Director, Retention

American City Business Journals•Charlotte, NC

About The Position

The Director, Retention builds and leads a retention roadmap aligned with membership revenue goals. The role identifies churn drivers and early risk signals, develops differentiated member journeys, and designs and optimizes retention programs across onboarding, engagement, renewal, payment recovery, win-back, and upgrades. It partners with Data and Technology on churn models, triggers, and measurement, and turns cancellation reasons and member feedback into improvements across product, content, service, marketing, billing, and member benefits. The Director owns retention tools and experiences, including Chargebee retention tools, cancellation flows, onsite save offers, renewal experiences, and payment recovery. The role maintains a transparent testing program, scales successful interventions, reports on retention performance and economics, and collaborates across internal teams and local markets to improve member retention.

Requirements

8+ years in retention, lifecycle, subscription, CRM, or membership strategy.
Proven ability to diagnose churn and turn insight into measurable interventions.
Strong analytical skills, including cohort analysis, A/B testing, incremental impact, and business cases.
Experience with Chargebee, HubSpot, Salesforce, or comparable platforms.
Ability to challenge legacy practices and lead change across teams without direct authority.
Strong communication skills and a commitment to transparent reporting, even when results disappoint.

Responsibilities

Build a retention roadmap tied to membership revenue goals.
Identify churn drivers by cohort, tenure, product use, market, price, acquisition source, and engagement.
Prioritize interventions based on customer impact, revenue value, effort, and speed to learning.
Identify risk signals early and intervene before members decide to cancel.
Build differentiated journeys for new, engaged, inactive, high-value, high-risk, expiring, canceled, and former members.
Partner with Data and Technology on churn models, trigger logic, and measurement.
Turn cancellation reasons and feedback into product, content, service, and marketing changes.
Design and optimize onboarding, engagement, pre-renewal, renewal, save, payment recovery, win-back, and upgrade journeys.
Coordinate timing and messaging across email, onsite, app, and customer service.
Maintain a transparent test backlog, defining a hypothesis, audience, control, success metric, economics, and decision rule for every test.
Scale proven wins, revise inconclusive work, stop ineffective programs, and publish lessons.
Own Chargebee retention tools, cancellation flows, onsite save offers, renewal experiences, and payment recovery.
Improve data quality, event tracking, and trigger reliability; evaluate emerging tools.
Report on renewal, churn, retained revenue, and retention ROI; distinguish correlation from causation and surface negative trends and failed tests early.
Work with Growth & Membership Strategy, Development, Onsite Marketing, CRM, Audience Operations, Customer Service, Data, and local markets.
Translate retention insights into improvements in product, content, service, billing, and member benefits.