Senior Director, Experience Strategy

About the role

Merkle is looking for a Senior Strategy Director to lead across client engagements. This role is ideal for someone who combines cultural awareness, research expertise, data-driven experimentation, personalization, and storytelling to shape meaningful brand and customer experiences. You will gain an understanding of clients' businesses, the motivations of their target audiences, and the effects of trends within their industry. You’ll lead as an individual contributor and craft leader, collaborating with cross-functional teams to plan and execute research and strategies to achieve our clients' goals, and mentoring junior strategists while driving innovation and measurable outcomes.

Responsibilities

• Identify cultural trends and shifts to uncover brand and business opportunities.
• Develop strategic narratives that inspire creative and experience design teams.
• Write clear, relevant briefs and provide strategic input throughout the design process.
• Define strategic roadmaps for personalization and experimentation, refining and prioritizing experimentation backlogs in alignment with business objectives and development capacity.
• Maintain a continuous testing cadence and provide regular status reporting on personalization and experimentation programs.
• Coordinate with stakeholders and third parties to support test deployment and execution.
• Ensure work aligns with client business and marketing goals.
• Mentor junior team members and support their professional growth.
• Be strategic lead on important accounts and partner with account teams to deliver value.
• Build client relationships and identify long-term growth opportunities.

Qualifications

• 8–10+ years of experience in integrated strategy in a digital agency.
• Bachelor's degree in a related field.
• Experience with qualitative and quantitative research methods.
• Experience with brand strategy, cultural dynamics, market trends, strategic planning, analytics, and digital experience measurement.
• Experience leading large-scale, data-driven experimentation programs, leveraging marketing technologies and measurement platforms such as Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Adobe Target, Optimize.ly, Contentful, and other tools to continually collect audience insight and improve upon customer experiences.
• Experience with experimentation backlog management and roadmap prioritization frameworks.
• Experience in omni-channel personalization across web, mobile, and campaign experiences.
• Experience collaborating across analytics, creative, and technology teams.
• Experience understanding people, culture, and latest trends.
• Up to 25% travel allocated.

Pay

The annual base salary range for this position is $164,450 – $190,000. Placement within the salary range is based on a variety of factors, including relevant experience, knowledge, skills, and other factors permitted by law. Additionally, this position is eligible for discretionary incentive compensation.

Benefits

• Medical, vision, and dental insurance
• Life insurance
• Short-term and long-term disability insurance
• 401k
• Flexible paid time off
• At least 15 paid holidays per year
• Paid sick and safe leave
• Paid parental leave