Senior Director of Customer Lifecycle Marketing
Virgin Hotels
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Job summary
Virgin Hotels Collection seeks a Senior Director of Customer Lifecycle Marketing to drive a data-driven guest lifecycle program. You will lead IRU adoption, govern guest data, and translate insights into revenue and retention improvements across loyalty, marketing, and guest services.
You will manage a small specialist team and influence broader activation ecosystems including paid media, analytics, and property teams.
Qualifications
- 10-12+ years in CRM, lifecycle marketing or customer data.
- Experience owning a CDP or guest identity build end-to-end.
- Hospitality or multi-property loyalty experience preferred.
- Proven revenue outcomes from data initiatives.
- Hybrid commercial and technical fluency.
Responsibilities
- Own the IRU implementation roadmap with IRU, IT/data engineering.
- Define guest identity framework across loyalty, authentication, CRM, booking, mobile and on-property systems.
- Stand up governance: consent, retention policies, access control and GDPR alignment.
- Translate segments into lifecycle activation with marketing automation and paid media.
- Run a test-and-learn program across lifecycle journeys and predictive capabilities.
- Lead a small team of two to three specialists in CRM, data & analytics, and loyalty ops.
- Manage the IRU commercial relationship and vendor accountability.
Skills
Tools
Job description
We love what we do and what we do is important! We believe that everyone should leave feeling better - this means not just our guests, but also our teammates. Everyone should go home feeling better because they learned something new or had fun working that day. Therefore, we hire unique individuals who work together to create amazing experiences for our guests. We recognize that every member of the team contributes to the success of the whole hotel. No one is more important than anyone else, and unless we are in it together, we can't create that special experience for our guests.
We love what we do and what we do is important! We believe that everyone should leave feeling better - this means not just our guests, but also our teammates. Everyone should go home feeling better because they learned something new or had fun working that day. Therefore, we hire unique individuals who work together to create amazing experiences for our guests. We recognize that every member of the team contributes to the success of the whole hotel. No one is more important than anyone else, and unless we are in it together, we can't create that special experience for our guests.
Virgin Hotels Collection is embedding IReckonU (IRU), a hospitality Customer Data Platform, as the core of its guest data ecosystem, unifying and connecting guest information across every system so it becomes a single source of truth. A readiness engagement has already produced a customer data landscape assessment, an analytics baseline and an activation plan; this role exists to convert that diagnosis, and the IRU implementation itself, into a live, governed, value-producing capability, not a platform administration exercise.
The Senior Director of Customer Lifecycle Marketing owns that conversion, moving Virgin Hotels Collection from an early-stage data estate to a trusted, governed and activated guest data capability, and turning that foundation into measurable gains in retention, direct revenue, share of wallet, guest recognition and personalization. This is a value-realization leadership role with first-year delivery expectations, leading a small specialist team while influencing the wider activation ecosystem of loyalty, digital, paid media and guest-service teams.
- Own the IRU implementation roadmap jointly with IRU and IT/data engineering, covering PMS, POS, booking engine, loyalty, CRM, marketing automation, paid media and reporting integrations.
- Lead data mapping, Match & Merge configuration, the golden record definition, data-quality thresholds, monitoring and customer data issue management.
- Own the guest identity framework across loyalty, authentication, CRM, booking, mobile and on-property systems, including profile matching, account linking, preference management and guest recognition.
- Define decision rights for match confidence, survivorship, suppression and exception handling when data is not safe to activate.
- Stand up governance: consent, retention policies, access control and GDPR alignment across connected systems.
- Define the segmentation framework (RFM+, behavioral, event-based, lifecycle and value-based) and own the prioritized use-case backlog.
- Launch the first revenue-relevant use cases and drive adoption of reporting, insight and guest-profile insight by loyalty, revenue management, property teams, reservations, guest services, analytics and central marketing.
- Translate segments into lifecycle activation through the downstream stack, partnering closely with the owners of marketing automation, loyalty and paid media.
- Run a test-and-learn program across Next Best Offer, churn intervention and lifecycle journeys, measured through incrementality and holdouts wherever possible.
- Evaluate and operationalize predictive and AI-driven capabilities, including propensity modeling, churn prediction, next-best-action recommendations and personalization, as the customer data foundation matures.
- Extend unified first-party audiences to paid media (for example Meta and Google) for suppression, lookalikes and smarter targeting, improving acquisition efficiency over time.
- Identify and prioritize high-value guest journeys across acquisition, booking, pre-arrival, on-property, post-stay and re-engagement, translating data capabilities into measurable guest experience and commercial outcomes.
- Partner with brand, loyalty, commercial, revenue management, property and guest-service teams to support distinct brand, guest segment and journey needs while maintaining a unified guest view.
- Manage the IRU commercial relationship, roadmap influence, service levels and vendor accountability, ensuring the capability is not dependent on a single tool or vendor.
- Thrive doing foundational work in Year 1 without disengaging, while holding the Year-2 commercial endgame in view.
- Treat data quality and adoption as your own problem, not the vendor's or IT's.
- Define crisp success metrics rather than hiding behind a vague onboarding mandate.
- Translate technical data issues into business decisions for Marketing and customer value for IT, making progress even with imperfect data.
- Lead a small specialist team of two to three, spanning CRM/lifecycle, data & analytics, and loyalty or campaign operations.
- Priority integrations live against an agreed sequence.
- Golden guest profile defined and populated, with duplicate profile rate reduced to an agreed threshold.
- Guest identity decision rights documented, including match confidence, merge rules, survivorship, suppression and exception handling.
- Data-quality score baselined and under active monitoring with stakeholder alerting.
- Governance live: consent, retention, access control, GDPR alignment and appropriate use of customer data.
- Segmentation framework and value roadmap defined, with two to three revenue-relevant use cases launched and measured.
- Reporting and guest-profile insight in active use by loyalty, revenue management, analytics, guest services and pilot properties.
- Real lifecycle journeys live across acquisition, booking, pre-arrival, on-property, post-stay, loyalty, reactivation and paid media, driving incrementality, retention, share of wallet, direct bookings, ancillary revenue and LTV.
- Priority integrations live against an agreed sequence.
- Golden guest profile defined and populated, with duplicate profile rate reduced to an agreed threshold.
- Guest identity decision rights documented, including match confidence, merge rules, survivorship, suppression and exception handling.
- Data-quality score baselined and under active monitoring with stakeholder alerting.
- Governance live: consent, retention, access control, GDPR alignment and appropriate use of customer data.
- Segmentation framework and value roadmap defined, with two to three revenue-relevant use cases launched and measured.
- Reporting and guest-profile insight in active use by loyalty, revenue management, analytics, guest services and pilot properties.
- Real lifecycle journeys live across acquisition, booking, pre-arrival, on-property, post-stay, loyalty, reactivation and paid media, driving incrementality, retention, share of wallet, direct bookings, ancillary revenue and LTV.
- Current, legal and unrestricted ability to work in the United States.
- 10-12+ years in CRM, lifecycle marketing, customer data or marketing technology, including at least 3-5 years in a role that owned a CDP, data-unification, or guest/customer identity build end to end is a must have.
- Background in hospitality, travel, or another multi-property, high-frequency, loyalty-driven consumer business, with exposure to operational data (PMS/POS-type) and multi-property identity resolution is strongly preferred.
- Salesforce or similar CRM, CDP, customer data, loyalty or activation experience is essential; direct IRU experience is a plus.
- Demonstrable revenue outcomes from data (retention, lifetime value, upsell), not campaign-volume metrics.
- Proven track record of co-delivering integrations across the marketing and IT boundary.
- Experience with Data governance and privacy fluency (GDPR and consent), given UK and EU operations.
- Hybrid commercial and technical fluency: deep enough to challenge a data model, interrogate Match & Merge logic and sequence integrations, and commercial enough to turn a segment into a profit-and-loss hypothesis and an incrementality test.
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