Lifecycle Marketing Manager (In-School Lending)

Navient (Nasdaq: NAVI) helps students and families confidently manage the cost of higher education. We create long-term value for customers and investors through responsible lending, flexible refinancing, trusted servicing oversight, and decades of portfolio management expertise. Our employees thrive in a culture of belonging, where they are supported and proud to deliver meaningful outcomes.

As the Lifecycle Marketing Manager, you will play a strategic role in owning the development and execution of lifecycle campaigns that drive conversion and acquisition of Earnest and Navient’s products. You will be responsible for building out some of Earnest and Navient’s most important initiatives across our consumer finance products. This role includes hands-on ownership of campaign execution within the Braze CRM platform, requiring deep expertise in journey orchestration, segmentation, testing, QA, and deployment across lifecycle channels. Our ideal candidate has extensive experience with a next-generation CRM platform (Braze) and CDP (Segment), a willingness to own all aspects of their work (strategy development, creative briefing, audience segmentation, journey pathing, campaign execution, a/b testing, analytics measurement, etc.), analytic skills (well-versed in Google Sheets and Looker, HTML and SQL a plus), superior attention to detail, prioritization and time management in a fast-paced environment. You will provide senior leadership and stakeholders with campaign performance reports, including data-driven recommendations for future campaign optimization and strategic plans for growing the impact of lifecycle marketing. This cross-functional role works closely with Creative, Marketing Operations, Legal & Compliance, Analytics, Product Marketing, and Product.

Areas of Responsibility:

Lifecycle Campaign Execution (Braze CRM Platform)

• Own end-to-end execution of lifecycle marketing campaigns within the Braze platform, including email, push, in-app, and SMS (where applicable).
• Build and manage Braze Canvas journeys, including entry criteria, event-based triggers, decision splits, personalization logic, and suppression rules.
• Configure audience segmentation using real-time event data, user attributes, and CDP integrations (Segment).
• Partner with Marketing Operations and Data teams to ensure accurate event instrumentation, data flow, and campaign eligibility logic.
• Execute campaign QA (content, targeting, timing, links, tracking parameters, compliance requirements) prior to launch.
• Manage campaign deployment schedules, throttling, and frequency controls to protect customer experience and deliverability.
• Implement and monitor A/B and multivariate tests directly within Braze, ensuring statistical rigor and clean readouts.
• Troubleshoot execution issues (data discrepancies, delivery failures, journey logic) and resolve quickly with cross-functional partners.
• Ensure all executions meet legal, regulatory, and brand standards (CAN-SPAM, TCPA, CPPA, consent management).

Strategy Development

• Translate team objectives and key results into actionable plans.
• Define an experimentation roadmap for increasing the impact of existing lifecycle marketing strategies.
• Develop and maintain a customer serialization framework to categorize users by lifecycle stage, loan status, engagement level and behavioral data.
• Making strategic recommendations on new areas of opportunity (new capabilities, partnerships, etc.).

Project Management

• Superior attention to detail, prioritization and time management in a fast-paced environment.
• Ownership mentality: willingness to own all aspects of campaign strategy development, creative briefing, audience segmentation, journey pathing, campaign execution, creative a/b testing, analytics measurement, and campaign performance readouts.
• Ability to manage project timelines and maintain expectations with priorities that shift frequently.

Data Analysis

• Expert in Google Sheets and able to pull relevant data from Looker. Proficiency in HTML and SQL is a plus.
• Develop a/b creative testing and to analyze results independently for “BAU” campaigns.
• Report proactively on weekly campaign performance tied to business metrics.
• Able to brief in and work directly with Marketing Analytics for larger-scale measurement initiatives.
• Analyze performance metrics (open rates, CTR, conversion) and make program recommendations based on data analysis.
• Make strategic recommendations on new areas of opportunity, including new campaigns and/or targeting and segmentation opportunities.

Communication

• Incredible collaboration: able to forge highly effective relationships across Creative, Marketing Operations, Legal & Compliance, Data and Analytics, Product Marketing, and Product teams.
• Keep the internal marketing team, senior leadership, and external stakeholders updated on email and campaign project progress and results.
• Ability to communicate with technical team members (Data Analysts, Programmers, DevOps).
• Provide effective feedback to creative team members.
• Ability to craft clear, completing and conversion driven messaging across channels.

MINIMUM REQUIREMENTS

• Bachelor’s Degree Marketing or other related field of study. Additional equivalent experience above the required minimum may substitute.
• 5+ years of experience in a business-to-consumer email marketing or lifecycle marketing role in a corporate or agency environment.
• 3+ years of experience developing lifecycle/CRM engagement programs.
• Experience developing marketing plans to drive financial and customer experience objectives.
• Experience presenting campaign results, learnings, and recommendations to senior leadership.
• Extensive knowledge of next-generation ESPs - Braze preferred (experience also valuable with others e.g. Adobe Marketo Engage, Iterable, Customer.io, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Eloqua, Responsys).
• Experience in audience segmentation and targeting using database information and real-time event data.
• Experience setting up and optimizing automated marketing campaigns.
• Ability to formulate test hypotheses, executing, measuring, and reporting on A/B and multivariate tests.
• Strong data analysis skills and knowledge of business intelligence systems such as Looker or Tableau.
• Strong project management skills and experience with tools such as Jira, Workfront, Basecamp, or Mavenlink.
• Very strong attention to detail and strict adherence to QA processes.
• Knowledge of regulatory and privacy requirements (CAN-SPAM, TCPA, CPPA).

PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS

• Natural curiosity of the marketing technology ecosystem and ability to quickly learn and adapt to new tools and technologies.
• Manage, prioritize, delegate, and deliver on ad hoc requests.
• Ability to communicate strategies, results, and insights effectively.
• Ability to proactively manage and own individual workload and output.

IMPORTANT NOTICES:

All offers of employment are contingent on standard background checks. Depending on the needs of our business, the successful candidate may be subject to further background checks to determine eligibility and suitability.

EOE Race/Ethnicity/Sex/Disability/Protected Vet/Sexual Orientation/Gender Identity. Navient Corporation and its subsidiaries are not sponsored by or agencies of the United States of America.

Navient is a drug free workplace.