For recruiters & talent leads · Active

Ten months ago this brand had no email program. It now drives 69.9% of store revenue.

$10.9M email-attributed, built from an empty ESP. The DTC portfolio average is 33%. Above 40% is considered top tier.

Book a 20-min intro Email me directly No form. No screening call before the screening call.

I'm Steve Hebert — CRM, lifecycle and retention leader in Manchester, NH. Thirteen years split between enterprise brands sending to audiences above two million and DTC programs I've taken from zero. I also own the systems underneath: platform selection, requirements, integrations, QA, consent, vendors.

The short version

Four things worth asking me about.

Each of these has a longer answer. None of them fit on a page.

01
I killed 60 of 107 campaigns. Revenue went up 18.2%.

Send volume dropped 19.8%. Unsubscribes fell 26.6%. Worth $860K on identical volume. The interesting part is what the 60 had in common.

02
The brand was built for women of childbearing age. The buyers were men over 55.

MegaFood. I read the behavior before I read the brief, then moved acquisition to match. 150%+ YoY DTC revenue growth followed.

03
Email was under-reported by roughly 98%. Nobody had noticed.

1,424 tagged clicks recorded as about 20 sessions, and no purchase event firing at all. I found it in a GA4/GTM audit and handed over a developer punch list, not a slide deck.

04
8,000 at-risk subscribers. A 0.2% click rate. That was the good outcome.

A test that paid off by failing. A good disaster beats a guess, and it beats a meeting about a guess.

Signet Jewelers
Kay · Jared · Peoples · Banter. Enterprise CRM, 2M+ per send, US & Canada.
2021 – 2026
MegaFood
DTC and lifecycle from zero. 200K+ subscribers. Salesforce Commerce Cloud replatform.
FIRST DIGITAL HIRE
Junk Gym Digital
My practice. Currently running email end to end for an eight-figure DTC wellness brand.
SINCE 2008
The filter

Three lines, so neither of us wastes a call.

Role
Director or Head of CRM, Lifecycle, or Retention. Senior Martech. Growth leadership where retention and the customer stack are real parts of the job.
Shape
Health, wellness, supplements, DTC, subscription, multi-location retail. Remote or NH/Boston-accessible. A program being built, rebuilt, or consolidated — from-zero is my strongest mode.
Terms
Director-level base, specifics on a call. Full-time W-2, or fractional through Junk Gym Digital if full-time isn't on the table.

Not me: daily paid media buying, software engineering or pure implementation, IC-only campaign management without strategy or team, B2B SaaS lifecycle, or Manager scope wearing a Director title. If the role sits mostly there, pass this page to someone in your network instead.

Twenty minutes is the fastest way to find out.

Tell me about the role, or forward the link to the hiring manager. My calendar is open — pick a slot, no email back-and-forth.

Open my calendar ↗ stephen.j.hebert@gmail.com 603-493-6138 · LinkedIn ↗
The long version

Everything above is what you need to decide whether to call. Everything below is for the people who like reading the whole thing — hiring managers, mostly, and the occasional recruiter who wants ammunition for an internal pitch.

Track record

Programs I built. Numbers they did.

Every metric is an outcome from a program I built or ran. No composites, no extrapolations.

Email program built from zero
Current engagement · Eight-figure DTC wellness brand · Oct 2025 – Jul 2026
$10.9M
Email-attributed revenue
69.9%
Share of store revenue
+47%
Revenue per send in one quarter
39,600+
New subscribers in 12 months

4.27M delivered emails carrying 59.4% of store orders, with spam complaints running 25x below the Gmail and Yahoo throttling thresholds. The build was as much platform work as marketing: owning the Omnisend, WooCommerce and WordPress connection, clean data, explicit consent, the foundational journeys, the reporting, and every day-to-day platform call.

DTC lifecycle build from zero
MegaFood · National supplement brand · First in-house digital hire
200K+
Email subscribers built
150%+
YoY DTC revenue growth
85%+
Subscriber retention sustained
~20%
DTC revenue from lifecycle

Took a brand-only website and made it a real DTC business. Owned acquisition through LTV expansion — list building, onboarding, subscription via OrderGroove, loyalty via Yotpo, winback — managed the DTC team, and partnered with Product and FP&A on KPIs and forecasting.

It was also a zero-to-one martech build. I partnered with the VP of IT through vendor evaluation and RFP work, took part in selecting Salesforce Commerce Cloud, chose Klaviyo when no native connector existed, and wrote the business requirements a full-stack developer built against. Then marketing-side QA and UAT, regulated catalog migration, consent, launch readiness — and after go-live, governance of Klaviyo, Attentive, Zendesk, OrderGroove and Yotpo.

Enterprise CRM at scale
Signet Jewelers · Kay, Jared, Peoples & Banter · 2021 – 2026
2M+
Audience per send
3
Household brands owned
30%
CRM revenue lift at Banter
5–7
Agency team led

Three roles, not one. Senior CRM & Retention Marketing Manager at Banter by Piercing Pagoda, where I launched the first SMS program from scratch and rebuilt the lifecycle — 23%+ subscriber growth, 5× peak-season ROI, and a batch-and-blast program turned into a segmentation-driven channel. Then Performance & Lifecycle Marketing Leader at Peoples Jewellers. Then CRM Engagement Manager for Jared and Kay, holding two-brand continuity through a centralization and two layoff rounds.

Database mining, RFM, behavioral and predictive segmentation, built alongside the data activation and data science teams so predictive models became lifecycle programs people actually received. Represented Marketing in the enterprise Adobe CDP implementation and the RFPs behind it. Directed a 5–7 person Publicis workflow end to end.

Client work
Junk Gym Digital · Builds and teardowns
40%+
Revenue from email, founder-led health brand
50K+
Subscribers from zero
21x
RPR, automated vs campaign (teardown)
76%
Of subscriber growth erased by churn (teardown)

Builds create the systems. Teardowns find what an existing program is leaving on the table. It also includes a live operating system that joins site sales and ESP data into a product velocity burn report, read daily for inventory control and repurchase strategy — a decision system, not an engineering project.

How I read a business

"Customers tell us with their clicks what's working and what's not."

Latest example: order-level analysis of 9,000+ orders showed the median first-to-second reorder landing at 15.8 days, so the replenishment flow moved from day 21 to day 14. The calendar didn't decide that. The customers did.

01 · Behavior is the source of truth

Brand assumptions and customer behavior almost never line up. Clicks, abandons, completed purchases — that's the honest scoreboard, and I read it before the brief.

02 · Funnel and stack as one loop

Acquisition, lifecycle, ecommerce and customer systems usually get owned by different teams. I run them as one loop: retention data informs acquisition, and the stack has to support the decision.

03 · Cohorts, not vanity metrics

Open rate and CTR are leading indicators. Cohort retention, repeat purchase rate and LTV are the actual KPIs. Engagement that doesn't compound to revenue isn't worth chasing.

Systems & AI

Business ownership first. Technology lets one operator see more and move faster.

I'm not applying as a software engineer. I'm the business owner who can choose the platform, define what it needs to do, direct the technical work, test the result, and operate it after launch.

Analytics without an engineering ticket

Eight Python analytics engines and an unattended monthly reporting job, in production since May 2026. Site sales merged with ESP performance into views I use to make calls: product velocity, repurchase windows, inventory pacing. No analyst between me and the answer.

Business-side integration ownership

I've selected platforms, written requirements and acceptance criteria, led QA and UAT, worked through consent and data flows, and managed vendors and technical partners. I own the business problem and the operating result. Engineers own the code.

AI as my devil's advocate

Before a campaign ships, I have the model argue against it — tell me why this failed — and pressure-test the plan while it's still cheap to change. Claude, Python and n8n: how I work, not a demo I run for interviews.

Lifecycle & CRM
Klaviyo · Omnisend · Attentive · Sailthru · Movable Ink · Adobe CDP
Commerce & service
Salesforce Commerce Cloud · WooCommerce · WordPress · OrderGroove · Yotpo · Zendesk
Analytics & ops
GA4 · Google Tag Manager · Tableau · Power BI · Jira · Claude · Python · n8n
About
Steve Hebert
Steve Hebert
CRM, Lifecycle & Marketing Technology Leader · Manchester, NH

CRM, lifecycle and retention are the center of the work. I define the journey architecture, then go build it — senior enough to set the strategy, hands-on enough to execute it. Acquisition sits inside that view rather than beside it, because retention data is what tells me where the next dollar should go.

The second thread is the machinery underneath the program: platform evaluation, RFPs, requirements, integrations, QA and UAT, consent, customer data and vendor governance. I'm not the engineer in the room. I'm the marketing owner who can make the work specific enough to build and accountable enough to operate.

Categories run from FDA-regulated supplements to intimate wellness — places where compliance and channel restrictions are operating constraints, not afterthoughts. And I don't need a roadmap handed to me. I need a leader who unblocks me when I'm stuck; the rest is mine to figure out.

The thread through my career: I show up when there's nothing built yet and leave a system that runs. The latest room with nothing in it now does $10.9M email-attributed. Looking for the next one.

If headcount's frozen, the work still gets done.

Junk Gym Digital is my consulting practice — three to five clients at a time, retainer or project. Same operator, same skill set, narrower scope. If a full-time hire isn't on the table right now, this is the lower-friction first step. The full-time door stays open either way.

See the consulting option ↗ Free 30-min assessment · No sales call

The numbers are the headline. The build is the conversation.

How the program was built, what the stack had to support, and why the decisions worked — none of that fits on a page. Tell me about the role, or forward the link to the hiring manager.

Book the call Email Steve