Director, CRM & Retention | Dermstore

THG•New York, NY

3d•$110,000 - $120,000•Hybrid

About The Position

As the Director of CRM & Lifecycle Marketing, you will be the architect of our customer journey, owning the end-to-end strategy across email, SMS/MMS/RCS, app push, web push, and direct mail. Your mission is to transition our CRM function from a channel-focused team into a centralized hub for customer intelligence and personalized experience. By taking ownership of our first-party data strategy, loyalty programs, and subscription models, you will ensure that every customer touchpoint, across owned and paid channels, is cohesive, data-driven, and optimized for long-term retention. You will lead, mentor, and grow a talented team, providing the hands-on guidance necessary to elevate their technical execution while fostering a culture of continuous learning.

Requirements

7-10+ years of relevant CRM, lifecycle, or retention marketing experience, ideally within high-growth D2C, retail, beauty, or CPG environment, including people management; part of it setting strategy, not only executing campaigns.
Deep Technical Fluency: Expertise in data privacy, identity resolution, API integrations, and the technical architecture of enterprise CRM/ESP platforms (Listrak preferred; Klaviyo, Attentive, Braze, Iterable, or Salesforce Marketing Cloud comparable), including migration/implementation experience.
Lifecycle Expertise: Proven success managing loyalty programs and recurring subscription (sub-and-save) models, with demonstrated cohort analysis and incrementality/holdout testing.
Leadership & Mentorship: Strong management background with a "lead by example" approach; highly skilled at teaching and developing junior staff.
Analytical Mindset: Commercially minded with a strong analytical toolkit — advanced Excel (formulas, pivots, charts), BI/SQL a plus, and a deep understanding of customer data, user behavior, and performance metrics.
Strategic Communication: Ability to translate complex technical concepts into clear, actionable business strategies for non-technical stakeholders.
Agility: Ability to operate with speed, clarity, and judgment in a fast-paced, evolving, and highly analytical environment.

Responsibilities

Own the global CRM and lifecycle marketing strategy, including customer segmentation, retention roadmaps, and lifecycle architecture.
Build a cohort analytics framework — retention curves, repeat-purchase rate, inter-purchase interval, and spend-by-customer — and translate it into lifecycle interventions targeted by cohort and lifecycle stage across activation, engagement, retention, and win back.
Define the role of loyalty programs and "Subscribe & Save" initiatives within the portfolio, aligning them with commercial objectives and long-term customer value (LTV).
Quantify the retention differential between our various retention program participants and non-participants and use it to prioritize where lifecycle investment compounds CLV.
Own the customer database, DMP/CDP strategy, and identity resolution, ensuring a unified view of the consumer to minimize channel fatigue and maximize the impact of every touchpoint.
Partner with Performance Marketing, Paid Social, and Search teams to synchronize audience targeting, ensuring first-party data informs broader acquisition and retargeting efforts.
Identify opportunities to strengthen the user experience through improved content, behavioral triggers, and seamless cross-channel integration.
Lead the strategic development of CRM messaging across email, SMS/MMS/RCS, app push notifications, web push, and direct mail.
Drive the maturity of our mobile app channel, focusing on deep linking, personalized in-app experiences, and push notification strategies.
Stand up and optimize the lifecycle suite: welcome, browse/cart abandonment, post-purchase, replenishment, win-back/re-engagement, birthday, and loyalty journeys across all channels.
Activation — utilizing partner tools to build predictive segmentation, AI channel affinity, AI recurring automated campaigns (RAC), send-time optimization, and product recommendations — to personalize at scale.
Oversee the technical CRM ecosystem, including API integrations and data privacy compliance, ensuring all systems are robust, scalable, and future-proofed against the evolving privacy landscape.
Manage the roadmap for our ESP/CRM platform (Listrak), ensuring technical execution aligns with broader brand and commercial requirements, including deliverability, list health, and data integrity.
Act as the key CRM integrator across E-commerce/Trade, Buying, Creative, Performance, Data, Brand, and Product teams.
Coordinate the acquisition-to-retention handoff with paid channels, optimizing first-purchase customers to enter the right journeys and utilizing paid spend to reactivate unreached customers.
Lead, mentor, and provide daily hands-on guidance to the CRM Manager, Senior Associate, and broader team, fostering a culture of teaching, technical growth, and proactive collaboration.
Translate complex data and technical requirements into actionable marketing plans that balance brand-building, engagement, and commercial performance.
Bring forward clear recommendations, risks, and opportunities to leadership to improve decision-making and cross-functional execution.
Define KPIs and reporting frameworks across CRM channel performance, loyalty health, subscription growth, and audience conversion.
Own retention reporting — weekly vs. target and YoY — across the KPI set: retention rate, repeat-purchase rate, CVR, AOV, opt-in/opt-out, CLV, CLV/CAC, and Email+SMS revenue share; recommend in-month pivots to deliver improvement.
Own CRM-level incrementality design — holdout and control-cell methodology — so retention spend is provably incremental rather than credited for purchases that would have happened anyway.
Partner with the MMM/measurement function to triangulate lifecycle results and feed retention read-outs into the mix model.
Use performance insights, CRM analytics, and market context to refine strategy and improve marketing effectiveness over time.
Oversee relevant CRM budgets and platform investments, ensuring efficiency and high-impact resource allocation.