, with finance and with the executive team - not just to execute a plan handed to you
• Lifecycle & Retention Strategy
• Own the end-to-end customer lifecycle strategy - acquisition handover, onboarding, activation, repeat purchase, win-back and lapsed reactivation - across gocity.com and our city pass brands
• Treat the customer journey as one product rather than a series of disconnected campaigns; design the nurture, trigger and lifecycle flows that move customers between stages
• Move the organisation away from a discount-led, signup-volume mindset toward a value-led model, and build the evidence and the case to do so
• Customer Value & Commercial Ownership
• Own customer lifetime value as a metric you understand, can decompose and can move - including the LTV difference between discount-acquired and full-price customers, and what that means for how we market
• Define success for the CRM channel in outcome terms (retention, repeat rate, margin, LTV) rather than activity or input metrics (sends, signups, open rates)
• Build the commercial case for CRM investment and defend it with data in front of finance and the executive team
• Develop a segmentation and value framework so the right customers receive the right contact, rather than everyone receiving the same offer
• Programme & Loyalty
• Design and run the loyalty and retention programmes that reduce our dependency on paid acquisition over time
• Own the email, push and lifecycle channels operationally - deliverability, data capture, consent and the underlying CRM platform - while keeping the focus on relationship and value, not volume
• Partner with the data and analytics team to build the measurement that tells us whether the channel is genuinely creating value, including clean before/after reads and defined kill criteria for tests
• Leadership & Influence
• Lead, hire and develop the CRM / lifecycle team, raising the strategic bar of the function
• Operate as a true peer to the Director of Paid and Head of SEO — contributing a strong, structured point of view to marketing strategy rather than waiting to be directed
• Bring forward strategic proposals, stress-test the proposals of others constructively, and think in trade-offs rather than absolutes
• Success at 6 months
• A clear, evidenced CRM strategy that the leadership team has bought into, framed in customer value rather than signup volume
• A working segmentation and value framework, with the highest-value cohorts identified and treated differently
• At least one well-designed lifecycle or retention programme live and measured properly, with a clean read on its commercial impact
• A credible point of view on the discount-led vs value-led question, backed by LTV evidence, ready to inform wider marketing strategy
• A CRM function visibly operating as a strategic peer to acquisition, not a downstream execution channel