Email & Retention Specialist

The Role

The Email & Retention Specialist will own the full cycle of email and SMS delivery for our clients: building campaigns and flows in Klaviyo, owning segmentation logic, running A/B tests, analyzing performance, and bringing back recommendations to sharpen the strategy. This is not a “set up campaigns from a brief” role. You’ll be the operational right hand of our two strategists, executing flawlessly while also pushing back, proposing improvements, and treating each Klaviyo account as if it were yours.

You’ll also help us push the agency forward on AI. We’re investing heavily in AI across operations, content, and CRM, and we need a teammate who is genuinely curious, willing to test new tools as they come out, and excited about building lightweight agents and Claude skills that remove repetitive work from their plate.

What a typical week looks like: building the next month of campaigns in Klaviyo for four or five clients. Adapting copy from a strategist for FR and EN audiences. Running QA on a flow before launch (preview, rendering, links, UTMs, deliverability). Pulling post-send numbers and writing a short note on what to keep, what to test next, what to kill. Hopping into Shopify to update a collection, fix a content block, or tweak something light in the theme so the designer is unblocked. Testing a new AI tool a teammate flagged and reporting back on whether it earns its place in our stack. On a client call, surfacing a segmentation opportunity nobody had spotted. Drafting a clean A/B test plan for a welcome flow.

Reality Check

Lake House has tripled in size over 3 years and is aiming to do it again. This is a small team building something ambitious, embedding long-term with clients as their CRM and email partner, and pushing hard on AI as the underlying leverage.

You’re not joining a finished company with polished processes. This is the construction site. Some things are well-defined, others are being figured out as the team grows. When something doesn’t work well, the expectation is to speak up and help fix it, not just work around it.

The person we hire will help build what comes next: shaping how email work flows through the agency, contributing ideas about how to scale CRM delivery, building internal skills and agents that compound across clients. If you want a clearly defined role where you execute an established playbook, Lake House isn’t there yet. If you want to help build those systems while delivering exceptional retention work, this could be the right fit.

This is a builder role. You’ll shape how the team works, not just execute within existing frameworks.

Non-Negotiables

• Bilingual French/English. You’ll write campaigns, brief designers, talk to clients, and communicate internally in both languages every day. This is mandatory, not optional. Most of our clients are French-speaking Quebec brands.
• Deep Klaviyo expertise. You understand flows, segmentation, A/B testing, deliverability, list health, suppressions, custom properties, conditional splits. You can make decisions about how to structure a flow, not just execute someone else’s plan. If your background is another major ESP, you must be ready to master Klaviyo fast.
• 3+ years managing email or CRM for eCommerce brands with active campaign calendars and live retention flows. You’ve been the person responsible when a send goes wrong.
• Strong copywriting instincts. You can produce a clean campaign draft in either language without supervision, and you can adapt tone between promotional, educational, and relational sends.
• Comfortable in Shopify. Operational work (products, collections, content blocks) plus light theme edits (theme editor, basic Liquid, app installs and configuration). You won’t be a developer, but you’ll be unblocked when the designer is busy.
• AI fluency and posture. You already use Claude or ChatGPT daily in your work. You see AI as leverage, not a threat, and you’re excited about replacing your own repetitive tasks with lightweight agents and skills. You don’t need to be technical, but you need to be open to everything we’re going to push.
• Hands-on mentality. You do QA yourself. You write your own briefs. You’re not above the work.
• Detail obsession. The kind of person who notices the broken UTM, the missing alt text, the segment that double-counted.

Nice to Have

• SMS marketing experience (Klaviyo SMS, Postscript, Attentive).
• Klaviyo experience across multiple verticals (DTC fashion, beauty, wellness, food, etc.).
• Experience building or shipping AI agents, Claude skills, custom GPTs, or lightweight MCP integrations.
• Previous agency experience juggling multiple clients.

Challenges

• Multiple clients, parallel calendars. You’ll own email programs for several brands at once. Context switching is real and the calendar never sleeps.
• Speed and precision at the same time. The bar is “ship a lot” AND “every send is clean.” Both, not one or the other.
• Building while delivering. We’re simultaneously running excellent retention work for clients AND building our internal AI-driven systems. Both matter.
• Continuous learning. Klaviyo evolves, AI tooling evolves faster, the playbook from 6 months ago is already partly obsolete. Comfort with constant change is the job.

What Makes Someone Succeed Here

You bring ideas to the table, you don’t wait to be told what to do. You catch details others miss. You can shift between strategic (proposing a new flow architecture) and tactical (fixing a broken merge tag). You communicate clearly in both French and English. You’re comfortable with ambiguity, because we’re building as we go. You see AI as an opportunity to do better work, not a threat to your job.

What You’ll Learn & Grow Into

Deep Klaviyo and CRM mastery across multiple verticals. Retention strategy at scale. How to build an AI-leveraged delivery practice from the inside. Over time, the path is to grow into a strategist role within the agency.

What We Offer

• Hybrid work. A mix of working from home and from our downtown Montreal WeWork office.
• Competitive salary.
• Wellness and cell phone allocation.
• Room to grow. Small team means real impact.
• Learning environment with serious investment in AI tooling.
• Autonomy and flexibility.

About Lake House Group

Lake House Group is an AI Commerce agency for Shopify brands. We help companies grow by building strong retention engines (email, SMS, CRM), sharpening their go-to-market, and embedding AI across marketing, operations, and product management.

Through the right mix of technology, training, and hands-on partnership, Lake House helps brands move with more clarity, speed, and adaptability in the era of intelligent commerce.

The team has tripled in size over the last 3 years and is aiming to do it again.