A cyclist riding past the seafront railings at dusk

Keeping customerscoming back

CRM · Retention · Lifecycle · AI

What I do
Help big brands keep their customers
Also known as
Retention Mike
Based
Brighton, UK

I help some of the world’s biggest brands get closer to their customers, and get to do some genuinely cool stuff along the way.

Current role · 2025 — present

Underground Ecom

Head of CRM

Right now I'm Head of CRM at Underground Ecom, an ecommerce growth agency. I lead the CRM team: we work out what a brand's customers actually want, then build the emails and journeys that keep them coming back.

The job is part strategy, part building, part making the tech behave, and lately a lot of it runs on AI.

undergroundecom.com

What I actually do

Keep customers coming back

Lifecycle programmes people actually open, read and act on. Fewer sends nobody asked for, more that land.

Build the team (and the pitch)

Growing a specialist CRM team, and the story we tell big ecommerce brands about what CRM can really do for them.

Make the tech behave

Klaviyo, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Braze, Bloomreach and the rest of the stack. I’ve lived in most of them.

Mike speaking at Ecom Unlocked 2026 beside a slide reading “Retention is having its moment”
A packed room listening to Mike’s talk, with a slide reading “At most agencies, CRM is an afterthought”

On stage · Ecom Unlocked 2026

Retention is having its moment

Career inchapters

  1. 2025Underground EcomHead of CRMNow
  2. 2024Medialab GroupHead of Retention
  3. 2020JellyfishVP, CRM
  4. 2018JellyfishEmail Marketing Director
  5. 2015American ExpressEmail Marketing Analyst
Full career on LinkedIn

The tools I use

Klaviyo
Bloomreach
Braze
Salesforce

Salesforce · Certified

Marketing Cloud Email Specialist

Salesforce · Certified

Marketing Cloud Consultant

Bloomreach · Certified

Certified Professional

Ecom Unlocked

Speaker · 2026

DMA Gold Award

Best Use of Email · 2020

Advertising Week

Speaker & contributor

Campaign Magazine

Featured

MarTech Series

Contributor

About

I've spent my whole career in marketing, from analysing email at American Express to running CRM for agencies. The thread through all of it is simple: customers stick around when you treat them like people, not a list.

Retention Mike is where I share what I've learned: what's working, what isn't, and how AI is changing the job. Thinking clearly about retention is still one of the most useful things a marketer can do.

From the blog

Marketing · Retention · AI

Stop Hiding the AI

Marketing

Stop Hiding the AI

Agencies use AI across every part of the work, and a lot of us still have a reflex to keep quiet about it. That needs to stop.

Investing in Yourself

All of the above

Investing in Yourself

I turned 40 and the only thing I actually wanted was a £3,000 monitor. This isn't really about the monitor - it's about why we'll invest in everything except ourselves, and why that's the wrong instinct.

I Built a YouTube Thumbnail Tool in One Evening with Claude Code

All of the above

I Built a YouTube Thumbnail Tool in One Evening with Claude Code

Last week I built my website in one evening. Seven days later I built a working browser-based thumbnail generator. The gap between 'I wish this existed' and 'I just built it' has never been smaller.

All posts

Let’s talk

Got customers you want to keep, or an idea that sounds a bit too ambitious? Find me on LinkedIn.

LinkedIn