Data Scientist, Marketing

Company Description

Dedicated to telling stories and creating experiences, Indigo is always looking for bright, energetic and customer-focused people who can help bring our exciting mission to life in one of our more than 170 Indigo, Indigospirit, Chapters and Coles stores across Canada. We offer a variety of exciting opportunities at our retail stores, distribution centres, and home office for people who share our passions and want to be part of a dynamic and enriching culture.

WHO WE ARE

• We love books and all things beautiful
• We are Canada’s Cultural Department Store
• Books are our heart and our soul and Great Books are JUST the Beginning…

We play by the following rules:

• We exist to add joy to our customers’ lives each and every time they interact with us and our products
• Our job is to create joyful moments for our customers
• We treat each other the way we’d treat a valued friend
• We inspire each other to do our best work
• We seek to ignite creativity and innovation every day
• We give back to the communities in which we operate

Job Description

The Marketing Data Scientist plays a crucial role on our analytics-driven customer insight team. This role will focus on leveraging data to optimize customer loyalty, personalize CRM campaigns, accelerate digital performance, and integrate AI solutions that drive business impact.

You’ll work closely with CRM, loyalty marketing, digital media, and retail teams to translate business objectives into analytical strategies, delivering measurable improvements in customer retention, engagement, and lifetime value.

KEY PERFORMANCE METRICS

• Improvements in the quality and accuracy of customer data
• High independence in managing own day-to-day work deliverables
• Collaboration with internal partners to drive data literacy and understanding
• Contribution to driving the overall data enablement strategy
• Build an acquisition model to support high-profit potential customer acquisition
• Build and maintain a retention model for Indigio's most profitable customers
• Deliver specific and actionable insight on the role digital engagement (e.g. App, site, email) plays in future customer retail transactions. 

KEY ACCOUNTABILITIES

Functional

• Analyze customer behaviour and segmentation to optimize loyalty programs and reward structures.
• Measure campaign performance across lifecycle stages: acquisition, engagement, reactivation, and retention.
• Build predictive models for churn, propensity, and next-best-offer.
• Provide insights into the effectiveness of media mix across paid, owned, and earned channels.
• Collaborate with digital and e-commerce teams to improve targeting, personalization, and conversion through data.
• Support A/B and multivariate testing for email, push, and media campaigns.
• Apply machine learning to automate customer segmentation, creative optimization, and offer personalization.
• Partner with engineering and MarTech teams to implement real-time decision-making models.
• Explore and evaluate generative AI solutions for creating marketing content and ideating campaigns.
• Develop and implement advanced customer segmentation models (e.g., K-means, hierarchical clustering, DBSCAN) to identify key behavioural cohorts and optimize targeted marketing strategies.
• Leverage unsupervised learning techniques to uncover patterns in customer purchase behaviour, lifecycle stages, and channel preferences, enabling hyper-personalized campaign design and offer targeting.
• Ensure data integrity and consistency across loyalty platforms, CRM systems, and Customer Data Platforms (CDPs).
• Define key performance indicators (KPIs), reporting frameworks, and dashboards to track marketing performance.
• Document methodologies and communicate findings to technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Support the implementation and enhancement of data science methodologies across the organization.
• Contribute to the development and utilization of Indigo’s data language and ensure its integration into business processes.

People

• Work collaboratively with cross-functional teams to ensure alignment on data-driven initiatives
• Contribute to knowledge-sharing sessions and mentorship within the data team
• Share technical knowledge with others and actively seek to learn from those more knowledgeable than yourself
• Actively seek feedback from peers and stakeholders to refine models and analyses
• Encourage others to freely share their point of view and be open to feedback

Cultural

• Model Indigo’s beliefs and convey a positive image in everything you do
• Celebrate the diversity of thought and have an open mindset
• Take an active role in fostering a culture of continual learning, taking risks without the fear of making mistakes
• Embrace, champion, and influence change through your team and/or the organization

SCOPE

Reports to: Director, Customer Insights & Analytics

KEY RELATIONSHIPS

Internal:

• Loyalty
• CRM
• Digital Media
• Retail Operations

Qualifications

Work Experience / Education / Certifications

• University degree (master’s is preferred) degree in statistics, marketing analytics, computer science, or computer science, or a related field
• 10+ years of experience in marketing data science, preferably in retail, eCommerce, or subscription-based businesses.
• Experience with CRM platforms (Salesforce, Braze, Adobe Campaign), CDPs (e.g., Segment, mParticle), and cloud environments (AWS, GCP, or Azure).
• Strong communication and storytelling skills with an ability to influence decision-makers.
• Experience with loyalty program design and analysis (e.g., points-based, tiered systems).
• Experience implementing or evaluating generative AI models (e.g. for executive reporting synthesis), considered an asset
• Extensive experience linking and analyzing large datasets
• Proven ability and experience analyzing customer data for actionable business insight

Competencies / Skills / Attributes

• Proficient in SQL, Python or R, and machine learning libraries (e.g., scikit-learn, XGBoost, TensorFlow).
• Familiarity with digital analytics tools (e.g., GA4, Adobe Analytics) and media platforms (Meta, Google Ads).
• Knowledge of attribution modeling and marketing mix modeling (MMM).
• Effective communication skills that include excellent written, oral, and presentation abilities
• Demonstrated time management skills: the ability to organize and prioritize work to manage timelines and meet defined deadlines in a fast-paced work environment

Additional Information

At Indigo, we are committed to our communities, our customers, and each other; together we can make a positive impact. We know that fostering diversity and inclusion brings out your full potential and creates a joyful and welcoming environment for everyone. We are driven to be an equitable employer, which highly values your diverse backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives. We believe that you, in all your uniqueness, belong at Indigo. We welcome all applicants and encourage applications from individuals who identify as Black, Indigenous, a person of colour, LGBTQ2+ and people with disabilities. Accommodations are available upon request to individuals who self-identify as having a disability or special need. Please contact Human Resources at [email protected] if you require an accommodation at any time during the recruitment process. 

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