Job role: CRM & Lifecycle Assistant Manager
Department: Brand & growth
Job Experience: 5+ years
Location: Mumbai HQ
About The Hosteller
The Hosteller started in 2015, when backpacker hostels weren't a category in India yet. Seventy-plus properties later, we're the country's largest self-operated hostel chain — and we've never really sold beds. We sell the common room at 11pm, the trek someone talks you into, the table that had four people and now has seven. Belonging is the product. The whole brand runs on one line: go meet your people.
Role overview
Thousands of travellers stay with us every month, and many of them come back. This seat belongs to the guest after that first stay: staying in touch, giving them a reason to travel with us again, and making a direct booking the easiest thing they do.
It is a build-and-own role, not a run-the-campaigns role. You will design the retention engine, the messages, the channels, the loyalty programme and the booking experience, and own the numbers it moves. You start as the person who owns this, and build the processes around it as it grows. The OTA-versus-direct tension is the whole reason the seat exists, and closing it is the job.
Responsibilities
Lifecycle & retention programmes
- Design and run the full guest lifecycle: welcome and onboarding, pre-arrival, in-stay, post-stay, win-back, dormant reactivation, ancillary attachment and referral
- Own repeat rate, direct-booking share of repeat guests, and revenue per guest as your primary numbers
- Run structured segmentation (RFM, acquisition channel, trip purpose, solo vs. group, workation vs. leisure) and keep it alive rather than one-off
- Build and grow the loyalty / membership programme as a real retention lever, not a points gimmick
Channels
- Own WhatsApp, email, push, in-app and SMS end to end: strategy, segmentation, creative briefs, build, QA, send and readout
- Set up cross-channel orchestration with sensible frequency capping and channel-priority rules, so a guest gets one coherent conversation rather than four disconnected ones
- Partner with Performance Marketing on retargeting and audience syncs, so paid and owned channels aren't buying the same guest twice
Website & booking funnel
- Drive down abandoned-cart and abandoned-search loss with triggered journeys and on-site nudges
- Run a real experimentation programme on the funnel and on lifecycle campaigns: hypothesis, sample size, holdout, result, decision. Work with Product / Tech on the changes that need code
Analytics & AI
- Build the retention reporting layer: cohort retention curves, repeat-purchase intervals, LTV by acquisition channel, CAC:LTV, channel incrementality and campaign-level revenue attribution
- Turn analysis into a decision and a next test, not a dashboard nobody acts on
- Use AI tools as part of how you actually work: analysis, campaign and creative variant generation, segment and journey ideation, reporting automation
Qualifications
- 5 years in marketing, with at least 2–3 years specifically in lifecycle / CRM / retention marketing, ideally at a consumer internet, D2C, travel, hospitality or subscription business
- Hands-on ownership of a marketing automation platform. You've built multi-step, multi-channel journeys yourself, not briefed an agency to do it. WebEngage, CleverTap, MoEngage, Braze, Klaviyo or similar
- Real WhatsApp marketing experience: template approvals, BSP quirks, opt-in and quality-rating management, and the difference between a utility and a marketing template
- Strong analytics. Advanced Excel / Sheets, able to run a cohort or retention analysis without waiting on the data team
- A/B testing literacy that goes past "variant B won", you understand holdouts, significance, and why most reported lifts aren't real
- Working knowledge of GA4 and event tracking, and enough of the web funnel to argue with
- Genuine AI fluency, you already use LLMs daily for analysis, copy and process, and can show us how
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