Company Overview:
Party City Holdings, Inc. is the largest party goods supplier and party retail chain in the world. We are also the country's premier retailer of Halloween costumes, accessories, and decorations. At Party City we like to have fun! We are helpful, passionate, and creative. We inspire our customers with exciting concepts, themes and ideas and provide everything they need to bring them to life. We make it easy to create unforgettable moments.
Job Overview
As the Head of Customer Strategy, you’ll lead the PCHI transformation from a channel-centric to a customer-centric marketing operating model. Focusing on democratized access to customer data, and cross-functional alignment of customer strategies; you will be responsible for driving customer growth, retention, and frequency both immediate and long-term. As a senior leader in the marketing and digital organization, you will collaborate with peers across marketing, merchandising and operations to pilot new customer segmentation, customer journeys, and customer loyalty. You will be a key strategic partner in developing and informing customer acquisition strategies. Your expertise will lead the team in creating the robust data strategy and foundation, an omni-channel marketing technology stack, and the customer communications strategy necessary to drive brand growth. The HCS will drive a culture of agility, testing and learning, quick to market and a willingness to get in the trenches with the team as necessary.
Responsibilities and Duties
Develop Customer Growth Strategy:
- Identify data and insights (consumer, financial, sales) from internal and external sources to inform category and customer strategy across active and lapsed customers, aligned with topline financial targets
- Develop the strategic vision for a personalized guest-first experience across all purchasing channels to increase customer engagement and lifetime value.
- Develop and deploy rapid loyalty “lite” strategy to drive customer acquisition, data capture, incremental transactions and increased customer life time value; leverage learnings to inform long-range robust Party City loyalty program
- Develop measurement approach, funnel analytics, customer analytics, and reporting mechanisms to provide a holistic view into customer experiences and customer retention.
- Establish the short and long-term digital customer engagement roadmap with input and partnership with key partners across Product Management, Digital Product, CRM, Media, Data & Analytics, Brand, and Operations.
- Develop forecasts and models for impact of customer growth on 3-year financial plans.
Develop Customer Intelligence Capabilities:
- Lead initiative to build customer data ecosystem, including repositories and platforms that provide real-time actionable insights and make segmentation accessible to fuel customer growth.
- Lead team of customer analysts to prioritize customer data roadmap.
- Lead periodic reporting on customer health with insights and implications to optimize KPIs.
- Develop new personalization measurement capabilities for personalized customer journey and offers
Develop Customer Lifecycle Strategy:
- Identify and prioritize key segments, use cases, and critical moments in the customer lifecycle to foster deeper relationships.
- Lead team of CRM and Loyalty Analysts to optimize loyalty / CRM programs.
- Define a robust customer journey model & promotion strategy, rooted in customer behavior, interest & intent, targeting customer segments to achieve financial objectives.
- Lead the creation of a customer growth, frequency, and retention roadmap, taking accountability for achieving financial targets.
- Responds to macro, retail, and brand environment on a daily and weekly basis to continuously test and deploy new and proven tactics and levers to drive incremental visits and sales in support of attaining total retail, channel and category sales goals
Lead Customer Lifecycle Management & Loyalty Program:
- Oversee the CRM program- craft, test, learn, optimize, and scale customer engagement tactics to achieve customer KPIs (key performance indicators).
- Enhance channel utilization (email, SMS, push, in-app, geo-targeting)
- Own the customer communication and contact strategy to support all customer journeys, ensuring messaging, visual, brand and offer reflect the brand and are positioned to deliver on key KPIS. Partners with marketing for realization of content and creative needs.
- Drive A/B and multi-variate testing for campaign optimization.
- Ensure seamless communication deployment and channel optimization through the right capabilities and streamlined execution.
Lead Personalization Initiatives:
- Champion an all-encompassing omni-channel personalization vision
- Leads the end-to-end engagement strategy that reflects concept essence
- Integrate customer data and leverage AI for personalized messaging
- Foster strategic partnerships with key external vendors
- Facilitate a strong collaborative relationship with analytics, crafting comprehensive testing strategies to expedite learning, optimization, and scaling
Qualifications:
- Bachelor's Degree required, MBA a plus
- 8-10 years of proven experience in CRM and Loyalty marketing, with an impressive record of accomplishment in program planning and execution across loyalty, CRM, and personalization
- Proven experience implementing an omni-channel, customer-centric marketing & digital operating model that delivered strong top-line sales growth and significant operating efficiencies across the marketing & digital ecosystem
- Strong working knowledge of marketing technology providers
- Demonstrated ability to balance the need to react quickly to sales environment while building long—range strategic capabilities
- Experience in retail, or hospitality industries a plus
- Strong analytical skills, with the ability to translate data into actionable insights.
- Experience developing campaign forecasts and ROI (return on investment) models.
- Demonstrated history of delivering against KPIs and financial targets
- Hands-on leadership style with the ability to work cross-functionally, foster true alignment, overcome operational challenges, and accelerate value delivery.
- Executive presence and communication skills.
