Currently available for select engagements

Hire Lifecycle Marketing Director — the full customer journey, owned

A Lifecycle Marketing Director owns the customer journey end to end: onboarding that activates, engagement that retains, winback that recovers — orchestrated across email, SMS, push, and in-product messaging. They think in journeys, not campaigns: every stage of the customer’s life measured, every transition optimized. This is the hire when you have customers but no systematic way of keeping and growing them.

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15+

Years Experience

100+

Projects Delivered

Countries Served

$25M+

Revenue Enabled

I'm Omer Muneer Qazi, a Dubai-based Fractional CTO & Solutions Architect with 15+ years of experience and 100+ projects delivered across 6 countries. Lifecycle is orchestration across systems — ESP, CDP, product analytics, mobile — and I vet directors on their ability to design journeys the technology can actually execute. For day-to-day lifecycle operation, see head of lifecycle marketing.

What You Get

Journeys designed, not just campaigns sent

Lifecycle strategy & journey maps

Every stage mapped: acquisition to onboarding to habitual use to advocacy — with the metrics and ownership defined at each transition.

Onboarding & activation programs

New-customer journeys engineered for time-to-value: the first days designed deliberately, drop-off points fixed systematically.

Engagement & retention journeys

Ongoing programs that keep customers active: behavioral triggers, habit loops, and re-engagement for the drifting.

Winback & churn prevention

Churn predicted and intercepted: save plays before cancellation, winback journeys after. Revenue recovered measurably.

Cross-channel orchestration

Email, SMS, push, and in-app coordinated from one journey logic: frequency capping, channel preference, and message consistency handled centrally.

Lifecycle analytics

Stage-to-stage conversion, journey performance, and incremental revenue per program. The customer journey reported as the asset it is.

How It Works

From batch-and-blast to journey-led

A structured engagement with no surprises — you’ll always know what’s happening and what’s next.

Journey audit

Current lifecycle mapped as it actually works: what triggers exist, where customers drop, what the data shows about each stage.

Priority journeys

The highest-impact journeys designed first — usually onboarding and winback, where the revenue math is clearest.

Build & launch

Journeys built in the stack, tested, and launched with measurement in place. Quick wins fund the bigger builds.

Expand & optimize

More journeys added, existing ones optimized on performance data. The lifecycle program compounds.

Why Omer

Why hire a lifecycle marketing director through a Fractional CTO

Lifecycle directors fail when they design journeys the stack cannot run — beautiful maps that die in implementation. I check systems thinking: can they work across the ESP, the data platform, and the product to make journeys real? The strategy is only as good as its executability.

To make your customer journey systematic, get in touch.

FAQ

Frequently asked questions

What does a Lifecycle Marketing Director cost?

Full-time $130k–$180k. Fractional directors suit companies with real customer volume that need journey strategy without a full-time executive.

What team do they work with?

They typically orchestrate across email, product, and data teams rather than owning a large direct team — influence and systems thinking matter more than headcount.

First 90 days?

Journey audit, priority journeys (onboarding, winback) live, measurement in place, roadmap for the rest. Early journey performance visible within the quarter.

How is lifecycle success measured?

Stage conversion rates, activation and retention improvements, winback revenue, and incremental LTV from journey programs.

Lifecycle Director vs Head of CRM?

Lifecycle owns the journey strategy across channels; CRM owns the database and retention programs. Hire lifecycle when the journey needs designing, CRM when the data needs owning.

Inside the build

Why you hire a lifecycle marketing director for the data layer, not the deck

When someone decides to hire a lifecycle marketing director, the brief is usually a strategy deck and a stalled roadmap. In my first fortnight I mostly ignore both and read the data. I open the tracking plan, pull the event stream in Segment or RudderStack, and check whether identity actually resolves across anonymous, logged-in, and server-side events. Most lifecycle programmes I inherit are built on three or four events that fire inconsistently, so no trigger can be trusted. Before I write a single journey I rebuild the event taxonomy in the warehouse (Snowflake or BigQuery), model it with dbt, and push clean, computed audiences into the messaging platform via Hightouch or Census. That plumbing is the job most people underestimate when they go to hire for this role.

Only then do I touch the messaging platform. In Braze I build Canvases keyed to warehouse audiences; in Iterable, Customer.io, or Klaviyo it is the same discipline with different syntax. I write the Liquid myself, wire catalog or connected-content calls for real personalisation, and build a channel-preference centre so nobody gets three nudges in an hour. The decision I force early is which system owns orchestration: the messaging tool, the CDP, or the product. Letting two of them own it is the commonest way lifecycle quietly breaks. Good looks like a single source of truth for who is eligible for what, versioned entry and exit rules, and a journey a new hire can read in ten minutes without a tribal-knowledge handover.

I measure with holdouts, not attribution. Every meaningful journey ships with a randomised control, a per-campaign holdback plus a standing global holdout of a few per cent, so we report incremental revenue instead of the inflated last-touch numbers a platform happily shows you. I run a few live experiments a week on timing, subject logic, and offer, and I kill losers fast. On email I will not let you scale into the inbox blind: SPF, DKIM, and DMARC alignment, a warmed sending domain, one-click unsubscribe, and complaint rates kept under the Google and Yahoo bulk-sender thresholds. These are the mistakes I most often fix, because real revenue leaks through deliverability that nobody on the team was actually watching.

The last thing I build is the part most directors skip: the operating model. I document the journey inventory, the event dictionary, and a QA checklist, and I set up a weekly review where stage-to-stage movement is read like a P&L. If you hire a lifecycle marketing director and the programme collapses the day they leave, you hired a contractor, not a director. My aim is the opposite, a system your in-house team or a junior CRM manager can run, extend, and defend to finance long after my engagement ends. That durability is what separates a lifecycle function from a pile of clever one-off automations.

Who it's for

When clients hire me for this

Free trials that leak

A Series A SaaS team has strong top-of-funnel but most trials never activate. I rebuild the onboarding event taxonomy, pinpoint the two or three steps where users stall, and ship product-triggered journeys in Customer.io or Braze that pull people back to the aha moment. The pipeline they already pay to acquire finally starts converting.

Still batch-and-blasting in Klaviyo

A DTC brand sends the same email to its whole list every week. I move them to behaviour-triggered flows across email and SMS, add browse, cart, and post-purchase journeys with proper suppression, and introduce holdouts. For the first time they can see which flows genuinely earn revenue instead of guessing from open rates.

A platform migration nobody wants to own

A scale-up has outgrown Marketo or Klaviyo and signed for Braze or Iterable, and the migration is drifting. I own the cutover end to end: event mapping, audience parity, Liquid rebuilds, deliverability warmup on the new domain, and a parallel-run period so active journeys never go dark mid-switch.

Churn nobody can explain

A subscription or marketplace business is bleeding customers silently with no reactivation engine. I build a risk signal in the warehouse, intercept at-risk users before the renewal date, and stand up winback journeys. Then I prove with a holdout how much of the retained revenue is genuinely incremental rather than coincidental.

Questions buyers ask

Do you build the journeys yourself, or just advise?

Both, but mostly build. When you hire a lifecycle marketing director through me you get someone actually in the platform, writing Liquid, configuring Canvases and flows, setting up the audience syncs, not a strategist who briefs the work out to an agency. I mentor and upskill your in-house CRM manager alongside the build so the capability stays when I step back, but the initial programme is built by my hands.

Which lifecycle and CRM platforms do you work in?

Day to day I work in Braze, Iterable, Customer.io, Klaviyo, and the HubSpot and Marketo stacks, plus the data layer underneath: Segment or RudderStack for collection, Snowflake or BigQuery with dbt for modelling, and Hightouch or Census for reverse ETL into the messaging tools. For product-side analysis I use Amplitude or Mixpanel. If your stack is not on that list, the patterns transfer; only the syntax changes.

Can you run a platform migration, for example Klaviyo to Braze?

Yes, and migrations are a frequent reason people hire a lifecycle marketing director rather than a generalist. I map every event and audience to the new schema, rebuild templates and journey logic, warm the new sending domain to protect deliverability, and run both platforms in parallel until parity is proven. The riskiest part is identity and suppression continuity, so I plan the cutover to avoid double-messaging or dropping anyone mid-journey.

How do you prove the lifecycle work is incremental, not just correlated?

With randomised holdouts baked into every programme, plus a standing global holdout of a few per cent of the base. That lets me report incremental revenue and retention against a true control instead of the last-touch attribution the platform inflates. I would rather show you a smaller, defensible number that survives a finance review than a vanity figure. Where it matters I validate the lift with a geo or audience split test before scaling.

How is a fractional engagement structured, by days, retainer, or project?

Usually a monthly retainer sized to a set number of days, often two to four days a week during the build phase, tapering as the programme stabilises and your team takes the reins. Some clients prefer a fixed-scope project instead, such as an onboarding rebuild or a platform migration with a defined deliverable. Either way I hold a hard scope and a weekly review, so you always know exactly what the engagement is buying.

You are based in Dubai, can you work with our US or UK team's hours?

Yes. I am in the Gulf timezone and already work across the UAE, US, UK, Canada, Pakistan, and Malaysia, so overlapping with London mornings or US afternoons is routine. Async is my default, tickets, Loom walkthroughs, and documented decisions, with live reviews booked inside your working window. Lifecycle work is build-and-measure rather than always-on, so what matters far more than timezone is a tight weekly cadence and clean handovers.

Currently available for select engagements

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