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Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Customer Retention Manager

💰 $70,000 - $120,000

Customer SuccessMarketingProductAnalyticsSaaS

🎯 Role Definition

The Customer Retention Manager is responsible for designing, executing, and optimizing retention and lifecycle programs that reduce churn and maximize customer lifetime value. This role blends quantitative analysis, lifecycle marketing, product partnership, and operational rigor to proactively identify at-risk cohorts, develop targeted interventions (onboarding, engagement, renewal and win-back), and measure the impact of retention initiatives. The ideal candidate is data-driven, customer-obsessed, experienced with CRM/marketing automation tools, and skilled at influencing cross-functional stakeholders.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

  • Senior Customer Success Representative or Customer Success Manager
  • Lifecycle Marketing Specialist or CRM Manager
  • Retention Analyst or Growth Marketing Manager

Advancement To:

  • Head of Customer Success / Director of Retention
  • VP of Customer Experience / VP of Growth
  • Chief Customer Officer (for enterprise trajectories)

Lateral Moves:

  • Product Manager (focused on adoption)
  • Growth Marketing Manager
  • Revenue Operations / RevOps Manager

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

  • Develop, own and execute a comprehensive retention strategy that aligns with company revenue and customer success goals, including goals for net retention, gross retention, and customer lifetime value (CLTV).
  • Build and maintain a prioritized roadmap of retention initiatives—onboarding improvements, engagement campaigns, renewal playbooks, and win-back flows—based on data-driven impact assessments.
  • Conduct cohort and churn analyses using SQL, Excel, or analytics tools to identify high-risk customer segments and actionable drivers of churn; translate insights into prioritized experiments and programs.
  • Design, launch and iterate automated lifecycle campaigns (onboarding, adoption nudges, renewal reminders, re-engagement/win-back) using CRM and marketing automation platforms (e.g., HubSpot, Braze, Iterable, Salesforce Marketing Cloud).
  • Create and maintain dashboards and KPIs (activation rate, health score, NPS, churn rate by cohort, time-to-first-value, usage metrics) to monitor program performance and escalate risks.
  • Partner with Product to translate product usage and feedback into retention-focused product improvements and in-app experiences that increase engagement and stickiness.
  • Define customer health scoring models that combine behavioral, contractual and qualitative signals, and operationalize those scores to trigger campaigns and human interventions.
  • Lead A/B tests and multivariate experiments to optimize email, in-app messaging, push notifications, pricing/packaging prompts, and renewal language; analyze results and scale winning variants.
  • Develop renewal and escalation playbooks for enterprise and high-value accounts, working closely with Account Management and Sales to coordinate renewal negotiations and prevent churn.
  • Establish and run a formal win-back program for lapsed customers, including personalized outreach, offers, and tailored product adjustments informed by churn reasons.
  • Manage cross-functional retention programs by coordinating with Marketing, Sales, Product, Customer Support, and Data teams to ensure consistent customer journeys and messaging.
  • Own the lifecycle communications calendar and governance—ensuring messages are coordinated, relevant, and consistent across email, in-app, SMS, and success outreach.
  • Collect and synthesize qualitative feedback (customer interviews, NPS comments, support tickets) to surface root causes of churn and to inform prioritized retention solutions.
  • Implement segmentation strategies to deliver hyper-targeted retention campaigns based on usage patterns, industry, contract type, and customer lifecycle stage.
  • Forecast retention impact and revenue at the cohort level, and provide monthly/quarterly retention reporting to executive stakeholders tying retention improvements to ARR/MRR.
  • Create and maintain documentation, playbooks and runbooks for retention programs, ensuring repeatability and handoffs between teams as programs scale.
  • Train and enable Customer Success and Support teams on retention tactics, account risk indicators, and standardized intervention templates to improve human touch effectiveness.
  • Negotiate and manage relationships with third-party vendors that support retention efforts (survey tools, automation platforms, analytics providers) and evaluate ROI.
  • Drive continuous improvement by running retrospective reviews (postmortems) on churn events and failed experiments to refine approach and reduce recurrence.
  • Lead or contribute to pricing and packaging tests that aim to reduce friction at renewal and increase customer willingness to renew or expand.
  • Translate retention strategy into operational metrics and SLA’s for cross-functional teams (time-to-first-contact for at-risk accounts, campaign delivery SLAs, experiment cadence).
  • Present retention initiatives, results and insights to senior leadership with clear narratives, data visualizations and recommended next steps.

Secondary Functions

  • Support ad-hoc data requests and exploratory data analysis.
  • Contribute to the organization's data strategy and roadmap.
  • Collaborate with business units to translate data needs into engineering requirements.
  • Participate in sprint planning and agile ceremonies within the data engineering team.
  • Coordinate with Customer Support to close the loop on recurrent product issues that drive churn and to prioritize fixes with Product.
  • Assist in developing customer education content and success resources that reduce time-to-value and improve retention.
  • Participate in customer-facing executive reviews for high-value accounts when retention risk is elevated.
  • Help define and monitor SLAs for renewal outreach and retention follow-up workflows.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

  • Proficiency with CRM and marketing automation platforms (e.g., Salesforce, HubSpot, Braze, Iterable) for building and automating lifecycle campaigns.
  • Strong analytical skills with hands-on experience in SQL for cohort, funnel and churn analysis; comfortable querying production data to derive insights.
  • Experience with analytics and visualization tools (Tableau, Looker, Power BI, Google Analytics) to build retention dashboards and executive reports.
  • A/B testing and experimentation design skills, including hypothesis framing, test setup, statistical significance interpretation and incremental impact measurement.
  • Familiarity with customer success tooling (Gainsight, ChurnZero, Totango) and health scoring implementation.
  • Comfortable with spreadsheet modeling (Excel/Google Sheets) for forecasting, scenario analysis and CLTV calculations.
  • Working knowledge of product analytics platforms (Amplitude, Mixpanel) to measure adoption, feature engagement and time-to-value.
  • Experience managing lifecycle email campaigns, including audience segmentation, copy optimization, and deliverability best practices.
  • Understanding of SaaS metrics and financial KPIs: MRR/ARR, churn (logo and revenue), expansion revenue, ARPA/ARPU, and LTV/CAC dynamics.
  • Ability to manage and evaluate vendor integrations and third-party retention tools, plus basic API familiarity for campaign orchestration.
  • Basic familiarity with scripting or analytics languages (Python/R) is a plus for advanced modeling and automation.

Soft Skills

  • Exceptional stakeholder management and cross-functional collaboration skills; able to influence without direct authority.
  • Strong written and verbal communication; capable of translating complex data into clear, actionable narratives for executives and frontline teams.
  • Customer-centric mindset and ability to synthesize qualitative and quantitative signals into pragmatic retention programs.
  • Strategic thinker with strong prioritization skills—focuses on high-impact initiatives and minimizes time on low ROI activities.
  • Problem-solver with a test-and-learn orientation; comfortable iterating quickly and making data-informed decisions.
  • Leadership and team coaching abilities—can mentor junior analysts and success managers on retention best practices.
  • High attention to detail and rigor in experiment execution, reporting, and playbook documentation.
  • Time management and project management skills; experienced running multi-channel programs concurrently.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

  • Bachelor's degree in Business, Marketing, Economics, Statistics, Computer Science or related field.

Preferred Education:

  • Master's degree or MBA preferred for senior or strategic roles; coursework in data analytics, marketing or behavioral economics is a plus.

Relevant Fields of Study:

  • Business Administration / Marketing
  • Data Science / Statistics
  • Economics / Finance
  • Computer Science / Information Systems

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range: 4–8 years in customer success, retention, lifecycle marketing, or growth roles with 2+ years in a manager-level capacity.

Preferred:

  • 5+ years of experience driving retention programs in SaaS or subscription businesses.
  • Demonstrated track record reducing churn, improving net revenue retention, or materially increasing CLTV through data-driven programs.
  • Experience working with cross-functional teams (Product, Sales, Marketing, Support) and presenting outcomes to senior leadership.
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