CRM & Lifecycle Marketing Specialist

About Candide

Candide is an AI-first tech company based at Babylonstoren in the Cape Winelands, with a second office in the UK. We build the digital products behind some of the world’s most celebrated hospitality and lifestyle estates - Babylonstoren, The Newt in Somerset, Vignamaggio, and others.

Our office sits on the Babylonstoren estate itself, surrounded by gardens, mountains, and farm-to-table food. We design, build and maintain eCommerce platforms, mobile apps, admissions and membership systems, booking engines, and brochure websites. Our team is small but high-impact, working across a portfolio of luxury brands that people genuinely love.

Role purpose

You will own guest lifecycle marketing in HubSpot across our estate brands, and the CRM architecture underneath it - segmentation, personalisation, automated journeys, lead scoring, the data model they all depend on, and the reporting that proves it worked.

Each estate has its own audience, language and data reality, so a large part of the job is doing enablement well in more than one market at once and then handing it over properly: documented, named consistently, and understood by the estate marketing teams who use it every day.

Key responsibilities

Campaigns

• Build, QA and deploy emails in HubSpot Marketing Hub.
• Own the send calendar across brands, and manage contact frequency and suppression so no guest is over-mailed.
• Run structured A/B tests with results logged so learnings compound.

Segmentation and personalisation

• Lists, custom properties, smart content and dynamic modules so messaging reflects what is actually known about a guest - segment-level content variations, not a first-name merge field.

Lifecycle and lead scoring

• Interconnected workflow series for enquiry nurture, pre-arrival, in-stay, post-stay, win-back and reactivation.
• Build and iterate the lead scoring model, and review its accuracy against real conversion outcomes.
• Turn estate-specific solutions into reusable frameworks so the next build is faster than the last.

Data quality and the wider data estate

• De-duplication, property standardisation, bounce and engagement decay management, inbox render testing, deliverability and email authentication.
• Maintain the quality of data arriving in HubSpot from BigQuery and third-party integrations, and raise data gaps that block segmentation rather than working around them.

Surveys and feedback operations

• Guest survey and feedback forms and the automation behind them, the export and reporting inventory that follows, and the conversion of manual reporting into something maintainable.

Reporting and insight

• HubSpot and Looker Studio dashboards on CRM-attributable revenue, repeat booking rate, engagement and list health.
• Report against a stated hypothesis: what was expected, what happened, what changes next.
• Surface the strategic findings too - conversion gaps, opt-in performance, channel effectiveness - with a recommended action attached.

Enablement and documentation

• Architecture and workflow documentation, decision records, diagrams and handover material.
• Train estate marketing teams to use what you build, and brief colleagues on system design and correct usage, so the pod is not a bottleneck and not dependent on one person’s memory.
• Handle incoming requests and set expectations with estate stakeholders on what is possible and when.

Compliance

• Consent capture, records of consent and opt-out handling that satisfy POPIA in South Africa and UK and EU GDPR for our UK, Italian and Dutch estates - including lawful basis, soft opt-in, data subject requests, retention and cross-border transfer.
• Design these into the architecture rather than retrofitting them, and advise on the right email type and consent treatment for a given send.

What we’re looking for

Essential

• 4-5 years in CRM, lifecycle, email or marketing automation, including at least three years hands-on in HubSpot Marketing Hub - building workflows, lists, custom properties and object relationships, not only sending from templates someone else built.
• Demonstrable ownership of a CRM data model, not only campaigns run inside one that someone else designed.
• Relevant tertiary qualification.
• Working knowledge of email deliverability and authentication - SPF, DKIM, DMARC, and what to do when a sending domain’s reputation slips.
• Practical command of POPIA and GDPR as they apply to marketing communication: lawful basis, consent capture and retention.
• Experience working inside or alongside a marketing team: taking briefs, feeding back on creative, coordinating timelines with people who do not think in workflows.
• Evidence you have enabled other people - documentation, training or standards you wrote that outlived your own involvement.
• Able to explain, unprompted, how you segmented an audience and why that segmentation was the right call.
• Evidence you have measured your own work: a metric you moved, and how you know it was you.
• Clear written English, and the ability to write and edit guest-facing copy to brief.

Advantageous

• Multi-brand or multi-market CRM experience, and working in Jira alongside a documentation tool such as Confluence or Slite.
• Integration and workflow automation tooling such as n8n.
• HubSpot CMS Hub, and experience onboarding a brand onto HubSpot from scratch.
• Afrikaans in addition to English.
• Experience using BI Reporting tools such as Data Studio/PowerBI.

How we will know it is working

• CRM that holds up as the portfolio grows, rather than accumulating workarounds.
• Reporting the commercial teams trust enough to make decisions on.
• Compliance maintained without obstructing commercial activity.
• Documentation complete enough that the systems stay intelligible without you present.
• Estate marketing teams able to run what you built.

Perks & Benefits

• Daily catered lunch.
• Flexible working hours - core hours are 9am to 3pm.
• Choice of equipment (most of us use Apple).
• Generous training and conference budget.
• 30% discount at Babylonstoren - online shop, hotel, spa, and farm shops.
• Arranged admission to Babylonstoren for you and immediate family.
• Access to Babylonstoren’s recreation centre, gym, swimming pool, and studios.
• Quarterly socials and team building.