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Acquisition, lifecycle, retention. Orchestrated as one motion, not managed in silos.

13+ years building growth engines, from enterprise CRM on household brands sending to audiences well above two million, to DTC programs taken from zero. I don't hand acquisition, lifecycle, and retention to three teams that don't talk. I run them as one motion, with retention as the deep end. This page answers the obvious questions so we can skip them on the call.

Book a 20-min intro Email me directly

The Filter

Where I fit. Where I don't.

Sharing this up front saves us both a call. If the role lines up on the left, let's talk. If it sits mostly on the right, pass the page along to someone in your network.

Strong Fit

Roles I'd move on quickly

Titles: Director or Head of Growth · Head of Acquisition / Retention · Director of CRM or Lifecycle · VP Marketing where the scope fits.
Scope: Oversight on the full growth stack: paid, organic, lifecycle, subscription, CRO, analytics. Retention is the deep end. The rest is in scope.
Industries: Health, wellness, supplements, intimate wellness, DTC, ecommerce, subscription.
Stage: Function is being built or rebuilt. The "from-zero" pattern is my strongest mode.
Location: Fully remote, or NH/Boston-accessible hybrid.
Comp: Director-level base. Specifics on a call.
Engagement: Full-time W-2. Fractional via Junk Gym Digital if FT isn't the right fit.

Not the Move

Roles that won't be a fit

Daily in-platform buyer / trafficker work. Better handled by an agency or a full-time channel specialist doing it every day. I've led performance teams. I'm not the daily hands-on-keyboard hire.
IC-only "email marketer" or "campaign manager" without strategy or team ownership.
B2B SaaS lifecycle. Not where my proof points sit.
Manager-level scope wrapped in a Director title with no budget or team.
On-site only outside the New England corridor.
Relocation or in-office >2 days/week outside NH/MA.

Track Record

Programs I built.
Numbers they did.

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

MegaFood · DTC Lifecycle Build From Zero

Took a brand-only website to a real DTC business. Built the retention engine from a blank canvas at a national supplement company.

200K+

Email subscribers built

150%+

YoY DTC revenue growth

85%+

Subscriber retention sustained

~20%

DTC revenue from lifecycle

Owned acquisition through LTV expansion: list-building, onboarding, subscription (OrderGroove), loyalty (Yotpo), winback. Managed the DTC team, partnered with Product and FP&A on KPIs and forecasting, oversaw creative and performance agencies.

Banter by Piercing Pagoda · SMS Launch & Lifecycle Rebuild

First SMS program from scratch. Full lifecycle overhaul. Measurable revenue lift.

23%+

SMS subscriber growth

30%

CRM revenue lift

5×

Peak-season SMS ROI

Turned a batch-and-blast program into a segmentation-driven retention channel. Built welcome, abandon cart, replenishment, and winback flows. Hit 10%+ CTR on SMS during peak season.

Signet Jewelers · Enterprise CRM at Scale · 2021–2026

Led retention and email for Kay Jewelers, Jared, and Peoples Jewellers. Household brands, audiences well above two million per send.

2M+

Audience per send

Household brands owned

~80%

Sends from modular blocks

5–7

Agency team led

Nearly five years owning retention and email across three household jewelry brands, routinely pushing campaigns to audiences well above two million. Owned the flows, automations, and program revenue KPIs across every touchpoint. Went well beyond batch sends: database mining, advanced segmentation, and proprietary first-party data combined into complex multi-touchpoint journeys across multiple platforms, all driving incremental revenue to the bottom line. Led both the internal team and the agency handling design, strategy, and execution.

Junk Gym Digital · Consulting Practice

Lifecycle programs driving 40%+ of total revenue for founder-led DTC health brands.

40%+

Revenue from email

50K+

Subscribers from zero

~2%

Sustained CTR

Active practice serving DTC operators since 2008. Includes a live multi-source analytics framework integrating site sales and ESP data into a product velocity burn report. Used daily for inventory control and repurchase strategy.

The Lens

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

At MegaFood, the brand was built for women of childbearing age. The data said otherwise: the stickiest, highest-LTV customers were men 55+ buying longevity products. I moved acquisition toward who was actually buying. I read customer behavior before I read the brief, and I look for that same gap in every business I walk into.

Customer behavior is the source of truth.

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

Full-funnel as a feedback loop.

Acquisition, lifecycle, content, and ecommerce get reported separately and run by different teams. I run them as one loop — retention data tells me where the next acquisition dollar should go.

Cohort & LTV thinking, not vanity metrics.

Open rates 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.

AI as Leverage

Experience first.
AI lets one operator ship the output of a team.

I'm not using AI to fake competence. 13+ years of doing this work, plus the reps that come with it. AI is the layer on top.

A test that paid off by failing

A win-back campaign where AI surfaced 8,000 at-risk subscribers. A 0.2% click rate didn't disappoint me — it confirmed the sunset call and cleaned the list. A good disaster beats a guess.

Analytics without an engineering ticket

Live frameworks that merge site sales with ESP performance into views I actually use to make calls. Product velocity, repurchase windows, inventory pacing. No SQL, no analyst between me and the answer.

Tools that work together

When the integration layer doesn't exist yet, I build it. Custom MCP connectors, Python scanners, n8n flows. The build is the means, not the headline. I don't wait for IT to connect things.

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, n8n, MCP: how I work, not a demo I run for interviews.

Steve Hebert

CRM & Lifecycle Marketing Leader

Book a 20-min intro stephen.j.hebert@gmail.com 603-493-6138 LinkedIn Profile ↗

13 years building growth engines for brands that needed one.

Marketing leader based in Manchester, NH. I run marketing as one motion: acquisition, lifecycle, and retention orchestrated together, not handed to three teams that don't talk. I define the journey architecture, then go build it: senior enough to define the strategy, hands-on enough to execute it. I report on revenue and cohort-level performance, not vanity metrics. Client categories run from FDA-regulated supplements to intimate wellness, places where compliance and channel restrictions are operating constraints, not afterthoughts. Enterprise scale on household brands plus zero-to-scale DTC growth is a combination few CRM leaders bring to one desk.

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. MegaFood (supplements, DTC, from zero to 200K+ subscribers, 150%+ YoY growth). Banter by Piercing Pagoda (SMS launch, full lifecycle rebuild). Junk Gym Digital for founder-led DTC clients since 2008. Most recently nearly five years as CRM Engagement Manager at Signet Jewelers (through May 2026), directing retention and email for Kay Jewelers, Jared, and Peoples Jewellers across the US and Canada, with campaigns reaching audiences well above two million. Now looking for the next room with nothing built yet.

Stack: Klaviyo · Omnisend · Attentive · OrderGroove · Yotpo · GA4 · Adobe CDP · Claude · Python · n8n · MCP

The Other Path · Junk Gym Digital

Hire is the goal. 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 (timing, budget, freeze), this is the lower-friction first step. The full-time door stays open either way.

junkgym.com/work-with-me

// Two seats currently open · Free 30-min assessment · No sales call

700+

Career pages monitored daily by an in-house Python scanner I built. AI is in the workflow, not on the brochure.

40%+

Total revenue driven by email for DTC consulting clients. Sustained ~2% CTR.

18 yrs

Independent practice running since 2008. Same hands, more reps every year.

Not ready to hire?

"Headcount freezes. The work doesn't."