Head of Direct Marketing

About this role

ABOUT LENDABLE

Lendable is on a mission to build the world's best technology to help people get credit and save money. We're building one of the world’s leading fintech companies and are off to a strong start:

- One of the UK’s most exciting unicorns with a team of over 800 people

- Among the fastest-growing tech companies in the UK

- Profitable since 2017

- Backed by top investors including Balderton Capital and Goldman Sachs

- Loved by customers with the best reviews in the market (4.9 across 10,000s of reviews on Trustpilot https://uk.trustpilot.com/review/lendable.co.uk)

So far, we’ve rebuilt the Big Three consumer finance products from scratch: loans, credit cards and car finance. We get money into our customers’ hands in minutes instead of days.

We’re growing fast, and there’s a lot more to do: we’re going after the two biggest Western markets (UK and US) where trillions worth of financial products are held by big banks with dated systems and painful processes.

JOIN US IF YOU WANT TO

1. Take ownership: you are trusted to make decisions that drive a material impact on the direction and success of Lendable from day 1

2. Work in small teams of exceptional people: Lendies are relentlessly resourceful. We challenge the status quo to solve problems and find smarter solutions

3. Build the best technology in-house: we use new data sources, machine learning and AI to make machines do the heavy lifting

About the role

We’re entering a once-in-a-company moment: a major step-change in our D2C marketing investment, a full rebrand of the company and product under the Zable brand, and a marketing function being built out at pace. This is one of the most exciting marketing builds in UK fintech right now, with the financial strength, customer base, and product depth to back it up.

Direct Mail is one of our highest-potential channels and we’re hiring a leader to turn it into a scaled, precise, and defensible growth engine. We’re looking for a Head of Direct Mail to own the channel end-to-end: creative, sends, logistics, offers, and reporting, sourcing the data pipeline and user-data enrichment that let us target the right customer, with the right offer, at the right moment.

You'll lead the channel's dedicated analysts and work with our creative team. Your job is to set the direction: decide who we mail, with what offer and when, commission and challenge the selection and response models, and hold every campaign to CAC and LTV targets.

Standalone direct mail roles with this kind of budget and autonomy are rare. If you've got significant experience in acquisition mail and want to build a channel your own way, at a profitable business with the product range and analytical capabilities to make it work, this is the role.

What we’re looking for:

Essential:

- 5+ years in direct mail, including at least 2–3 years owning an acquisition DM programme end to end: strategy, budget, data, production and results.

- A track record of mailing cold prospects at meaningful scale. You'll be able to talk through the volumes, budgets, response rates and CPAs you've been accountable for.

- Experience procuring data: working with data suppliers on list selection, screening, enrichment and cost.

- Deep knowledge of the DM supply chain: print, lettershop, Royal Mail products (Advertising Mail, Mailmark, partially addressed, door drops) and suppression (MPS, goneaways, deceased).

- A strongly commercial approach. You build the business case, forecast volumes and returns, own the channel P&L, and measure spend on CAC, ROI and payback rather than pieces mailed.

- Strong analytical judgement. You design test cells and holdouts, read results critically, and understand response and propensity modelling well enough to brief analysts, challenge their work and turn it into mailing decisions.

- Experience managing suppliers: tendering, negotiating, setting SLAs and keeping several partners to schedule.

- The ability to run a multi-drop campaign calendar across products, segments, creative, compliance sign-off, production and mail dates.

- Experience leading analysts and working closely with creative teams.

- A clear communicator who earns the trust of finance, risk, compliance and data teams.

- Demonstrable use of AI in your workflow.

Desirable:

- Experience in acquisition mail in financial services, especially credit cards or loans, including prescreened or pre-approved offers and risk-based targeting.

- Experience standing up a data pipeline or enrichment stack (first-party + third-party / bureau data)

- Experience building a channel or function from scratch

- Background hiring and developing an analytics or design team

You’re a good fit if you’re:

- Acquisition-minded: you're energised by finding new customers, not re-contacting existing ones.

- Commercially driven: you measure success in incremental LTV and payback, not response rate alone.

- A first-principles thinker: you argue from data and clean experiments, not received wisdom

- Organised: you can run several drops across multiple suppliers and still hit mailing deadlines.

- Energised by greenfield: you’d rather build the engine than tune someone else’s

What you’ll be doing

Strategy and commercials

- Own the direct mail strategy and set volume, response and payback targets anchored to LTV.

- Own the channel P&L: forecasting, budget and CAC/LTV discipline.

- Decide how far and how fast to scale, based on the economics.

Data and targeting

- Source and buy prospect data from bureaus and brokers, and combine it with our first-party data.

- Direct the analysts building the response and propensity models that decide who we mail, with what offer and when.

- Work with risk analysts to shape offers around eligibility and lifetime value.

Campaigns and supplier management

- Plan and run the campaign calendar, from data selection to the mail landing on doormats.

- Select, negotiate with…