Head of Marketing Automation

UniQuest is the embedded enrolment & admissions partner to universities across the UK, EU, USA, Australia and New Zealand. We are part of Keystone Education Group, one of the world's largest student marketing and recruitment businesses, and we are executing an ambitious strategy to 2030 – expanding into new markets, launching new products, and deepening what we do for the institutions we serve – always putting the student journey and our partner’s needs at the heart of ‘what good looks like’ and how we build and develop our services and products.

We’re a global business, both in terms of the geographical territories we serve and the operations we establish to underpin the necessary delivery to ensure partnership success and world-class outcomes for our partner universities.

The Opportunity

We are seeking an experienced leader in marketing communications and automation, with demonstrable technical expertise in Marketing Cloud, Salesforce or a comparable platform (transferable technical knowledge base and skill set).

As Head of Marketing Automation you will be responsible for the strategic, operational and technical leadership and development of the Marketing Automation function. This role ensures the team delivers high-quality, innovative and effective marketing activity for UniQuest partners while maintaining strong governance, platform stability, team performance and continuous improvement.

This role combines people leadership, technical expertise, data & insights, strategic partner engagement, service development, commercial acumen and cross-functional collaboration. As Head of Marketing Automation you will oversee day-to-day operations whilst driving the strategic development of marketing automations for existing UniQuest partners. You will do so, through a strong data-insight and analytical led approach, ensuring that developments optimise the marketing automation function(s) for the best possible outcomes. You will also draw on these capabilities to drive the overall strategic direction and development of the function and our products/services in this space.

You will be an authority for your remit, confident in what ‘good looks like’, with the ability to influence senior stakeholders both internally and externally. You will drive innovation and change with an acute commercial acumen that enables you to identify new opportunities and execute on the delivery of these.

As Head of Marketing Automation you will demonstrate:

• Strong people leadership and the ability to manage, develop and support teams across multiple locations.
• Advanced technical knowledge of marketing platforms, automation, HTML/CSS and CRM-integrated communications.
• Confidence in senior partner and stakeholder-facing meetings.
• The ability to translate business and partner requirements into scalable technical and operational solutions.
• Strong governance, quality assurance and risk-management skills.
• A proactive approach to innovation, optimisation and continuous improvement.
• The ability to manage competing priorities, complex projects and business-critical escalations.
• Strong cross-functional collaboration and stakeholder management.

Key Responsibilities

1. People Management & Leadership

• Lead and develop the Marketing Automation team across the UK and Manila, supporting all typical HR related processes associated with managing personnel, developing individuals (and a team) and ensuring effective coordination and delivery of day-to-day operations.

2. Technical Leadership

• Act as the technical lead for the Marketing Automation function and provide expert guidance on Salesforce Marketing Cloud, whilst ensuring appropriate technical knowledge is also embedded in appropriate roles within the team.
• Ability to identify technical issues that impact operations, mitigate against these and troubleshoot solutions in coordination with appropriate technical colleagues to maintain business continuity of marketing journeys, data and platform configuration.
• Manage the addition and amendment of fields and Base Data Extensions within Marketing Cloud, ensuring appropriate dependency checks are completed.
• Act as HTML and CSS subject‑matter expert.
• Identify and implement improved approaches to marketing automations, journeys and campaign delivery.
• Ability to solutionise complex or non‑standard requirements where appropriate.

3. Partner Implementation

• Coordinate the operational and technical onboarding/implementation of new UniQuest partners - capturing business requirements through discovery calls, working cross-functionally with technical solutions to provision business units, integrations, set‑up & access, and build/deploy relevant configurations as necessary in order to test, valid and sign‑off environments for live deployment.

4. Supplier & Third‑Party Management

• Own the day‑to‑day operational relationship with customer success managers for third‑party platforms such as: Salesforce Marketing Cloud, DESelect, JIRA and Litmus ensuring that these operate within contractual limits and continue to serve the business as the ‘best‑fit’ tools for the marketing automation function.
• Ability to make business cases to senior leadership with costed recommendations for the implementation of new, or replacement third party solutions that will enhance the marketing automation capabilities, improve architecture or serve to drive operational efficiencies or cost savings.

5. Partner Management & Strategic Influence

• Ability to build, foster and maintain excellent working relationships with key partner stakeholders at various levels of seniority. These relationships will be maintained through a regular cadence of meetings throughout the year, supplemented by other strategic touch points and reporting such as annual reviews.
• Through your engagement with UniQuest partners, you will ensure that partner objectives are being met, that their marketing automation activities are being optimised on a continuous improvement basis based on data‑led insights and that the power of our data‑insights are utilised to strategically inform and influence what and how we deliver for our partners.

Skills and Experience

• Significant experience in email marketing, CRM, marketing automation or a related digital marketing discipline.
• Strong experience of leading and developing a team, including performance management and workload prioritisation.
• Advanced working knowledge of Salesforce Marketing Cloud or a comparable enterprise email marketing/automation platform.
• Strong understanding of CRM‑integrated email marketing, data structures, segmentation, automation and customer journeys.
• Good working knowledge of HTML and CSS for email, including troubleshooting rendering issues.
• Experience managing technical configurations, platform changes or integrations.
• Strong B2B facing experience and partner management, with confidence presenting to senior stakeholders.
• Experience working across technical, data, operational and commercial teams.
• Strong analytical skills and the ability to use reporting to identify performance, workload and optimisation opportunities.
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills.
• Strong organisational skills, attention to detail and the ability to manage multiple priorities and deadlines.
• Experience managing third‑party technology providers or SaaS platforms is desirable.
• Experience within Higher Education marketing (encompassing student recruitment, admissions or conversion) is desirable but not essential, an ambition to become an expert and influential authority on this is required.

Key Platforms & Tools

Direct experience in the following platforms will be beneficial in this role:

• Salesforce Marketing Cloud and Sales/Service Cloud
• DESelect
• Litmus
• JIRA Service Management
• FormAssembly
• AWS/SFTP

About Keystone Education Group

At Keystone, you will be working with passionate, professional and high-performance individuals. Together, we have grown successfully into more than 700 talented employees with sites that are recognized as the world's leading search engines for education. Ambition, drive and great ideas help us reach our goals – join us in the next step of your career!

Keystone is an equal opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are deeply committed to fostering an inclusive environment for all employees.

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