Head of Retention

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Job Description

Your Team: The Sun is one of the UK's most recognised and trusted media brands, reaching millions of readers daily across print, digital, and social platforms. We are committed to delivering engaging, relevant, and entertaining content that keeps our audience coming back for more.

Your Role: We are seeking a strategic, commercially minded Head of Retention to lead our efforts in maximising customer lifetime value, engagement, and loyalty. This role is pivotal to The Sun's growth strategy, ensuring our audience and subscribers are engaged and retained.

You will be responsible for defining and delivering retention strategies across multiple channels, using insight and data to continuously improve the customer experience, reduce churn, and increase revenue from our audience base.

Key Responsibilities

• Own The Sun's retention strategy, setting measurable objectives to reduce churn and increase customer lifetime value.
• Partner with editorial, product, data and wider marketing teams to embed retention best practices across all audience touchpoints.
• Develop targeted initiatives to engage customers and reduce churn including winback.

• Design and execute lifecycle marketing programmes that increase engagement with The Sun's content, products, and membership proposition.
• Lead campaigns that deepen reader loyalty, including exclusive benefits, rewards, and personalised communications.
• Collaborate with the editorial, product and UX teams to improve digital experiences that keep audiences active.

• Use analytics and segmentation to understand user behaviour and churn drivers.
• Track and report on KPIs including churn rate, active days, engagement frequency, and customer lifetime value.
• Continuously test, measure, and optimise initiatives for maximum impact.

• Lead and develop a retention and engagement team, fostering a high-performance, data-driven culture.
• Manage budgets and resources effectively to deliver growth targets

What we're looking for from you

• Proven track record in retention, lifecycle marketing, CRM, or loyalty, ideally in a subscription or media environment.
• Strong understanding of customer segmentation, personalisation, and behaviour-driven marketing.
• Analytical mindset with proficiency in interpreting data to inform strategy.
• Experience leading cross-functional teams and influencing at a senior level.
• Excellent communication skills with the ability to tell compelling stories through data.
• Creative thinker with a test-and-learn approach.

If you think you have what it takes but don't tick every requirement on the list, please do apply. We recognise that considering someone's potential as well as their experience is a great way to hire. We want to hear from people who have a passion to learn and develop.

News UK is one of the leading media businesses in the UK and Ireland. Our newsbrands include The Times, The Sunday Times, The Sun, The Sun on Sunday and The TLS. Our national broadcast brands include talkSPORT, Times Radio and Virgin Radio UK, and we have market-leading local stations across Ireland. Our world-famous brands provide news, analysis, opinion and entertainment to almost 40 million people each month. Spanning print and pixel, audio and video, events and experiences, our multi-format brands are home to a plurality of opinion, representing the diverse communities we serve. Driven by passion, guided by principles and acting with purpose, we exist to promote a fair society, freedom of speech and a little bit of fun. Rethinking continually the business of storytelling, we represent, reflect and reach the nation, telling the stories that matter.

At News UK, we embrace a hybrid work model, currently requiring a minimum of three days per week in the office. This approach fosters collaboration, innovation, and team spirit within our workspace. Certain roles may necessitate additional in-office days; please discuss this with your recruiter for specific requirements.

Life at News

Driven by passion, guided by principles and acting with purpose. We represent, reflect and reach the nation, telling the stories that matter. We inform our audiences so that they can make decisions based on trusted information.

We represent, reflect and reach the nation, telling the stories that matter most. To ensure these stories resonate with as broad an audience as possible, it is essential that our organisation reflects the diversity of the people we reach. Whether through age, gender, ethnicity, disability, social class or sexuality, we are committed to representing the rich variety of voices that make up our society. And we champion a culture where everyone has the opportunity to contribute and thrive as we continue to innovate and drive long term sustainable growth. This is done through our Diversity Strategy.

At News UK, we take pride in our exceptional employee-led networks that bring together individuals with shared interests and create a vibrant sense of community. We believe our networks play a vital role in fostering a collaborative and supportive work culture at News UK. Groups that we support include the African & Caribbean Network, Parents and Carers, and LGBTQ+ group News Is Out, and the Apprentice Society.

Benefits

Some of our benefits include:

• Private medical insurance including coverage for pre-existing conditions
• Discounted gym memberships, free ClassPass at Home, weekly in person/ virtual exercise classes
• 'Bikes for Work' and 'Electric Car' scheme
• Up to 60% discount on Harper Collins books
• Maternity leave up to 18 weeks full basic salary & paternity leave up to 2 weeks
• Access to exclusive events and competitions with exciting brands such as talkSPORT, Virgin Radio UK & The Times. Weekly virtual panel chats with top journalists and celebrities
• Access to wellbeing benefits such as EAP, physio/massage and counselling
• A generous pension scheme with employer contributions of up to 5%
• Wide range of training available, plus full LinkedIn Learning access
• 25 days holiday, plus bank holidays and up to 4 volunteering days per year

We want to ensure that everyone has the opportunity to perform to their best when applying for a role. If you would like to receive any information in a different way or for us to do anything differently to support you to apply for any of our roles please contact us on [email protected].