Executive Director, Digital Subscription Growth

Key Responsibilities

• Own individual (B2C) paid subscription growth across the NEJM Group publications, with a primary focus on driving digital subscriptions.
• Develop and execute strategies to increase net new paid subscribers, improve subscriber retention, and grow circulation revenue.
• Set ambitious growth targets and define the roadmap to achieve them across acquisition, conversion, activation, retention, and long-term loyalty.
• Acquisition and Funnel Optimization
• Lead full-funnel subscription growth across web properties, email, SEO, partnerships, paid media, social, and other relevant channels.
• Improve conversion of anonymous and registered users into paid subscribers through optimized landing pages, paywall messaging, offer strategy, and checkout experience.
• Identify and scale new acquisition channels, audience pathways, and professional ecosystem partnerships that can expand reach among clinicians and early-career medical professionals.
• Build segmented paths for subscription acquisition, upgrade, and cross-sell, including movement into new subscription offerings.
• Lifecycle Marketing and Retention
• Develop and lead a lifecycle marketing strategy to improve activation, engagement, retention, churn prevention, save efforts, and win-back.
• Move the organization beyond batch direct-response email toward behavior-based, segmented, and personalized subscriber journeys.
• Build programs that increase first-year retention, deepen subscriber engagement.
• Partner with customer service and subscriber support teams to identify churn drivers and improve retention performance.
• Subscription Strategy and Offer Development
• Help shape the positioning, pricing, packaging, and growth strategy for NEJM Group subscription offers and models.
• Test offers, trial structures, pricing approaches, and messaging to improve adoption and share of wallet while preserving premium brand value.
• Testing, Personalization, and Insights
• Build a culture of rapid experimentation and continuous learning across the subscription business.
• Lead structured testing across pricing, packaging, promotional offers, messaging, creative, audience segmentation, channel mix, paywall experience, and Commerce UX flows.
• Use analytics and customer insights to understand subscriber behavior, activation patterns, engagement signals, and churn risks.
• Define and track KPIs and translate findings into scalable growth strategies and clear executive recommendations.
• Cross-Functional Leadership
• Partner closely with Product Management, Digital Strategy, Engineering, Digital Analytics, Customer and Market Intelligence, and Customer Success to improve subscription UX, instrumentation, and growth performance.
• Collaborate on initiatives that strengthen content discovery, topic-based engagement, newsletter strategy, and conversion pathways from editorial experiences to paid subscription.
• Lead and develop a high-performing team and manage external partners or agencies as needed.
• Serve as a change agent who can challenge legacy assumptions and lead transformation in an established, mission-driven organization.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of leadership experience in subscription growth, digital marketing, lifecycle marketing, circulation, consumer revenue, or a related field.
• Proven success growing subscription businesses and leading digital transformation.
• Demonstrated experience improving acquisition, conversion, retention, and revenue through testing and optimization.
• Strong analytical mindset, with experience using data to drive segmentation, experimentation, and performance decisions.
• Track record of cross-functional leadership and influencing across product, marketing, analytics, and editorial organizations.

PREFERRED EXPERIENCE

• In media, publishing, healthcare, medical information, professional education, or other high-trust subscription businesses.
• Familiarity with subscription packaging, bundled offers, and lifecycle strategy across digital properties.
• Experience leveraging and optimizing a sophisticated MarTech stack to drive subscription growth and modern marketing.
• Understanding of the needs and behaviors of clinicians, researchers, and medical trainees.
• Experience modernizing legacy acquisition models into digital-first growth systems.