Head of Lifecycle – CRM Director

About the job:

We’re MATES, a specialist email and CRM studio. We run email programmes for brands like Helly Hansen, Musto, and Patagonia. We’re hiring one person to own a small portfolio of client accounts from end to end. You’ll set the strategy, read the numbers, present to the client, and make sure every send is right.

We’re a small agency by design, so we hire people with unusually broad capability and high agency.

You’ll own your accounts end to end – performance, strategy, calendar, process and client relationship – but you won’t be doing it alone. You’ll work alongside a high-agency creative team of designers, copywriters and CRM specialists who can move quickly with you.

The expectation is that you know how to get the best out of that team. You can turn data into a clear direction, give a strong creative brief, challenge work when it isn’t good enough and make decisions without creating unnecessary layers of approval.

We deliberately remove hand-offs wherever possible. We’d rather pay more for someone who can operate confidently across several disciplines than split the role between three people.

AI is part of that. We use it every day to research faster, analyse more deeply, explore more options and produce better work. We’re looking for someone who uses AI to increase their capability and output – not someone who uses it to avoid thinking or produces generic work faster.

Why this role

  • You own the whole account. No handing strategy to another team, no waiting for someone else’s sign-off. You see your decisions land in the numbers.
  • A portfolio you can do properly. Two to four accounts, not ten. Enough to go deep and do the work you’re proud of.
  • Less grind. Dashboards are automated and our AI tooling connects Klaviyo and GA4, so your time goes on insight, not pulling numbers.
  • A studio behind you. Designers and builders produce the emails. An operations lead handles their schedule, so you’re not project managing.
  • Direct access. You work with the founder and our operations lead, not three layers down.
  • Room to lead. We plan to add a CRM lead role as the email team grows, and this is the person we’d want to grow into it.
  • 100% remote within the UK, working UK hours

Requirements:

  • Account performance. Two- Four accounts are yours depending on size. You know how each one is tracking, why, and what we’re doing about it next.
  • Strategy and planning. You build email and SMS roadmaps across campaigns, flows, and pop-ups, and keep the calendar moving.
  • Reporting that says something. Dashboards show the numbers. Your monthly and quarterly reports explain what they mean and what we’ll do next. You’ll pull from Klaviyo, GA4, Shopify and our reporting tools, and you’re comfortable talking about attribution.
  • The client relationship. You run the weekly calls and present your own strategy in monthly and quarterly reviews. When a client pushes back, you hold your ground with data and good judgement.
  • Process. If a client’s approvals, briefs, or feedback loops are messy, fixing that is part of the job. We don’t treat it as scope creep.
  • Briefing and QA. You write clear briefs for our designers and builders, give sharp feedback, and personally check every link, segment, and pixel before anything goes out.
  • Copy. If called upon you don’t mind supporting to draft on-brand, high-converting copy, and you can tell when copy sounds generic.

Qualifications:

  • Organised and detail orientated thinker
  • 5+ years running email and SMS for DTC or eCommerce brands, ideally agency-side
  • Deep Klaviyo experience: flows, segmentation, A/B testing, reporting. Salesforce or Braze a plus.
  • Solid analytical skills. You can turn a messy data export into a clear story without a separate analytics team behind you.
  • Confidence presenting to senior client stakeholders, on camera and in the room
  • A calm head when a client briefs late. Some weeks are planned weeks ahead and some aren’t, and you ship good work either way.
  • The ability to juggle several accounts without dropping details. You batch your questions, think before you message, and keep clients feeling looked after, not chased.
  • A good eye for design. You don’t need to be a designer, but you’ll spot a bad crop or uneven spacing straight away.
  • Native-level written and spoken English
  • Full availability during GMT working hours

Nice to have

  • Braze/Salesforce experience
  • Experience using AI to eliviate mundane tasks so you can focus on delivering strategy and revenue results.
  • Figma basics for wireframes, image swaps, copy updates and delivering feedback as coments
  • SMS platforms beyond Klaviyo
  • Experience with reporting tools like GA4 or Triple Whale

This probably isn’t for you if…

  • You’d rather someone else handled the looks at the data and hands you a plan
  • You prefer to stay behind the scenes rather than face the client
  • You need every piece of work planned weeks in advance to do your best work
  • You’re looking for one client among several freelance commitments
  • You’re hoping to one prompt AI to turn in work that the client could do themselves.

No judgement. These are all fair ways to work, they just aren’t this role.

What you get

  • Clients with great products and ambitious CRM programmes
  • 100% remote, with a small team that actually talks to each other
  • Room to grow into a leadership role as the email team scales
  • Training and mentoring from people who’ve been doing this a long time
  • No corporate red tape

How we hire

  1. Apply. Send your CV and a two-minute video introducing yourself to apply@matesincorporated.com.
  2. Intro call with Jack or Daniela (30 minutes).
  3. Paid test task. You’ll get a real-world data export and a short, late-arriving brief. We’ll ask for a one-slide summary of what the data says, a short recorded walkthrough of your recommendation, and a QA pass on an email.
  4. Final call to talk through your test.
  5. 30-day trial. It’s a two-way check that the role suits you as much as it suits us.