Director of Loyalty Marketing

About the Role

This Director role leads the end-to-end loyalty marketing strategy and program direction for Barclays’ Loyalty Ecosystem, designed to increase customer loyalty, card usage, and engagement through curated third-party shopping and dining offers, exclusive experiences, and co-brand offers. The Director of Loyalty Marketing will set the vision, strategy, and decision framework for how Barclays’ Loyalty Ecosystem is presented to customers across digital and traditional channels.

The role oversees a Vice President of Loyalty Marketing and two Managers of Loyalty Marketing, ensuring marketing plans, offers, and customer experiences are clear, compelling, personalized, compliant, and aligned to business outcomes. Operating at the intersection of Marketing, Data & Analytics, Product, Technology, Legal, Risk, and Compliance, this role establishes program priorities, approves key marketing decisions, and guides the team in translating business objectives into customer-facing campaigns, personalized experiences, and engagement strategies. The role also defines how customer data and behavioral insights are responsibly used to deepen customer relationships and improve program performance.

The Director serves as the senior orchestration point for the loyalty marketing program, balancing growth, customer experience, creativity, data-driven decisioning, regulatory requirements, operational discipline, and team leadership.

Responsibilities

• Set and own the loyalty marketing strategy aligned to goals for card usage, customer retention, engagement frequency, spend growth, and customer value.
• Define clear customer value propositions for program mechanics including the shopping portal, dining offers, bonus cashback, and exclusive experiences.
• Establish program success metrics and decision rights tied to engagement, activation, incremental spend, customer retention, and long-term loyalty.
• Set the direction for customer-facing marketing assets and oversee team delivery in partnership with internal Centers of Excellence.
• Approve creative direction and ensure execution is consistent, compliant, customer-centered, and optimized across channels.
• Guide UX, brand, and channel teams in using performance insights to improve messaging, visual treatments, and the overall customer experience.
• Set the email marketing strategy, including cadence, targeting, lifecycle triggers, and suppression logic, and oversee execution through Centers of Excellence.
• Define the customer contact strategy to balance engagement with customer fatigue, ensuring communications are timely, relevant, and additive.
• Align loyalty communications with enterprise marketing priorities and broader customer communication plans.
• Set the strategy for using credit card transaction data and behavioral insights to personalize offers, messaging, and recommendations.
• Define and approve use cases for segmentation, targeting, and next-best-offer strategies, ensuring alignment with data privacy, risk, and compliance standards.
• Review program performance and direct refinements to personalization logic based on customer response, engagement patterns, and business results.
• Set the vision for gamification and engagement design, including progress tracking, milestones, challenges, streaks, and bonus unlocks to increase repeat engagement and sustained card usage.
• Direct Product and Technology partners to ensure gamified experiences are intuitive, motivating, scalable, and clearly communicated to customers.
• Set measurement expectations for engagement mechanics and guide the team in iterating based on customer behavior, business outcomes, and control requirements.
• Development and implementation of marketing strategies that align with the bank’s business objectives, informed by market research, customer needs, and the competitive landscape.
• Collaborate with product development, sales, and other departments to align marketing efforts with overall business objectives.
• Develop compelling and targeted content for various marketing channels, including print, media, and related collateral.
• Analyze data to make informed decisions and optimize marketing strategies, using data analytics tools to measure and report on the performance of marketing campaigns.
• Manage the marketing budget, allocating resources to maximize ROI.
• Define marketing vision, set goals, clarify objectives, and work across organizations to achieve specific, well-defined outcomes.
• Foster and guide compliance, ensuring regulations are observed and relevant processes are in place to facilitate adherence.
• Focus on the external environment, regulators, or advocacy groups to both monitor and influence on behalf of Barclays, when appropriate.

Requirements

• 5-10 years of demonstrated leadership experience in loyalty marketing, digital marketing, or customer engagement.
• Strong experience setting strategy across email marketing, digital channels, lifecycle marketing, and customer contact management.
• Demonstrated ability to use customer data, insights, and performance metrics to shape strategy, guide investment decisions, and improve customer outcomes.
• Experience leading teams and senior cross-functional stakeholders through complex initiatives, with clear ownership of decisions, trade-offs, and business outcomes.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience in financial services, payments, or highly regulated industries.
• Experience with credit card rewards, cashback programs, shopping portals, dining offers, merchant-funded offers, or co-brand loyalty programs.
• Familiarity with gamification, behavioral design, or experimentation to drive customer engagement and repeat usage.
• Comfort setting direction and making decisions in environments with regulatory, risk, compliance, and control considerations.

Role Characteristics

• Senior strategic marketer and people leader with a strong bias toward measurable business and customer outcomes.
• Comfortable setting enterprise-level direction while ensuring the team delivers high-quality execution.
• Operates with high ownership, sound judgment, strong decision discipline, and resilience in complex, cross-functional enterprise environments.
• Manage a business function, providing significant input to function-wide strategic initiatives.
• Contribute to and influence policy and procedures for the function and plan, manage, and consult on multiple complex and critical strategic projects, which may be business-wide.
• Manage the direction of a large team or sub-function, leading other people managers and embedding a performance culture aligned to the values of the business.
• Act as a deep technical expert and thought leader, identifying new ways of working and collaborating cross-functionally.
• Train, guide, and coach less experienced specialists and provide information affecting long-term profits, organizational risks, and strategic decisions.
• Provide expert advice to senior functional management and committees to influence decisions made outside of own function, offering significant input to function-wide strategic initiatives.
• Manage, coordinate, and enable resourcing, budgeting, and policy creation for a significant sub-function.
• Escalate breaches of policies/procedures appropriately.
• Demonstrate extensive knowledge of how the function integrates with the business division/Group to achieve the overall business objectives.
• Maintain broad and comprehensive knowledge of industry theories and practices within own discipline alongside up-to-date relevant sector/functional knowledge, and insight into external market developments/initiatives.
• Use interpretative thinking and advanced analytical skills to solve problems and design solutions in often complex/sensitive situations.
• Exercise management authority to make significant decisions and certain strategic decisions or recommendations within own area.
• Negotiate with and influence stakeholders at a senior level both internally and externally.
• Act as principal contact point for key clients and counterparts in other functions/business divisions.
• Mandated as a spokesperson for the function and business division.

Leadership Expectations

• Demonstrate the LEAD behaviors: Listen and be authentic, Energize and inspire, Align across the enterprise, Develop others.
• Demonstrate the Barclays Values of Respect, Integrity, Service, Excellence, and Stewardship.
• Demonstrate the Barclays Mindset: Empower, Challenge, and Drive.