CRM Lead / Head of CRM

Location: Cape Town Working Model: On-site / Hybrid Reports to: Head of Customer Growth

A leading digital and eCommerce organisation is seeking an experienced CRM Lead to develop and execute its end-to-end customer relationship management and lifecycle marketing strategy.

The successful candidate will lead a team of CRM specialists and drive personalised, automated and scalable customer engagement initiatives across a large and diverse customer base.

This role requires a strong balance of strategic leadership, technical CRM capability, commercial thinking and hands-on campaign execution.

• Develop and execute the organisation’s CRM and lifecycle marketing strategy.

• Build a customer-focused CRM calendar supported by always-on automation.

• Reduce reliance on once-off campaigns through dynamic lifecycle journeys.

• Drive customer engagement, retention, order frequency and lifetime value.

• Manage communication across multiple product categories and customer segments.

• Lead, mentor and manage the CRM team.

• Establish clear ownership across strategy, campaign delivery and optimisation.

• Set team priorities and ensure delivery against business objectives.

• Present CRM plans, results and recommendations to senior stakeholders.

• Lead the marketing automation strategy.

• Act as the subject-matter expert for the CRM platform.

• Design complex automated customer journeys.

• Use real-time events, customer attributes and behavioural signals.

• Drive CRM platform best practice and capability adoption.

• Establish and monitor CRM KPIs.

• Track retention, frequency, incrementality and lifetime value.

• Develop operational campaign dashboards.

• Lead formal A/B, multivariate and holdout testing.

• Translate customer data into actionable lifecycle strategies.

• Partner with Product, Data, Engineering, Marketing and Merchandising teams.

• Coordinate CRM initiatives across multiple business units.

• Support partner-funded and retail media communication campaigns.

• Align CRM activity with wider customer-growth objectives.

• Relevant tertiary qualification.

• At least five years’ CRM or lifecycle marketing experience.

• At least two years’ direct people-management experience.

• Proven multi-channel CRM campaign experience.

• Hands-on enterprise CRM or MarTech platform experience.

• Experience developing automated lifecycle journeys.

• Advanced Microsoft Excel proficiency.

• Strong analytical and commercial ability.

• Experience working with large and diverse customer bases.

• Strong senior stakeholder presentation experience.

• Braze experience.

• Salesforce Marketing Cloud or Iterable experience.

• eCommerce, retail, marketplace or on-demand delivery experience.

• Experience managing customer communication across multiple product categories.

• Experience with subscription or loyalty programmes.

• Strategic and hands-on.

• Commercially minded.

• Highly analytical.

• Strong leadership ability.

• Confident senior-level communicator.

• Organised and detail-focused.

• Comfortable working in a fast-paced environment.

• Strong problem-solving ability.