Director, Retention

ACBJ; Charlotte (NC); On-site; USD 140,000 - 190,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health benefits package

Mental health & wellness programs

Generous time-off policy

Paid Parental Leave

401K with Employer Match

Commuter benefits

Job summary

American City Business Journals is seeking a Director of Retention in Charlotte, NC to lead a proactive retention discipline focused on membership revenue growth. You will drive lifecycle strategies, churn modeling, and optimized journeys across onboarding, renewal, and win-back initiatives, partnering with data, marketing, and product teams to deliver measurable results.

In this role you will own retention tools and workflows, ensure rigorous testing, and report performance with transparency.

Qualifications

• 8+ years in retention, lifecycle, subscription, CRM, or membership strategy.
• Proven ability to diagnose churn and turn insight into measurable interventions.
• Strong analytical skills: 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 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 by 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. Define the 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. 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.

Skills

Retention strategy

Lifecycle marketing

CRM proficiency

Data analysis

A/B testing

Cross-functional leadership

Clear reporting

Communication

Tools

Chargebee

HubSpot

Salesforce

Job description

Charlotte, North Carolina, United States

Job Overview

The Director of Retention protects and grows membership revenue by building a proactive retention discipline for American City Business Journals. The role combines customer insight, behavioral data, lifecycle marketing, experimentation, and retention technology to improve renewal, save performance, win-back, and customer lifetime value. The Director challenges assumptions, tests continuously, and reports results transparently.

Job 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 by 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. Define the 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. 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.

Skills & Experience

• 8+ years in retention, lifecycle, subscription, CRM, or membership strategy.


• Proven ability to diagnose churn and turn insight into measurable interventions.


• Strong analytical skills: 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 and a commitment to transparent reporting, even when results disappoint.

Additional Job Information

The well-being of our employees is paramount. For that reason, ACBJ offers a variety of rich and competitive benefits including bundled health, dental and vision plans designed to meet our employees' needs. We also provide programs to support mental health and wellness and a generous time-off policy in support of taking the time needed to recharge.

Here are just a few of our programs:

• Paid Parental Leave


• 401K Plan with Employer Match


• Flexible Spending Accounts


• Employee Assistance Program


• Multiple Employee Dependent Scholarship Programs


• Commuter Flexible Spending


• Lifestyle Programs (Including incentives for healthy habits)


• Medical Infertility Services


• Corporate discount programs


• Employee Recognition/Service Awards


• And so much more!

(Benefits coverage indicated above may be based on employee participation in benefit programs and eligibility)

Salary Range

NA

Compliance Statement

This Company is an Equal Opportunity Employer. The Company considers applicants for all positions without regard to race, color, religion, national origin, gender, age, marital status, disability, veteran status, sexual orientation, genetic information or any other characteristic protected by applicable city, state or federal law.

This Company is an Equal Opportunity Employer, and does not discriminate on the basis of race, gender, ethnicity, religion, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, or on any other basis prohibited by law. Information on race, gender and national origin will only be used for statistical and recordkeeping purposes, and will not be used in making any employment decisions. All information provided will be kept separate from your expression of interest. Providing this information is strictly voluntary, and you will not be subjected to any adverse action or treatment if you choose not to provide this information. If you do not choose to answer these questions, we ask that you select "Decline to Identify" for each question. Thank you for your voluntary cooperation.