Manager, Campaign Delivery

Job Description:

Here at Rakuten Kobo Inc. we offer a casual working start-up environment and a group of friendly and talented individuals. Our employees rank us highly in terms of commitment to work/life balance. We realize that for our people to be innovative, creative and passionate they need to feel valued and supported. We believe in rewarding all our employees with competitive salaries, performance based annual bonuses, stock options and training opportunities.

If you’re looking for a company that inspires passion, personal, and professional growth – join Kobo and come help us on our mission of making reading lives better.

The Role:

Rakuten Kobo Inc. is seeking an experienced and dynamic Manager, Campaign Delivery to lead our Campaign Delivery team. This pivotal role is responsible for the overall resource and team management for Developers, Campaign Specialists, and Marketing Automation Specialists. We empower the marketing organization by delivering innovative digital campaigns across email, push, and landing pages, creating robust technical solutions, ensuring meticulous QA, and deploying campaign elements seamlessly to market.

Reporting to the Senior Manager, Marketing Operations, the Manager, Campaign Delivery plays a vital role in guiding standards, best practices, and cultivating a team that demonstrates healthy curiosity, critical thinking, and strategic planning. This leader will drive both operational excellence and continuous innovation within our campaign delivery processes, ensuring our marketing platforms are fully leveraged to meet business objectives, including spearheading the adoption of AI technologies.

The Person:

Exceptional People & Technical Leader:

• Manages, mentors, and develops a diverse team of Developers, Campaign Specialists, and Marketing Automation Specialists, fostering a culture of high performance, accountability, and continuous learning.
• Provides technical support and strategic guidance, acting as a key technical resource for the team, guiding on standards and best practices for campaign execution, automation design, and front-end development for email, push, and landing pages, including custom scripting within Responsys (or similar marketing platforms), web pixel implementation, and VWO testing (e.g., A/B tests on landing pages and banners).
• Cultivates a team environment that encourages healthy curiosity, critical thinking, proactive problem-solving, and meticulous planning.
• Delegates projects effectively, ensures project timelines are met, and manages workload to prevent over-allocation while optimizing team capacity.
• Conducts reviews, provides guidance, training, and coaching for career development, and defines job specs, interviews, hire, onboards, and trains new talent as needed.

Drives Operational Excellence & Process Innovation:

• Owns and manages the full end-to-end solutioning and delivery lifecycle for all email, push campaigns, and landing pages. This includes overseeing strategic solutioning in collaboration with the Marketing Technology Solution team,
• development, meticulous QA, comprehensive end-to-end testing, deployment, and post-campaign reporting.
• Leads and drives AI adoption and automation within the team, identifying opportunities to leverage artificial intelligence and machine learning to enhance campaign efficiency, personalization, and overall effectiveness.
• Oversees team workflows, consistently identifying and implementing improvements that enhance quality, drive efficiency, and meet new business needs.
• Ensures requirements provided by stakeholders are clear and complete, enabling the team to develop robust solutions and deliver effectively.
• Sets guidelines and creates/manages training for campaign setup, QA processes, and development standards for both internal and external resources.
• Hold regular reviews of challenges faced by the team, working cross-functionally to implement sustainable improvements.
• Identifies new processes and tools needed to support new products, markets, partners, and languages within the Responsys ecosystem.
• Contributes to the strategic roadmap for marketing automation platforms and campaign delivery processes, identifying future needs and technological advancements to support business growth.

Strategic Platform & Solutions Expert:

• Oversees and provides critical input into solutions proposed by both Campaign and Marketing Automation Specialists, ensuring maximum scalability within the platform and the highest quality delivery on business requirements.
• Partners with the Marketing Technology Solutions Team to leverage accurate and aligned data within Marketing Platforms for campaign execution. Actively monitors data quality within the platform, promptly reporting any discrepancies or issues observed to the relevant data owners. Collaborates proactively with the Marketing Technology Solutions Team to define and onboard new data points and innovative solutions required to support evolving campaign strategies and personalization efforts.
• Keeps abreast of trends in the CRM space, particularly within the email and push automation landscape, and emerging AI applications for CRM marketing, bringing forward new ideas to enhance our capabilities.

Accountable for Quality & Performance:

• Ensures the team follows processes and standards for flawless solutioning and execution and accuracy.
• Ensures the team manages browser/ISP/device compatibility, usability, rendering, and adherence to project specifications.
• Ensures the team closely monitors live campaigns at launch and post launch to quickly identify and rectify any issues that arise, overseeing investigation, resolution, and communication for all originating issues.
• Monitors and reports on key performance indicators, including accuracy rate, QA defect rate, Delivery Satisfaction, and team engagement scores.
• Drives continuous improvement in campaign delivery performance by actively monitoring and analyzing send metrics (e.g., deliverability, engagement, skips, bounces, unsubscribes etc.). Identifies, investigates, and troubleshoots issues by collaborating with technical teams (Product, R&D, Marketing Solutions) and business stakeholders to resolve operational problems efficiently (Landing page bugs, banner issues, etc.). Communicates issue status and resolution clearly to all relevant parties and translates insights gained into actionable training or process enhancements for the team.

Collaborative & Communicative Partner:

• Excels in a fast-paced, collaborative working environment, interacting effectively with internal and external teams to ensure clear communication and meet expectations.
• Collaborates with Marketing Producers (within Creative Operations) to manage project timelines and deliverables, providing expertise on campaign scope, technical feasibility, and resource allocation to facilitate seamless execution.
• Partners with key stakeholders to deeply understand campaign requirements and objectives, actively participating in project prioritization by scrutinizing the strategic value and resource investment required for initiatives. This includes questioning approaches to ensure alignment with overall business objectives, maximize customer value, and deliver the best possible customer experience.
• Proactively identifies and manages dependencies with other marketing teams (e.g., Content, Design, Product Marketing, Marketing Operations) to ensure seamless campaign execution and timely delivery.
• Demonstrates excellent verbal and written communication skills, providing clear direction, feedback, and strategic updates to all stakeholders.

The Skillset:

Required:

• 4+ years of people management experience, with a proven track record of leading and motivating diverse technical teams, including Developers, Campaign Specialists, and Marketing Automation Specialists.
• Extensive hands-on experience (ideally 5+ years) within marketing automation platforms such as Oracle Responsys (preferred), Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Adobe Marketing Cloud, or similar, demonstrating a progression from execution to strategy to people management.
• Proven experience in leveraging AI/ML technologies to drive efficiencies or enhance outcomes in marketing automation or digital campaign delivery.
• Strong technical acumen, with a deep understanding of HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and SQL, sufficient to guide developers and critically evaluate technical solutions.
• Demonstrated problem-solving and critical-thinking skills, particularly in complex MarTech environments.
• Experience working with collaboration and work management tools (e.g., Clickup, Jira, Asana, Monday.com).
• Keen understanding of audience segmentation logic, CRM, and data integration principles.
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills, capable of influencing and articulating complex technical concepts to various audiences.
• Ability to manage multiple priorities, self-manage, and lead effectively in a dynamic, fast-paced culture.

Nice to Haves:

• Project Management certification (e.g., PMP, Agile Scrum Master).
• Experience with other MarTech tools (e.g., CDPs, DMPs, analytics platforms).
• Understanding of API integrations and data warehousing concepts.
• Formal education or certifications in AI/ML for marketing.

The Perks:

• Flexible hours and hybrid remote working environment
• Subsidized in-office lunches
• Four extended long weekends in the summer
• Full benefits starting from your first day
• Paid Volunteer days, unlimited sick days, and 3% RRSP matching
• Work From Anywhere Program for up to 3 months (90 days)
• Monthly commuting allowance for those who are hybrid
• Lifestyle spending account
• Talent and development training budget
• Free Kobo device + free weekly e-book or audiobook
• Weekly Kobo Tech University sessions
• Maternity/paternity leave top up
• Dog friendly office

About Rakuten Kobo Inc.
Rakuten Kobo Inc. is the world’s digital bookseller created by and for booklovers. Owned by Tokyo-based Rakuten Group, Inc. and headquartered in Toronto, Rakuten Kobo’s millions of worldwide users can read anytime, anywhere, and on any device. With a mission to make reading lives better for all, Rakuten Kobo connects readers to stories using thoughtful and personalized curation of eBooks and audiobooks, and the best dedicated eReaders and apps for reading. With the singular focus of making reading lives the best they can be, Kobo’s open platform allows people to fit reading into more moments in their busy lives. To learn more about Rakuten Kobo, visit www.kobo.com.

Rakuten Kobo Inc. is an equal opportunity employer. Accessibility accommodations for candidates with disabilities participating in the selection process are available on request. Any information received related to accommodation needs of applicants will be addressed confidentially.  

Rakuten Kobo would like to thank all applicants for their interest in this role however only qualified candidates will be shortlisted.  

#RKIND

Five Principles for Success
Our worldwide practices describe specific behaviors that make Rakuten unique and united across the world. We expect Rakuten employees to model these 5 Shugi Principles of Success.

Always improve, Always Advance - Only be satisfied with complete success - Kaizen
Passionately Professional - Take an uncompromising approach to your work and be determined to be the best
Hypothesize - Practice - Validate – Shikumika - Use the Rakuten Cycle to succeed in unknown territory
Maximize Customer Satisfaction - The greatest satisfaction for our teams is seeing their customers smile
Speed!! Speed!! Speed!! - Always be conscious of time - take charge, set clear goals, and engage your team

Rakuten is an equal opportunity employer. Accessibility accommodations for candidates with disabilities participating in the selection process are available on request. Any information received related to accommodation needs of applicants will be addressed confidentially. 

Rakuten would like to thank all applicants for their interest in this role however only qualified candidates will be shortlisted.

Beware of fraudulent job offers claiming to be from Rakuten. Rakuten does not send unsolicited job offers or request money during the recruitment process. Learn more: https://rakutenemploymentalert.com/

At the time of posting, Rakuten expects the Compensation (base salary + discretionary bonus) for this role to be within the range shown below. Individual compensation will vary based on job-related factors, including the skills, qualifications, and experience of the successful candidate as well as business need and geographic location. The successful applicant for this role will be eligible for stock options, health, vision, dental insurance, RRSP matching, Personal Time Off (PTO), Volunteer Time Off (VTO), and other employee benefits as the company implements.

CAD $77,837.00 - 122,548.53 annually