This position will support the day-to-day operation of Salesforce Marketing Cloud (SFMC), focusing on execution, platform coordination, and technical enablement – helping ensure campaigns, journeys, and automations are build, maintained, and released smoothly and consistently.
Based on qualifications and experience, a selected candidate may hold one of these titles: Associate Director of Marketing Cloud Operations or Director of Marketing Cloud Operations.
Core Responsibilities include but are not limited to:
- Provide day-to-day direction for SFMC across Email Studio, Journey Builder, Automation Studio, and Contact Builder to ensure platform stability and on-time campaign delivery.
- Lead the execution of the established SFMC send calendar to ensure build readiness, dependencies, and approvals within Marketing Cloud, and surfacing conflicts or risks to the Product Owner as needed.
- Deliver detailed documentation and Jira stories for SFMC builds and operational work (email/Journey/ automation setup, audience, quality assurance, deployment), aligned to Product Owner priorities and sequencing, ensuring clear requirements, acceptance criteria, and cross-team handoffs.
- Perform SFMC quality assurance and pre-send checks.
- Design, build, and maintain SFMC automations and journeys; perform quality assurance and ongoing monitoring to ensure reliability and effectiveness; partner with other teams to troubleshoot failed activities, data loads, sends or reporting and to resolve dependencies outside of Marketing Cloud; coordinate incident response, escalation, and post-incident documentation.
- Define and maintain SFMC operational standards and governance for in-platform usage including folder structure and naming conventions, data retention practices, and change/release coordination.
- Track and report operational KPIs and provide regular visibility into platform performance, along with status updates and risk signals, to marketing and technology stakeholders.
Qualifications
Education & Work Experience
- Bachelor’s degree in marketing, communications, information systems, or another related field, or equivalent combination of education and experience.
- 3+ years of hands-on experience in email marketing operations or marketing automation including campaign execution and delivery.
- Minimum of 1 year of experience operating Salesforce Marketing Cloud (Email Studio, Journey Builder, Automation Studio, Contact Builder) including release/change management and production support.
Skills & Experience
- Hands-on Salesforce Marketing Cloud experience building and maintaining Journey Builder, Automation Studio, Email Studio, Contact Builder, and Data Extensions.
- Ability to write and troubleshoot SQL, write and use AMPscript
- Validating data, audiences, and campaigns before deployment.
- Supporting day-to-day platform operations and stability, including performing quality assurance, troubleshooting issues, and resolving problems.
- Ability to partner effectively with technical teams such as systems, data, analytics, or technology groups.
- Strong problem-solving skills, ability to think creatively and work through complex issues.
- Strong organization, communication, and documentation skills.
- Excellent interpersonal and customer service skills.
- Training, supporting, or enabling marketers and platform users is a plus.
- Creating documentation, office hours, user guides, or operational resources is a plus.
- Experience with CloudPages, Marketing Cloud reporting, Data Cloud, Einstein, AI, or other advanced Salesforce capabilities is a plus.
- Proficiency with Microsoft Office Suite and the ability to learn new software.
- Must be able to handle several activities simultaneously with attention to detail and adherence to deadlines and accuracy.
- Must adhere to strict confidentiality standards.
- Creativity, patience, a sense of humor and a belief in our organizational mission of: Aligning donor passion and generosity to advance Iowa State University’s land grant ideals.
Travel: None
FLSA Status: Exempt
Location: Ames, IA; potentially hybrid
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