Lifecycle Marketing Manager

About Ziplines

Ziplines Education is a category-leading education company that partners with universities to deliver industry-focused certificate courses that prepare professionals for today’s digital-first workforce. Each year, we have the opportunity to help thousands of career advancers build the knowledge, skills, and credentials they need to move their careers forward. 92% of learners would recommend our programs, and our net promoter score is consistently in the excellent range. Together, we empower adult learners to confidently pursue the career they’ve always wanted.

The role

We’re looking to add a high-powered, passionate Lifecycle Marketing Manager (activation, cross-sell, referral) to our growing team. We value humility, collaboration, transparency, diversity, and most of all, grit. Sound interesting? Read on. 

As the Lifecycle Marketing Manager, you will execute comprehensive email and SMS marketing strategies to improve engagement, reduce customer acquisition costs (CAC) through non-paid acquisition channels, and elevate learner lifetime value (LTV). In addition, you will be responsible for developing automated campaigns that provide value-based content to activate and cross-sell our learners, as well as encouraging referrals.

What you’ll do

• LTV Growth: Lead the development and execution of lifetime value (LTV) growth strategies through ongoing nurture content to keep former learners engaged, with the aim of cross-selling and upselling additional courses.

• Referral: Establish and oversee a referral campaign, leveraging email and SMS marketing to encourage new and former learners to refer friends and colleagues, with a key goal of reducing customer acquisition cost (CAC) by enhancing enrollments through non-paid acquisition channels.

• Activation: Collaborate with the Learner Success Team to generate engaging and value-based content within the activation email/sms series, ensuring learners are enticed and reminded to participate fully in our courses.

• Email (Hubspot) / SMS (HeyMarket):

  • Execute a comprehensive email strategy that engages learners and improves LTV and engagement

  • Collaborate with the growth marketing team to determine which content and messaging will drive conversion

  • Iterate on copy, content, subject lines, design, and timing to create A/B testing roadmaps that improve metrics and drive conversion

  • Acts as the in-house technical lead for ESP improvements and technical management

  • Develop and continuously optimize automated email/SMS campaigns that are triggered by high-intent actions along the post-acquisition journey 

  • Lead audience segmentation strategy, personalizing and automating email/SMS campaigns based on user content affinities and behaviors

  • Analyze and report on email/SMS KPIs including deliverability, open rates, click rates, conversion rates, and opt-out rate with a focus on driving improvements to support our business goals

  • Establish an ongoing conversion rate optimization (CRO) initiative by designing and deploying multivariate tests across email/SMS channels to identify opportunities for improving engagement

  • Establish reporting and QA processes to ensure 100% accuracy

• CRM (HubSpot):

  • Develop a deep understanding of CRM and contact information architecture and schema

  • Own all post-acquisition email/SMS workflow management, optimization

  • Collaborate with operations and engineering team to ensure data continuity within CRM system

• Analytics:

  • Collaborate with the analytics team and Senior Director, Lifecycle to define relevant analytics dashboards and reporting to better optimize channels, targeting, creative, etc…

  • Develop and track metrics and success criteria for all marketing automation programs and activities

• General:

  • Review competitor marketing automation flows and evaluate their strategies and positioning while creating effective counter strategies

  • Participate and collaborate with marketing team to identify campaigns, assets, strategies, and tactics to optimize conversion, growth, and efficiency

Who you are

Attention to detail is your second nature. You understand that a comprehensive email marketing automation strategy has to work holistically. You also have a drive for constant improvement and optimization. You are motivated to solve the “puzzle” of discovering all levers we can pull to gain a 1% incremental improvement every week, in order to drive game-changing growth over time. You bring a strong analytical mindset, using data to uncover trends, identify opportunities, and inform strategic decisions. You understand that marketing is a team sport and only through collaboration with other talented players can we execute and win.

What we’re looking for

• 6+ years of experience in a retention or lifecycle marketing role (extra points if in a D2C and especially within an education and e-learning environment)

• Demonstrated examples of onboarding, activation, cross-sell, and/or upsell campaigns you have executed from end-to-end

• Experience driving cross-channel campaigns across email, and SMS

• Strong understanding of lifecycle experimentation: A/B testing, holdouts and incrementality reporting, journey/segmented tests

• Track record of producing high response, personalized content and creative

• Mastery of lifecycle marketing platforms such as Iterable, Hubspot, Braze, Klaviyo, etc. (NOTE: we use Hubspot currently)

• Familiarity with metrics like lead conversion, LTV, revenue per user, and churn and how to impact them

• Basic to intermediate skill with email HTML and mobile responsiveness

Additionally you:

• Are direct and transparent

• Are incredibly detail-oriented

• Are highly collaborative and communicative 

• Are a collaborative, flexible problem-solver

• Love to roll up your sleeves to get things done

• Live for outcomes/results

• Believe in the power of a team

• See the value of diversity

• Dig working remotely

• Have a “whatever it takes” mindset, and have never said “that’s not my job”

• Are reading this job description thinking, wow, that’s me. Let’s do this

Our core values

• Focus on outcomes — students come first, always.

• Be trustworthy — deliver, be honest, have our backs.

• Be humble — we’re in this together.

• Be curious — continuous learning drives innovation.

• Be you — diverse thinking creates opportunity.

• You value and will contribute to a transparent, no B.S. culture.

Perks and benefits at Ziplines Education (full-time employees)

• Equity: Ownership is a core value, and each full-time employee can invest in Ziplines Education via a stock option (equity) grant, which will vest across four years.

• Time off: We offer a flexible paid time off policy, in addition to 10 paid holidays. 

• Flexible, remote work environment: We are a fully distributed team with folks all over the U.S. We meet as a full team at least one time per week and have in-person gatherings or team offsites one or more times per year. 

• Family health and wellness: Choose from a range of medical, dental, and vision insurance plans (premiums start at $0/month) for yourself or your family. 

• 401K: We know your future self will thank you when you start contributing to your company-sponsored 401k. 

Plus, we’d be happy to share additional benefits with you during the hiring process. 

The salary range for this role is $90,000 - $120,000  USD annually for candidates located in the San Francisco Bay Area (this is considered the Ziplines Education virtual home base). Individual compensation packages are based on a few different factors unique to each candidate, including their skills, location, experience, qualifications, and other job-related considerations.


To ensure a fair and consistent hiring process, we kindly ask that all applicants submit their applications through our job board rather than reaching out directly via LinkedIn, phone, or email. This helps our recruitment team review every application efficiently and equitably. We truly appreciate your interest in joining our team and look forward to considering your application!

Ziplines, Inc. is proud to be an equal-opportunity employer. We do not discriminate based on race, religion, color, national origin, gender (including pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions), sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, age, status as a protected veteran, status as an individual with a disability, or other protected characteristics under applicable law.