Marketing Automation Journey Lead

About us

The Financial Times is one of the world’s leading news organisations, globally recognised for its authority, integrity and accuracy, with a mission to deliver quality information and services worldwide.

At the FT, curiosity thrives and ambitious thinking is rewarded. Here, you’re given the chance to reach millions, create work that matters and deliver impartial journalism in a polarised world.

In our warm, collaborative culture, you’ll connect with a diverse community of experts who support your growth, career aspirations and wellbeing.

Your future at the FT will be filled with opportunities that challenge and inspire you. With no fixed path, you’ll discover new skills and forge a career that can take you anywhere.

Build a newsworthy career at the FT.

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We believe everyone should have a fair opportunity to contribute, succeed, and reach their full potential. That means ensuring everyone is heard, respected, and valued, while identifying and removing barriers that may get in the way. Our commitment is to be an employer role model, grounded in inclusion and fairness for all.

We want every application to receive fair and thoughtful consideration; therefore, all applications are reviewed by a member of our recruitment team, not by AI.

The role

We're looking for a Marketing Automation Journey Lead to join our Reader Revenue Group and play a key role in shaping how we engage with customers across their lifecycle.

As our Consumer and B2B subscription businesses evolve towards a more sophisticated, customer-led approach to growth, engagement and retention, Marketing Automation plays a critical role in delivering relevant, connected and effective customer experiences.

Our Marketing Automation teams operate as a Centre of Excellence, bringing together journey expertise, platform capabilities, experimentation, personalisation and measurement to drive customer and commercial value.

Reporting to the Head of Marketing Automation (Consumer or B2B), you'll be responsible for ensuring we're automating and improving the right customer experiences.

Sitting between lifecycle strategy and execution, this is a journey architecture, orchestration and optimisation role. You'll partner closely with Lifecycle Marketing and other collaborators to understand customer needs and commercial objectives, translating these into effective automated experiences.

You'll take a comprehensive view of the automated journey portfolio, finding opportunities to improve how journeys, campaigns, triggers and customer or account states work together. You'll assess existing activity, identify gaps or overlaps, and recommend whether journeys should be optimised, extended, redesigned, consolidated or retired.

Rather than focusing primarily on building individual campaigns, you'll lead the thinking behind journey design and optimisation, developing actionable recommendations and coordinating delivery through Marketing Automation Specialists and Executives.

You'll also work closely with your counterpart in the Consumer or B2B Marketing Automation team, sharing expertise and helping establish consistent standards, experimentation approaches and guidelines across the Centre of Excellence.

This is an opportunity to have a meaningful impact on the FT's customer experience, ensuring automated journeys are connected, measurable and continuously improving.

Key responsibilities

Journey architecture and orchestration

• Partner with Lifecycle Marketing and other collaborators to understand business objectives, customer needs, target audiences and lifecycle challenges.

• Translate strategic briefs into effective automation opportunities, challenging proposed solutions where necessary to address the underlying customer or commercial problem.

• Maintain a comprehensive view of the automated journey portfolio, ensuring journeys, campaigns, triggers and customer or account states work together coherently.

• Map and visualise customer journeys, identifying gaps, overlaps, friction and opportunities to improve reach, relevance and effectiveness.

• Determine whether objectives are best achieved by optimising existing journeys, introducing new pathways, adjusting triggers, content or sequencing, or retiring existing activity.

• Design automated experiences using appropriate audiences, channels, behavioural signals, personalisation, decisioning and timing.

• Define journey sequencing, eligibility, hierarchy and suppression rules to handle interactions between customer experiences.

• Work with Data, Technology, Creative and Marketing Automation colleagues to translate journey designs into delivered experiences.

Portfolio optimisation and prioritisation

• Own and maintain the journey opportunity and optimisation roadmap, prioritising activity according to customer and commercial impact, reach, effort and strategic importance.

• Regularly audit automated journeys to find opportunities for improvement, redesign, consolidation or retirement.

• Investigate underlying audience, data, design and execution issues to understand journey performance.

• Find opportunities to improve customer experiences through behavioural triggers, segmentation, personalisation and multichannel orchestration.

• Ensure journeys are continuously reviewed and optimised rather than treated as one-off launches.

• Work with the Head of Marketing Automation to align optimisation priorities with the wider strategy and available capacity.

Measurement, testing and learning

• Establish clear objectives, KPIs and measurement approaches for significant journey interventions.

• Incorporate testing and experimentation into journey design, including hypotheses, control groups and learning objectives where appropriate.

• Use customer, account, behavioural and commercial data to assess journey effectiveness and find opportunities.

• Evaluate broader journey outcomes alongside individual campaign performance, focusing on measurable customer and commercial impact.

• Translate analysis and experimentation into actionable recommendations and future improvements.

• Contribute to shared learning, measurement frameworks and procedures across the Centre of Excellence.

Delivery leadership and collaboration

• Translate journey recommendations into clear, actionable briefs for Marketing Automation Specialists and Executives.

• Work with delivery teams to define audience requirements, triggers, branching logic, personalisation, sequencing, testing and data dependencies.

• Provide architectural direction, reviewing implementation proposals and identifying risks or opportunities for improvement.

• Coach and support colleagues in journey design, optimisation and effective use of automation capabilities.

• Collaborate with Consumer and B2B counterparts to share expertise, find opportunities and develop consistent approaches.

• Contribute to Centre of Excellence playbooks and standards for journey design, testing, personalisation and orchestration.

Platform and capability development

• Apply a strong understanding of marketing automation and customer data platforms to design effective journeys.

• Find opportunities to make better use of existing automation capabilities and work with technical colleagues where further development may be required.

• Combine customer and account data, behavioural signals, segmentation and decisioning to improve relevance and effectiveness.

• Support the development and adoption of scalable, reusable Marketing Automation standards and ways of working.

Required skills and experience

• Significant experience in marketing automation, CRM, lifecycle marketing or a closely related field.

• Strong expertise in customer journey architecture, design and orchestration, with the ability to think across interconnected customer experiences rather than individual campaigns.

• Experience handling or optimising a portfolio of automated journeys, identifying gaps, dependencies and opportunities for improvement.

• Ability to translate customer and commercial challenges into clear journey strategies and practical automation solutions.

• Strong understanding of automation principles, including triggers, segmentation, personalisation, decisioning, channel selection, frequency and journey sequencing.

• Excellent analytical and problem-solving skills, with experience using customer, behavioural and commercial data to improve outcomes.

• Experience developing testing and experimentation approaches and applying insights to journey optimisation.

• Commercial awareness and an understanding of how automated journeys contribute to acquisition, conversion, onboarding, engagement, retention and customer value.

• Ability to map, visualise and explain sophisticated customer journeys to collaborators with varying levels of technical expertise.

• Strong relationship management, collaboration and influencing skills, including confidence challenging briefs and recommending alternative approaches.

• Experience coaching or mentoring colleagues and supporting the development of others.

• Excellent organisational skills, with the ability to prioritise contending opportunities and make evidence-based recommendations.

• Sufficient technical and platform knowledge to understand implementation requirements, identify dependencies and challenge proposed solutions.

Desirable

• Experience in subscription, digital media, recurring revenue or other customer lifecycle businesses.

• Familiarity with sophisticated marketing automation or customer data platforms such as Bloomreach, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Marketo or equivalent.

• Experience with behavioural decisioning, next-best-action, dynamic content or advanced personalisation.

• Experience designing or optimising multichannel journeys across email, onsite and other digital channels.

• Knowledge of account-based marketing, multi-contact buying journeys or complex B2B customer relationships.

• Experience developing reusable journey frameworks, playbooks or operating standards.

• Experience working across B2C and B2B audiences or within a Centre of Excellence.

What's in it for you? Our benefits

Our benefits vary by location but we are committed to providing best-in-class perks across all our offices. These include generous annual leave, medical cover, inclusive parental leave packages, subsidised gym memberships and opportunities to give back to the community. Full details of our benefits are available here.

We currently operate a hybrid model which requires staff to work onsite 50% of the time, subject to role requirements & regular review. While flexible working requests will be considered, not all patterns are suitable for all roles. We believe this balanced approach supports flexibility and protects our culture, making collaboration and communication easier, building stronger relationships and team cohesion, and supporting peer learning. We reserve discretion on reasonable notice to change this approach either generally or for specific individuals or teams.

Accessibility

We are a disability confident employer and Valuable 500 signatory.

Please let us know if you require any reasonable adjustments/personalisation as part of the application process or to enable you to attend an interview. If you would like to discuss your requirements or have any questions, email [email protected] and a member of our team will be happy to help.

Further information

At the FT, we embrace innovation and the use of technology and appreciate that individuals may use AI tools as part of their job application process. Whilst we are happy for you to use AI to assist with your application, it is essential that all information provided is authentic and accurately represents your skills, experience, and qualifications.

Candidates should be aware that the use of AI throughout the application process may be monitored to ensure a fair and transparent hiring process for all.

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