Director of Retention

Llama Naturals makes whole food vitamins for kids and families that are closer to real food than candy. No synthetic fillers, no added cane sugar, no junk. Just real fruit and vegetable-based nutrition parents can trust. We're an 8-figure brand with a large Amazon business and a subscription-first DTC channel that is our fastest-growing revenue line and the next chapter we're betting on. The Role As Director of Retention you'll lead the entire post-purchase customer journey at Llama Naturals: lifecycle marketing, the subscription experience, cancel and save, winback, expansion and cross-sell, referral and loyalty, and the post-purchase offers that tie it all together. You're accountable for the outcomes: churn, cohort retention, and lifetime value. You'll inherit a loyal customer base with exceptional NPS and a well-built subscription portal, and you'll work directly with both founders and our Head of Growth. Why This Role, Why Now Subscription is our fastest-growing channel, checkout attach is at an all-time high, and acquisition efficiency is improving. Every new subscriber we win now is worth more if we keep them longer, which makes retention one of the highest-leverage seats in the company. Small improvements in first-rebill survival, save rate, and basket growth compound across a large and growing subscriber base. This is a genuine ownership role. You'll own the data, the tools, the budget, and the authority to decide what the retention program should be and ship it. We're looking for an operator who thinks independently, backs their calls with evidence, and treats retention as a product to be designed rather than a calendar of email sends. What Success Looks Like First 60 days: You've assessed the full customer journey with your own eyes, your own data, and real customer conversations, formed a clear point of view, and published a prioritized retention roadmap the founders have signed off on. Quick wins are shipped. A retention scorecard exists that the whole company trusts, with one source of truth per metric. First 6 months: Subscriber churn is down meaningfully and cohort survival is up at every milestone that matters, because the experience works, not because we discounted our way there. Saved customers stay and remain profitable. One-time buyers convert to subscribers at a higher rate. Lifetime value per customer is climbing at healthy margins, and you've earned the trust to own more. What You'll Own Set the retention strategy and roadmap for the business: where we're losing customers, why, and what we'll do about it in what order Bring an independent point of view: challenge assumptions, pressure-test what exists Feed retention insight upstream: help Growth attract the customers most likely to stay and set expectations the product can deliver on Lifecycle Journey & Onboarding Own the full post-purchase journey across email, SMS, and on-site, from order confirmation through onboarding, habit formation, renewal, and beyond, as one system Design journeys that branch on who the customer is and what they bought Own the email and SMS campaign calendar with segment-first targeting Product Adoption & the Household Own adoption: understand what helps a family build the daily habit, what gets in the way, and whether delivery cadence matches real usage. The parent pays and the child decides whether the product gets taken Subscription Experience & Churn Own the subscription experience (portal, cadence, pre-renewal communication, and dunning) and the at-risk signals that let us act before someone reaches the cancel page Cancel, Save & Winback Own the cancel-and-save experience: the intercept, the reason capture, and the save offers matched to each reason Mine cancel reasons and verbatims continuously and turn them into offer, product, and journey changes Build and run winback as an ongoing program across lapsed subscribers and one-time buyers Expansion, Referral & Loyalty Build cross-sell where the economics justify it Own referral and advocacy: decide where it's surfaced, what it rewards, and how often we ask Own the post-purchase offer map (renewal, save, winback, cross-sell, and loyalty incentives) so every offer a customer meets after the first order tells one coherent story Partner with Growth on acquisition offers, plan structure, and subscription incentives. Growth leads those decisions; you bring the retention economics Customer Insights Talk to customers regularly, including those who stay, those who leave, and those who never subscribe, through conversations, surveys, reviews, and support feedback alongside behavioral data Bring what you learn back to the business so it shapes acquisition messaging, product decisions, and the customer experience, not just retention campaigns Measurement & Reporting Own the retention scorecard and the definitions behind it: one source of truth per metric across Skio, Klaviyo, Shopify, and our analytics stack Measure the quality of retention, not just the quantity: whether saved customers stay past the next rebill, retained margin per subscriber, and LTV net of the incentives it took to keep them Prove incrementality with holdouts on the programs we claim credit for What You Bring 5+ years in retention, lifecycle, or CRM marketing, with at least 2 years directly owning retention outcomes (churn, cohort retention, LTV) at a subscription-first DTC brand Hands-on command of Klaviyo (flows, segmentation, campaign strategy, deliverability) and a subscription platform such as Skio or Recharge. You've built and run these yourself, not only directed an agency Experience in supplements, consumables, or health and wellness DTC Deep fluency in subscription economics: cohort curves, rebill survival, cancel-reason analysis, save rate by treatment, plan mix, and LTV by acquisition path A track record of building your own retention roadmap from data and shipping it Structured experimentation habits (holdouts, clear hypotheses, documented learnings) and the discipline to say what didn't work Strong copy instincts. You can write a save screen, a pre-renewal email, or a winback SMS that sounds like the brand, or effectively direct someone who does Systems thinking. You design journeys per customer, not flows per trigger, and you can hold the whole map in your head Daily use of AI tools (Claude, Claude Code, Claude Cowork, and similar) What Sets You Apart You've turned a fragmented lifecycle program into one coherent journey per customer, and you can show the cohort curves before and after You've designed a loyalty or membership mechanic and can talk fluently about the economics versus a discount You've run SMS as a genuine retention channel, not a promo blaster You've worked inside a data warehouse or with an analytics partner to reconcile platform numbers and put holdouts on flows $150,000 – $200,000 base salary plus bonus, depending on experience Equity compensation with significant upside Remote-first with a preference for Chicago-area candidates AI tooling budget: use whatever makes you faster #J-18808-Ljbffr Llama Naturals, Inc.