Senior Email Lifecycle Marketing Strategist

About the Role

Forge Digital Marketing is looking for an experienced Senior Email Lifecycle Marketing Strategist with deep Klaviyo and DTC ecommerce expertise to lead lifecycle strategy for a portfolio of growing ecommerce brands.

This is not a junior email marketing role, campaign coordinator position, or primarily executional Klaviyo role.

We’re looking for someone who can step into a Shopify/Klaviyo account, understand the business behind the data, identify where opportunities are being missed, and develop a sophisticated lifecycle strategy to improve retention, customer experience, and revenue.

You should be equally comfortable analyzing account performance, architecting complex lifecycle journeys, developing campaign strategy, briefing designers and copywriters, presenting recommendations to clients, and deciding what we should do next—and why.

The right person won’t need to be handed a checklist. We’re looking for someone who creates the checklist.

What You’ll Own

Lifecycle Strategy & Account Leadership

• Develop comprehensive lifecycle strategies based on each client’s business model, customer behavior, product mix, purchase cycle, and growth goals.
• Audit existing Klaviyo accounts and identify opportunities across flows, campaigns, segmentation, deliverability, acquisition, retention, and customer experience.
• Build quarterly and monthly strategic roadmaps.
• Develop testing strategies and prioritize opportunities based on expected impact.
• Monitor performance and determine what should change based on the data.
• Translate performance data into actionable insights—not simply report what happened.
• Proactively identify opportunities beyond the original brief.

Klaviyo Flow Architecture

Design and continuously optimize sophisticated lifecycle programs including:

• Welcome and lead nurture
• Browse abandonment
• Product abandonment
• Cart and checkout abandonment
• Post-purchase journeys
• Cross-sell and upsell
• Replenishment
• Review generation
• Winback and reactivation
• VIP and loyalty journeys
• Sunset and engagement management
• Customer education
• Product-specific journeys
• Predictive and behavioral segmentation
• SMS integration within the broader lifecycle

We aren’t interested in simply checking off the standard Klaviyo flow list. We want someone who thinks deeply about when customers should receive a message, why they’re receiving it, what they need at that point in their journey, and what should happen next based on their behavior.

Campaign Strategy & Management

Own strategic campaign calendars and determine:

• What we should send
• Who should receive it
• Why we’re sending it
• What the offer or message should be
• How campaigns support the client’s larger marketing calendar
• What should be tested
• How frequently different customer segments should be contacted
• How promotional, educational, product, brand, and retention messaging should work together

Creative Direction

Work closely with Forge’s email designers and copywriters to create thoughtful briefs that include:

• Campaign objective
• Audience/segment
• Customer insight
• Messaging hierarchy
• Offer strategy
• Creative direction
• Required products/content
• CTA strategy
• Testing considerations

Review creative before it reaches the client and recognize when something may look good but isn’t strategically right for the customer or campaign.

Analytics & Optimization

Be comfortable evaluating conversion rate, revenue per recipient, placed order rate, click rate, unsubscribe rate, spam complaints, flow performance, campaign performance, customer cohorts, repeat purchase behavior, AOV, LTV, and retention.

More importantly, know which metrics actually matter for the question you’re trying to answer.

Develop hypotheses, design tests, interpret results, and use those findings to continuously improve the account.

Shopify + DTC Ecommerce

Deep understanding of Shopify and direct-to-consumer ecommerce is essential. You should understand how lifecycle marketing fits into:

• Customer acquisition
• Paid media
• Organic acquisition
• Landing pages
• Offers and promotions
• Merchandising
• Product launches
• Subscription models
• Loyalty programs
• CRO
• Customer retention
• Attribution
• Customer lifetime value

What We’re Looking For

• 5+ years of email/lifecycle marketing experience, preferably with substantial DTC ecommerce experience
• Advanced, hands-on experience with Klaviyo
• Deep understanding of Shopify
• Experience owning strategy for multiple ecommerce brands or complex accounts
• Strong knowledge of segmentation, automation, lifecycle architecture, and personalization
• Experience building campaign calendars and ongoing account strategy
• Strong analytical ability and comfort interpreting ecommerce performance data
• Experience developing structured testing programs
• Excellent understanding of email and SMS deliverability and list health
• Strong understanding of DTC customer psychology and buying behavior
• Experience briefing and directing designers and copywriters
• Excellent written and verbal communication
• Confidence presenting strategy and recommendations to clients
• Agency experience strongly preferred
• Experience working with established or high-growth DTC brands is a major plus

Klaviyo certifications are welcome, but certification alone is not what we’re hiring for. We’re much more interested in what you’ve actually built, managed, diagnosed, improved, and learned.

You’ll Probably Love This Role If…

You’re the person other marketers come to when they can’t figure out why an account isn’t performing.

You enjoy getting into the weeds of customer behavior and figuring out what the brand should do differently. You have strong opinions—but can back them up with data, experience, or a thoughtful hypothesis.

You notice things other people miss. You don’t wait for a client to tell you what to do next. You can zoom out and think about the entire customer lifecycle, then zoom all the way in to individual campaign and segmentation decisions.

When someone asks, “What should we do with this account?” you genuinely enjoy figuring out the answer.

This Role Is Probably Not a Fit If…

This likely isn’t the right role if your Klaviyo experience has primarily involved:

• Scheduling campaigns from calendars created by someone else
• Building flows from predefined diagrams or templates
• Loading provided copy/designs into Klaviyo
• Pulling monthly reports without determining what should happen because of them
• Relying heavily on standard best practices rather than developing account-specific strategies
• Waiting for a manager or client to determine priorities
• Managing email as an isolated channel without understanding the broader ecommerce business

Application Requirements

Along with your resume or LinkedIn profile, please answer:

1. Tell us about the most sophisticated Klaviyo account you’ve personally owned. What made it sophisticated? What did you personally own versus what did your team own?
2. Tell us about an underperforming email/SMS program you inherited. How did you diagnose the problems, what did you change, and what happened?
3. Walk us through one lifecycle strategy you’re particularly proud of. We care more about your thinking than a giant revenue number.
4. Tell us about an experiment that didn’t work. What was your hypothesis, what happened, and what did you do afterward?
5. You’re handed a Shopify brand doing $5M/year tomorrow and given access to Shopify, Klaviyo, and GA4. What are the first things you investigate?