Director of CRM in London

Go City is transforming the way people see and experience the world’s greatest destinations. We give our customers total flexibility to choose the experiences, tours and activities they want to visit at incredible savings. The Director of CRM owns the relationship between Go City and the people who buy from us - before, between and after every purchase. This is the most strategically important growth lever we have that isn’t paid media: as customer acquisition costs rise across our OTA-driven channels, the value we extract from each customer we already have is what protects our margin and our long-term growth.

We are explicit about what this role is and isn’t. It is not running a transactional email calendar, sending the same discount to everyone and reporting on open rates. It is building genuine customer relationships across the lifecycle - understanding who our customers are, what they’re worth, what makes them come back, and designing the programmes that move them up the value curve. The difference between a CRM that sends transactional messages and a CRM that builds relationships and lifetime value is the difference between this role done badly and done well, and it's the single most important thing we are hiring for.

You will sit alongside the Director of Paid and the Head of SEO as a peer in the marketing leadership team, owning the retention and value side of the growth equation while they own acquisition. You will be expected to hold your own in strategic debate with them, with finance and with the executive team - not just to execute a plan handed to you.

What you'll own

• Lifecycle & Retention Strategy: Own the end-to-end customer lifecycle strategy - acquisition handover, onboarding, activation, repeat purchase, win-back and lapsed reactivation - across gocity.com and our city pass brands. Treat the customer journey as one product rather than a series of disconnected campaigns; design the nurture, trigger and lifecycle flows that move customers between stages. Move the organisation away from a discount-led, signup-volume mindset toward a value-led model, and build the evidence and the case to do so.
• Customer Value & Commercial Ownership: Own customer lifetime value as a metric you understand, can decompose and can move - including the LTV difference between discount-acquired and full-price customers, and what that means for how we market. Define success for the CRM channel in outcome terms (retention, repeat rate, margin, LTV) rather than activity or input metrics (sends, signups, open rates). Build the commercial case for CRM investment and defend it with data in front of finance and the executive team. Develop a segmentation and value framework so the right customers receive the right contact, rather than everyone receiving the same offer.
• Programme & Loyalty: Design and run the loyalty and retention programmes that reduce our dependency on paid acquisition over time. Own the email, push and lifecycle channels operationally - deliverability, data capture, consent and the underlying CRM platform - while keeping the focus on relationship and value, not volume. Partner with the data and analytics team to build the measurement that tells us whether the channel is genuinely creating value, including clean before/after reads and defined kill criteria for tests.
• Leadership & Influence: Lead, hire and develop the CRM / lifecycle team, raising the strategic bar of the function. Operate as a true peer to the Director of Paid and Head of SEO — contributing a strong, structured point of view to marketing strategy rather than waiting to be directed. Bring forward strategic proposals, stress-test the proposals of others constructively, and think in trade-offs rather than absolutes.

Success at 6 months

• A clear, evidenced CRM strategy that the leadership team has bought into, framed in customer value rather than signup volume.
• A working segmentation and value framework, with the highest-value cohorts identified and treated differently.
• At least one well-designed lifecycle or retention programme live and measured properly, with a clean read on its commercial impact.
• A credible point of view on the discount-led vs value-led question, backed by LTV evidence, ready to inform wider marketing strategy.
• A CRM function visibly operating as a strategic peer to acquisition, not a downstream execution channel.

What you'll bring

• Significant experience leading CRM, lifecycle or retention at a senior level in a consumer / ecommerce business, with demonstrable ownership of customer value and retention outcomes (not just campaign delivery).
• A track record of building genuine lifecycle programmes - segmentation, value-based contact strategy, loyalty or retention - that moved a commercial metric.
• Strong commercial and numerical literacy: comfortable with LTV, cohort and margin analysis, and able to translate them into strategy.
• Experience owning a CRM / lifecycle platform and the data, consent and deliverability that underpin it.
• Experience leading and developing a team, and operating as a peer to other marketing leaders.

Bonus, not essential

• Experience in travel, attractions, ticketing or another considered-purchase consumer category.
• Experience shifting an organisation away from a discount-led model toward a value-led one, including managing the short-term trade-offs that involves.
• Familiarity with experimentation discipline - clean test design, before/after reads, pre-agreed kill criteria.

This job is for you if

• You have a clear strategic view and can articulate a position — not a series of “it depends” caveats - and you can defend it under challenge.
• You think in customer value and trade-offs, not channel activity, and instinctively reach for data rather than assertion when you don’t know an answer.
• You understand that a transactional relationship is not CRM, and can explain what real relationship building and value creation look like in our category.
• You can answer questions like: how would you measure the CRM channel if signup volume wasn’t a metric? What’s the LTV gap between a discounted and a full-price customer, and how would you find out if you didn’t know?
• You have a forward view: you can say where the channel should be in 12–18 months and what structural risks we’d be foolish to ignore.
• You’re genuinely “can-do”: you turn a strategic position into a concrete plan and get it moving, rather than only critiquing.

This may not be a good fit if

• You’d rather run a transactional email calendar - sending the same discount to everyone and reporting on open rates - than build genuine customer relationships and lifetime value.
• You prefer a series of “it depends” caveats to holding a clear, defensible position under challenge.
• You’d rather execute a plan handed to you than hold your own in strategic debate with peers, finance and the executive team.

Benefits

• Annual Go City Explorer Pass allowance
• Enhanced pension contributions. (5% employer)
• Life assurance: 4x your base salary
• Time off: Annual leave: 25 days + bank holidays
• Option to buy additional 5 days annual leave per year
• Upgraded Family Leave
• 1x Community day. Take a day off to give back to the community
• Work from Anywhere for up to 4 weeks per year
• Health care cash plan
• Personal Learning Budget & dedicated time for development
• EAP providing access to counselling, finance support, etc.
• Cycle to Work Scheme