Pathway
Retention & Conversion Optimisation Manager
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Retention & CRO Manager
We’re looking for a Retention & CRO Manager to join Pathway and help e-commerce brands improve conversion and customer lifetime value. This is a hands-on role focused on experimentation, journey optimisation, and performance improvement across the full customer lifecycle. You’ll work closely with clients and our specialist team to identify friction, design and test improvements, and turn insight into measurable growth across acquisition, conversion, and retention.
Hybrid - Manchester
Full-time
£35k - £50k (DOE)
About Pathway
Pathway is a specialist consultancy helping e-commerce brands get more value from CRM and retention marketing. We work across platforms like Bloomreach and Klaviyo, partnering with in-house teams to design and build lifecycle programmes that are practical, measurable, and genuinely improve the customer experience.
We are a hands-on team that moves quickly, care about the craft, and take pride in doing work that stands up in the real world.
What’s Special About This Role
Most e-commerce teams treat on-site conversion and CRM as separate disciplines, but customers don't experience them that way. The email, landing page, and journey a customer takes to purchase, then the follow-up that turns a first buyer into a loyal one: these form a single experience that most brands leave unoptimised.
This role exists to close that gap. It’s for someone who sees the full customer journey as their domain and who has the skills to optimise it end-to-end.
This is a genuinely unusual combination. We know that. Most people in CRO and CRM have gone deep in one direction. We're looking for someone who has resisted that split, or grown across both, and takes pride in it. We have people like this on the team, so you’ll feel right at home (finally).
Salary
Range: £35-50k
Rationale: we're open to a range of experience and will pay based on what you can take responsibility for from day one.
Why Join
- Small team, big ownership: You will have real responsibility and the space to own outcomes.
- Shape how we work: As an early team member, you will help define our standards, templates, and ways of working.
- Varied, interesting projects: You will work across different brands and problem types, from lifecycle build to personalisation and reporting.
- Grow fast: You will be close to decisions and learn by shipping real work with thoughtful feedback.
- Remote and flexible: We focus on outcomes, clear communication, and sustainable pace.
What You’ll Do
Role shape
- Primary focus: Optimising the full customer journey — on-site conversion and lifecycle marketing as one connected programme.
- Typical split (guideline): ~40% CRO/experimentation, 40% CRM delivery (Bloomreach/Klaviyo), 20% insight synthesis (qualitative and quantitative).
- Working rhythm: Continuous Kanban flow. A mix of fast-moving improvements and occasional multi-day initiatives.
- Flex: The split will vary by client. Some engagements are heavier on CRO, others on CRM delivery. You're comfortable moving between both without losing momentum.
- Support structure: You will have clear briefs and prioritisation support, but you will be expected to bring structure and momentum to ambiguous problems.
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The customer journey — how this role thinks
Rather than working in channels, you work in customer moments:
Acquisition and landing
- Design and optimise landing pages that match the intent of the traffic arriving — whether from email, paid, or organic.
- Ensure message-match between upstream channels and on-site experience.
- Run CRO on key entry points to maximise the value of acquisition spend.
On-site Experience And Conversion
- Identify and prioritise conversion opportunities across e-commerce journeys: navigation, search, PDP, basket, checkout, account.
- Turn evidence into clear hypotheses with defined success metrics and guardrails.
- Translate hypotheses into test plans: variants, audience, measurement approach, duration, and decision rules.
- Use behavioural evidence confidently — GA4 funnels, drop-offs, session tools like Hotjar/Clarity, experiment results — to prioritise and iterate.
- Run test debriefs that are decision-orientated: what we learned, what we ship, what we test next.
- Collaborate with design and engineering (client-side or Pathway-side) to ship variants that are feasible and robust.
Post-purchase and lifecycle
- Design and build lifecycle journeys that convert one-time buyers into loyal customers: welcome, post-purchase, browse and cart abandonment, VIP, win back.
- Build email, push, and SMS campaigns and automated flows with a focus on measurable outcomes. Measure them, then iterate.
- Own data quality during builds and migrations: event validation, field mapping, test runs, and QA.
- Define measurement plans and KPIs with stakeholders and ensure tracking is reliable.
- Build dashboards and reporting that help teams understand performance and make decisions.
Journey coherence and retention
- Keep CRM, landing pages, and on-site experience coherent: message-match, offer framing, segmentation-aware journeys, and intent continuity across the full loop.
- Identify optimisation opportunities across journeys and campaigns through a continuous improvement mindset — not one-off heroics.
- Understand our clients’ customers and develop scalable personalisation strategies with clear ROI, then iterate on them.
- Run discovery and requirements gathering, then translate that into clean, maintainable builds.
- Own work end-to-end: define milestones, manage dependencies, and keep delivery moving through to launch.
- Present recommendations, progress, and results to client stakeholders with clarity and authority.
- Run training and enablement for client teams where needed.
What We’re Looking For
Essential
- 3–6 years of experience in CRO/experimentation, CRM/lifecycle marketing, or performance-led e-commerce optimisation.
- Strong hands-on experience with a CRM/ESP platform (Bloomreach, Klaviyo, Dotdigital, or similar) — able to build independently.
- Demonstrable CRO capability: hypothesis writing, test planning, measurement, iteration, and test debriefs.
- Strong grasp of measurement fundamentals — events, funnels, guardrails, attribution constraints.
- Comfortable moving from ambiguity to a structured plan with clear success metrics.
- Able to translate insight into buildable requirements and delivery plans.
- Confident working with client stakeholders: clear communication, structured thinking, commercial awareness.
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We don't expect equal depth across both disciplines from day one. We care more about genuine capability in one and credible understanding of the other, plus the curiosity and drive to close the gap. If that sounds like you, we'd like to hear from you.
Nice to Have
- Bloomreach Engagement experience.
- Experience with experimentation tooling (VWO, Optimizely, Convert, or similar).
- Event tracking experience (in Google Tag Manager or similar).
- Shopify or other e-commerce platform experience.
- Basic HTML/CSS comfort and a practical understanding of web implementation constraints.
- Consent and preference centre implementation experience.
- Agency or consultancy background.
- Commercial accountability and experience.
What You Might Work On
- CRO programmes: landing page optimisation, checkout and basket improvements, merchandising and offer framing tests, conversion enhancements across key journey points.
- CRM implementations: core lifecycle journeys, templates, segmentation foundations, QA, and launch support.
- Retainer optimisation: experimentation backlogs, iteration cycles, new channel expansion.
- Journey alignment projects: ensuring email, landing pages, and on-site modules work as one experience with consistent intent and offer framing.
- Tracking and data quality work that unblocks reliable measurement and optimisation.
We have a mix of clients right now, so sometimes the work will include a bit of grinding (for example: making 20+ new email automation flows for a CRM migration).
But some of our best clients come to us for CRM and CRO. That means complete, end-to-end lifecycle optimisation. Those 20 campaigns you built last week, they’re now yours to improve.
What a Successful Candidate Looks Like
- 30 days: Embedded in our ways of working. Shipping safely — build tasks, CRO variants, or both — and building a structured optimisation backlog with clear hypotheses and measurement.
- 60 days: Owning a client work stream end-to-end (plan → coordinate build → QA → launch → test debrief → iterate), across at least one CRO programme and one lifecycle build.
- 90 days: Driving measurable improvements through a repeatable optimisation rhythm that spans on-site and lifecycle, and contributing to our internal playbooks and standards.
What Will Make You Stand Out
- You think CRO doesn’t end at the purchase, and CRM doesn’t begin with the email.
- You bring structure to messy problems: clear hypotheses, clear metrics, and delivery plans stakeholders can trust.
- You care about data quality and measurement before you optimise.
- You design experiments thoughtfully — and you know when not to test.
- You consistently ship small improvements that compound into meaningful impact.
- You're proud to be a generalist in a world that usually asks you to pick a side.
How to Apply
Send your CV with a short cover note to careers@wearepathway.com
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