Retention Director

Retention DirectorLocation: Remote UK

Hours: Full-time (37.5 hours per week)

We are looking for a Director of Retention to take ownership of Twinkl’s global retention strategy. This pivotal leadership role will be accountable for maximising customer lifetime value, reducing churn, and embedding a customer-first culture across the organisation.

Reporting to the VP of Growth, you will set the vision and strategy for retention worldwide, influencing product development, marketing, customer success and commercial priorities. You’ll have responsibility for leading and growing a high-performing retention function, spanning CRM, lifecycle management, insights and loyalty.

This role is both strategic and operationally critical: you will translate customer data into actionable insights, secure investment in retention initiatives and ensure that Twinkl continues to deliver long-term value to our customers worldwide.

Key Responsibilities:Strategy & leadership:

• Develop and execute a comprehensive retention strategy aligned with overall business objectives and customer lifecycle stages.
• Lead, mentor and grow a high-performing, global retention team, fostering a culture of continuous improvement, innovation, and customer-centricity.

Customer journey & experience optimisation:

• Own and optimise the full customer lifecycle – from onboarding through renewal, loyalty and advocacy.
• Collaborate with Product, Engineering and Design teams to influence product roadmap development, ensuring features and functionalities address customer needs and drive retention.
• Shape and oversee segmentation, personalisation, loyalty and reactivation strategies across global markets, supporting in-market teams to optimise their full-funnel lifecycle comms.

Data & commercial impact:

• Set, monitor and report on key retention KPIs (e.g. churn, CLTV, engagement, retention-driven revenue, etc).
• Report regularly on retention performance to senior leadership, identifying trends, opportunities and areas for improvement.
• Work closely with Data teams to develop actionable segmentation and predictive models.
• Ensure all retention activity delivers measurable commercial impact and margin improvement.

Cross-functional influence:

• Partner closely with Marketing, Product and Customer Service to align acquisition and retention efforts, ensuring a seamless customer onboarding and ongoing engagement experience.
• Work closely with local and in-market teams, ensuring regional execution aligns with global retention best practice and positioning the function as the centre of excellence globally.
• Act as the key stakeholder in technology, data and tooling decisions to enhance lifecycle capabilities, such as CRM platform, CDP, AI capabilities etc.

Innovation & thought leadership:

• Sponsor experimentation frameworks (AB/multivariate testing, pilot programmes) that inform global retention best practice.
• Benchmark Twinkl against best-in-class subscription retention models, ensuring continuous innovation.
• Secure and manage budgets for retention investment, ensuring efficient resource allocation.

Qualifications and Experience:

• 7+ years’ experience in CRM, lifecycle, or customer retention, with at least 3 years in senior leadership.
• Proven track record of delivering significant reductions in churn and increases in CLTV within a subscription, SaaS or digital consumer environment.
• Experience influencing product and commercial strategies, not just marketing.
• Strong history of building and scaling high-performing teams in a fast-growth, international context.

Skills:

• Strong commercial accountability, with the ability to connect retention performance to business outcomes.
• Technical fluency across CRM platforms (e.g., Salesforce, Braze, Iterable) and analytics tools (e.g., Google Analytics, Amplitude, Tableau).
• Analytical, data-driven thinker, deep expertise in customer segmentation, predictive modelling and lifetime value analysis.
• Strong leader and collaborator, capable of influencing at Senior and C-suite level.
• Excellent communicator, able to translate complex insights into compelling narratives for varied audiences.
• Strategic thinker with a hands-on approach and a bias for action.
• Ability to thrive in a fast-paced, dynamic environment.

Benefits:

In return for everything you can bring, we can offer you an exciting role in a fast-growing and dynamic business, with plenty of career opportunities. Here’s a couple of the things that make Twinkl a great place to be:

• A friendly, welcoming and supportive culture. We believe work should be fun and always put people before the process
• Diversity, inclusion and belonging - our Employee Network Program includes working groups for LGBTQ+, People of Colour, Disabilities (visible and invisible), Women in Tech and Working Parents.
• From day 1 - Westfield Health, 33 annual leave days per year (pro-rata) inclusive bank holidays, a "Me" day each year, a charity day each year and Twinkl subscriptions
• Quarterly company awards programme
• Seasonal events
• Referral scheme
• Cervical and Prostate screening
• Company sick pay after 3 months of service
• After probation - cycle-to-work scheme
• Long-term service reward - Life insurance, enhanced pension contribution, enhanced maternity pay, enhanced adoption pay and enhanced paternity pay, long service award, long service annual leave