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Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Engagement & Retention Marketing Manager

💰 $80,000 - $140,000

MarketingGrowthCRMProductCustomer Success

🎯 Role Definition

The Engagement & Retention Marketing Manager is a strategic, data-driven marketer responsible for designing and executing lifecycle and retention programs that increase customer engagement, reduce churn, and maximize customer lifetime value. This role owns end-to-end customer journeys across owned channels (email, push, SMS, in-app, and web), partners with analytics and product teams to build actionable segmentation and personalization, and leads experimentation and optimization to continuously improve retention metrics. The ideal candidate combines hands-on CRM/automation experience with strong analytical skills, creative strategy, and cross-functional stakeholder management.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

  • Lifecycle Marketing Specialist / CRM Specialist
  • Digital Marketing Manager with CRM ownership
  • Growth Marketing or Customer Success Manager with retention focus

Advancement To:

  • Senior Manager, Engagement & Retention
  • Head of Lifecycle Marketing or Director of Growth
  • Head of Customer Retention / VP of Growth

Lateral Moves:

  • Product Marketing Manager (with analytics focus)
  • Customer Experience / CX Lead
  • Growth Product Manager

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

  • Develop and own a comprehensive lifecycle and retention strategy that spans onboarding, activation, engagement, loyalty, reactivation, and win-back programs across email, push, SMS, in-app messaging, and on-site experience to drive measurable improvements in retention and LTV.
  • Design, build, and manage automated customer journeys and triggers in CRM and engagement platforms (e.g., Braze, Iterable, Klaviyo, Salesforce Marketing Cloud), ensuring reliable orchestration, failover handling, and scalable templates.
  • Lead segmentation and customer-scoring frameworks using behavioral, demographic, and transactional data to deliver highly relevant, personalized campaigns that increase repeat purchase rates and retention cohorts.
  • Develop and run rigorous A/B and multivariate tests to validate subject lines, send times, creative, frequency, channel mix, and personalization tactics, then translate learnings into repeatable playbooks.
  • Collaborate with data analytics and product teams to define retention KPIs (churn, 7/30/90-day retention, repeat purchase rate, LTV, DAU/MAU) and build dashboards and cohort analyses that enable real-time decision making.
  • Create compelling, conversion-focused campaign creative and messaging in partnership with content, design, and brand teams, ensuring consistent voice and on-brand experiences across channels.
  • Own lifecycle campaign planning and calendar management, aligning campaigns to business priorities such as product launches, pricing changes, seasonal promotions, and cross-sell/upsell initiatives.
  • Execute onboarding and activation programs that accelerate time-to-value for new users and reduce early churn through tailored welcome flows, product education, and milestone nudges.
  • Build and optimize re-engagement and win-back strategies that identify at-risk customers, test reactivation offers, and recover lapsed revenue through targeted incentives and product updates.
  • Implement and maintain deliverability best practices (list hygiene, SPF/DKIM/DMARC, suppression management) and partner with email service providers to ensure strong inbox placement and sender reputation.
  • Partner with product, engineering, and analytics to instrument events, validate tracking, and ensure data integrity across marketing attribution and retention measurement systems.
  • Lead cross-functional experiments with product and pricing teams (e.g., trial-to-paid flows, subscription renewal flows) to measure the causal impact of product changes on retention and monetization.
  • Manage vendor and agency relationships for channel execution, creative production, deliverability support, and advanced personalization, ensuring SLAs and measurement standards are met.
  • Monitor and report on campaign performance and program health through weekly and monthly reports, executive summaries, and actionable recommendations that prioritize high-impact initiatives.
  • Drive personalization at scale by leveraging dynamic content, behavioral triggers, propensity models, and recommended product algorithms in campaign execution.
  • Translate qualitative customer feedback (NPS, CSAT, support tickets) into product and messaging changes that address friction points responsible for churn.
  • Ensure compliance with privacy and consent regulations (GDPR, CCPA) in all retention programs, managing preference centers, suppression lists, and lawful bases for communications.
  • Define and manage budget allocations for retention initiatives, channel spend, and tool subscriptions, optimizing ROI and reporting on cost-per-retained-customer and payback periods.
  • Mentor and develop junior marketers and cross-functional partners on lifecycle principles, experimentation methodology, and campaign operations to scale retention capabilities.
  • Establish clear OKRs and success metrics for retention programs and align leadership and stakeholders to priorities, trade-offs, and resource needs.
  • Partner with growth, acquisition, and product analytics teams to align on unified measurement frameworks for customer cohorts and to ensure retention improvements are reflected in LTV and CAC payback analyses.
  • Create and maintain reusable templates, libraries, and technical documentation for campaign setup, naming conventions, and QA processes to reduce operational risk and speed up execution.

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.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

  • Expert in CRM and lifecycle marketing platforms (Braze, Iterable, Klaviyo, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, HubSpot) with proven hands-on implementation experience.
  • Strong analytics skills: SQL for ad hoc queries, cohort analysis, funnel analysis, and segmentation; comfortable partnering with Looker, Tableau, Amplitude, Mixpanel, or equivalent.
  • A/B testing and experimentation design experience, including hypothesis development, test sizing, significance calculation, and iterative learning.
  • Hands-on experience with email deliverability best practices, inbox placement diagnostics, and ESP configuration (SPF/DKIM/DMARC).
  • Proficiency with marketing automation and template systems (liquid/ handlebars, dynamic content, personalization tokens).
  • Familiarity with mobile engagement tooling for push and in-app messages and with SMS compliance and deliverability best practices.
  • Data literacy: ability to interpret event tracking, define tracking requirements, and work with product/engineering to ensure data accuracy.
  • Experience with analytics/reporting tooling and building executive dashboards tied to retention KPIs.
  • Basic HTML/CSS for email templating and troubleshooting across clients.
  • Knowledge of privacy and consent frameworks (GDPR, CCPA) and practical experience implementing preference centers and suppression workflows.

Soft Skills

  • Strong strategic thinker with ability to translate business goals into actionable retention playbooks.
  • Excellent cross-functional collaboration and stakeholder management across product, analytics, design, and engineering teams.
  • Analytical mindset with curiosity to dig into root causes, spot trends, and recommend prioritized actions.
  • Clear and persuasive communicator, adept at presenting results and influencing senior leadership.
  • Project management and organizational skills to manage multiple concurrent campaigns and experiments.
  • Creativity in messaging and campaign ideation balanced with disciplined test-and-learn execution.
  • High attention to detail and process orientation for QA of complex, automated journeys.
  • Coaching and mentorship skills to develop junior team members and uplift organizational maturity.
  • Resilience and adaptability in a fast-paced, iterative environment.
  • Customer-centric mindset with strong empathy for user needs and lifecycle experience.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

  • Bachelor's degree in Marketing, Business, Statistics, Communications, or related field (or equivalent practical experience).

Preferred Education:

  • Master's degree in Marketing, Analytics, Business Administration (MBA), or related advanced degree.

Relevant Fields of Study:

  • Marketing
  • Data Analytics / Statistics
  • Business Administration
  • Communications
  • Computer Science (for tagging/tracking familiarity)

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range:

  • 3–7 years in lifecycle, retention, or CRM marketing roles; or 5+ years with progressive responsibility in digital or growth marketing.

Preferred:

  • 5+ years owning lifecycle/retention programs in B2C or subscription/SaaS businesses with demonstrated impact on churn reduction and LTV improvements; experience with enterprise-grade CRM tools and cross-functional program leadership.
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