Senior Email, Lifecycle & Ecommerce Strategist

Role Overview:

Mel Fisher’s Treasures is seeking a Senior Email, Lifecycle & Ecommerce Strategist for an initial three-month fractional engagement. This is a senior, hands-on player-coach role for someone who can take accountable ownership of a technically underperforming email and lifecycle program, beginning with Mailchimp, and make it work quickly and correctly ahead of the peak holiday season.

The role’s center of gravity is email and lifecycle marketing: deliverability, sender reputation, list health, segmentation, preference management, campaign strategy and production, lifecycle flows, Shopify customer and order data, reporting, testing, and platform strategy. This is not a broad fractional CMO role, a strategy-only supervisory position, a Shopify store-operations role, or a paid-media generalist role. The successful candidate must be senior enough to lead the client and strategic enough to shape the broader customer-growth roadmap, while remaining willing and able to work directly inside the systems.

The mandate also extends beyond technical rehabilitation. Mel Fisher’s Treasures needs a stronger consumer content and campaign strategy, one that balances promotion with editorial storytelling and brings artifacts, shipwrecks, grading, provenance, history, craftsmanship, and the larger Mel Fisher story to life for distinct customer groups.

Responsibilities:

• Own the day-to-day email and lifecycle program, including transition, campaign planning, production, quality assurance, testing, reporting, and stakeholder communication.
• Audit Mailchimp and the surrounding email ecosystem during the first one to two weeks, covering deliverability, authentication, list quality, consent, automations, templates, Shopify data, and reporting.
• Clean and organize the database; define engaged audiences, suppression or archiving rules, customer segments, and preference structures.
• Recommend the right lifecycle platform and long-term architecture, comparing Mailchimp with Klaviyo, Omnisend, HubSpot, and ActiveCampaign as appropriate.
• Lead the approved Mailchimp stabilization or platform migration while protecting consent, customer data, deliverability, and business continuity.
• Build and optimize key lifecycle journeys, including welcome, browse and cart recovery, post-purchase, education, cross-sell, win-back, and VIP.
• Own the campaign and content strategy, balancing promotional email with storytelling around artifacts, provenance, history, and craftsmanship.
• Use Shopify and point-of-sale data to improve targeting, personalization, measurement, and the email-to-site journey without taking over store operations.
• Establish KPIs, dashboards, testing practices, and reporting across deliverability, clicks, conversion, revenue, repeat purchase, and list health.
• Serve as the hands-on lead for a lean team, coordinating creative and technical support
• What Success Looks Like: First 90 Days
  • Weeks 1–2: Transition, Diagnose, Clean & Decide
    • Complete access, documentation, handoff, account preservation, baseline measurement, and the full email, sender-health, list, consent, automation, integration, and reporting audit.
    • Protect essential sends, address the highest-risk authentication, deliverability, data, and continuity issues, identify the engaged audience, and establish approved cleanup rules and target segmentation.
    • Present the lifecycle-platform recommendation, business case, dependencies, implementation plan, resource requirements, and holiday-risk controls for approval.
  • Weeks 3–6: Build the Approved Path
    • Execute the approved near-term Mailchimp stabilization or selected-platform migration plan without duplicating avoidable work.
    • Implement the cleaned audience structure, core segments, sender configuration, Shopify data flow, reusable templates, forms or preferences, priority automations, campaign workflow, dashboard, and quality-assurance standards.
  • Weeks 7–12: Launch, Learn & Prepare the Next Phase
    • Launch controlled campaigns and lifecycle improvements to appropriate engaged audiences and monitor deliverability, customer behavior, conversion, revenue contribution, list health, and operational performance.
    • Refine segments, cadence, content, templates, flows, and email-to-Shopify touchpoints based on evidence; document roles and recurring processes.
    • Deliver the 90-day results review and prioritized recommendation for ongoing email ownership, lifecycle priorities, team structure, platform needs, paid-media readiness, and adjacent ecommerce opportunities.

Qualifications:

• Substantial senior-level experience leading B2C ecommerce, email, lifecycle, or retention programs, with a record of combining strategy, client leadership, and hands-on execution.
• Deep, current, hands-on Mailchimp expertise, including the ability to enter a messy or underperforming account, diagnose what is wrong, stabilize essential operations, rehabilitate list and campaign practices, and clearly explain the plan to senior stakeholders.
• Strong command of deliverability and sender reputation, authentication, list hygiene, suppression and archiving, consent, preference management, segmentation, lifecycle flows, campaign operations, testing, and email performance reporting or revenue attribution.
• Deep understanding of Shopify integrations and customer, order, product, point-of-sale, and behavioral data. The ideal candidate knows how to use Shopify signals for lifecycle marketing and conversion insight without needing to be a Shopify inventory, merchandising, or store-operations manager.
• Hands-on experience with one or more modern lifecycle platforms, ideally Klaviyo, and the judgment to evaluate fit across Klaviyo, Omnisend, HubSpot Marketing Hub, ActiveCampaign, and the current Mailchimp environment. Prior experience leading a Mailchimp-to-Klaviyo or comparable migration is strongly preferred.
• Strong consumer campaign and content instincts, including the ability to translate history, provenance, craftsmanship, high-consideration products, and brand storytelling into segment-specific promotional and editorial email programs.
• Ability to establish meaningful measurement across deliverability, clicks, conversion, email-attributed revenue, repeat purchase, customer lifetime value, list health, and testing while recognizing the limitations of open-rate data.
• Senior player-coach judgment: comfortable making decisions, doing critical platform work personally, directing a small number of specialists, communicating risks and tradeoffs, and earning trust with owners and senior operators.
• Strong familiarity with paid social, ecommerce acquisition, audiences, retargeting, pixels, attribution, and creative testing. 
• Experience with luxury goods, jewelry, collectibles, high-consideration purchases, heritage brands, omnichannel retail, or fractional and agency environments is strongly preferred.

Company profile:

Mel Fisher’s Treasures is a Key West–based retail and ecommerce business under shared Mel Fisher family ownership. It offers authentic recovered coins and artifacts, one-of-a-kind shipwreck jewelry, and related collectibles through physical retail locations and a Shopify ecosystem used for ecommerce and point of sale. Product provenance, authenticity, craftsmanship, and the story behind the treasure are central to the customer experience.

Mel Fisher’s Treasures is a separate legal and operating company from Mel Fisher’s Shipwreck Expeditions, which leads the active search and recovery operation and its investor-participation model. Expeditions discoveries, history, and field activity can provide powerful storytelling for Treasures when appropriate and approved, but recovered expedition treasure does not automatically become Treasures inventory, and the two companies’ customer data, communications, economics, systems, and approvals must remain appropriately separated.

For the right leader, the opportunity is unusually compelling: rehabilitate a neglected but commercially important email channel, turn Shopify and retail customer data into more relevant lifecycle marketing, improve the quality of campaign storytelling, and help a globally recognized heritage brand build a modern consumer-growth capability without losing its authenticity.