Senior Lifecycle Marketing & Personalisation Manager

Candide is an AI-first tech company based at Babylonstoren in the Cape Winelands, with a second office in the UK. We build the digital products behind some of the world’s most celebrated hospitality and lifestyle estates — Babylonstoren, The Newt in Somerset, Vignamaggio, and others.

Our office sits on the Babylonstoren estate itself, surrounded by gardens, mountains, and farm-to-table food. We design, build and maintain eCommerce platforms, mobile apps, admissions and membership systems, booking engines, and brochure websites. Our team is small but high-impact, working across a portfolio of luxury brands that people genuinely love.

You will make sure every guest, member and customer feels known and valued every time they hear from us, so they choose to come back.

You do that by leading lifecycle marketing and personalisation across our estates: you shape the group’s lifecycle marketing and personalisation strategy with estate leadership, and you make it real through guest journeys that run at every estate.

Our estates share one vision, and each keeps its own voice. Personalisation here means recognising the person and making their next visit, stay or purchase feel considered, using what they have chosen to tell us. It is always thoughtful and never intrusive.

Within the CRM pod, you own the marketing and lifecycle side: what we say, to whom, when and why. The CRM pod lead owns how it is built and run, and sets the platform standards you build within. You agree priorities with them and the Head of Data & CRM.

This is a senior, hands-on role. You do the work yourself, building, launching and improving journeys and campaigns, and you enable and coach the marketing team at each estate to do the same. You lead them through expertise and example, not line authority.

• Lead the group’s lifecycle marketing and personalisation strategy with estate leadership and get it agreed: what is shared across the group, what each estate owns, and how a guest’s relationship carries from one estate to the next.
• Turn the strategy into a roadmap of journeys and initiatives, agreed with the CRM pod lead, that the pod can deliver.
• Keep the strategy current as guests, channels and technology change, and test new ideas with small, well-scoped trials.

• Build, launch and run journeys and campaigns yourself in our marketing automation platform: segments, triggers, content, testing and quality checks.
• Monitor live journeys, fix what is not working and improve them over time.
• Stay hands-on: do the work yourself, and help the estate marketing teams do more of it themselves.

• Turn what estates ask for into creative, personal journey and campaign ideas, and show them as the real messages guests would receive before they are built.
• Map the full lifecycle at each estate, from first enquiry or purchase to stay or visit, return, renewal and win-back, across hotel, dining, spa, day visits, events, shops and corporate sales.
• Design personalised journeys from what guests have shared with us: segments, triggers, timing, content and offers.
• Shape journeys that welcome a guest known at one estate to the others, within the consent rules between estates.
• Brief the CRM pod lead on complex builds and review them before launch.

• Own the member lifecycle: joining, the first year, renewal and re-engagement.
• Grow membership that lasts: give new members reasons to visit and stay, so that growth in new members does not come at the cost of renewals.
• Develop recognition, loyalty and subscription ideas with estate teams, and turn the ones that work into lasting programmes.

• Work with the data team on the guest data that journeys depend on, and know the single guest profile well enough to question it.
• Set the standard, with estate operations teams, for what useful detail is recorded when guests share it and how it reaches the profile.
• Make sure every journey respects consent and privacy law in each of our markets, working with the CRM pod lead, who owns the technical side.

• Turn estate requests into goals, and present back a plan they can agree to. When there is a better answer than the one asked for, explain it clearly and bring them with you.
• Lead seasonal planning with estate leaders, so estates bring goals, not only tasks.
• Help each estate set up and grow its own CRM owner, and coach them, often by building alongside them.
• Build and maintain a shared playbook of proven journeys, briefs and standards, so estates can run more of their own marketing.
• Keep a clear view of all guest communication across estates, and set the rules for who is left out of a send and how often guests hear from us, so guests are never overwhelmed and campaigns do not compete.

• Keep every message true to each estate’s own voice and to the quality our brands expect.
• Write and edit guest-facing copy, and give clear feedback on creative.
• Lead how we use AI in personalisation: AI suggests the offer and drafts in the estate’s voice, a person approves every send, and the results show whether it is worth doing.

• Give every journey a goal, a baseline and a measure before it goes live.
• Use control groups and holdouts to show what a journey adds, not only what happened.
• Agree with estate teams when to do more of a journey, when to change it and when to stop it.
• Review results with estate teams, working with the Insights team on reporting, and reuse what works across estates.

• A relevant tertiary degree, for example in Marketing, Business, Communications, Economics or Statistics, or equivalent experience.
• Typically 5+ years in CRM, lifecycle or direct marketing, including at least 3 years leading lifecycle or personalisation programmes for a customer base of hundreds of thousands, ideally across several brands or markets.
• Experience in luxury or premium hospitality, travel, food and wine or retail.
• Strong marketing fundamentals: audience insight, positioning, offers that add value, and seasonal planning, across different brands.
• A lifecycle marketing or personalisation strategy you wrote and got agreed across several brands, markets or business units.
• Evidence that you built personalisation from a single customer view and showed its effect on repeat visits, purchases or retention.
• Hands-on experience designing or growing a membership, loyalty or subscription programme, with evidence that it improved retention.
• Deep, hands-on experience of at least one enterprise marketing automation platform: you build complex journeys yourself, not only brief them, and you enjoy coaching others to do the same.
• You work closely with data teams, read data well enough to question it, and measure with baselines and control groups.
• Working knowledge of consent and privacy law in marketing practice, such as POPIA or UK/EU GDPR.
• Experience leading senior stakeholders and brand and marketing teams without line authority, presenting ideas they can agree to, across countries and cultures, with clear, calm communication.
• A strong eye for brand and tone across different brand voices, and clear written English, including guest-facing copy.

• HubSpot Marketing Hub, ideally Enterprise across several portals.
• UK or European market experience.
• Practical, critical use of AI in marketing, including AI-drafted messages that a person approves.
• Comfortable mocking up messages or journeys in a design or email tool.
• Guest data from hotel, restaurant and booking systems, and messaging channels such as WhatsApp.
• BI and self-service analytics tools, such as Power BI.
• Afrikaans in addition to English.

• Repeat stays, visits, purchases and member renewals grow against baseline at each estate.
• Members stay longer, and more of them renew in their first year.
• Guests known at one estate are welcomed at the others, within what they have agreed to.

• Every estate runs personalised journeys across the full lifecycle, using what guests have shared.
• A growing share of guests engage with what we send, and none feel overwhelmed by it.
• More of what guests share on the estate reaches their profile.

• The group lifecycle marketing and personalisation strategy is agreed, followed and reviewed at least once a year.
• Each estate has a CRM owner, brings goals rather than tasks, and plans from the shared playbook.
• Ad-hoc requests to the CRM pod fall year on year.

• Every journey has a goal, a baseline and a measure before it goes live.
• Estate leaders can point to results a journey delivered, measured against a control group.
• What works at one estate is reused at the others.

• Daily catered lunch.
• Flexible working hours — core hours are 9am to 3pm.
• Choice of equipment (most of us use Apple).
• Generous training and conference budget.
• 30% discount at Babylonstoren — online shop, hotel, spa, and farm shops.
• Arranged admission to Babylonstoren for you and immediate family.
• Access to Babylonstoren’s recreation centre, gym, swimming pool, and studios.
• Quarterly socials and team building.

Contract type: Permanent, full-time
Location: In-office at Babylonstoren, Franschhoek, South Africa
Reports to: Head of Data & CRM
Works closely with: The CRM pod, the wider Data & CRM and Candide teams, and estate leadership and marketing teams across the group