Meet Nikhil

With a history of success from utilizing data-driven tactics and funnel optimizations, Nikhil’s expertise in driving growth through creative marketing strategies, customer life cycle journey management, and partnership integrations has led to dynamic results in rapidly changing industries.  

He consistently collaborates with organizational stakeholders to develop sustainable marketing plans that foster growth. Nikhil has managed and grown a $1 Billion-dollar line of business in the D2C subscriptions vertical while driving 2x growth in digital subscription volume and revenue in less than 2 years.

He brings his innovative thinking, swift decision-making, and steward leadership abilities to build and drive teams as disciplined startups despite the size of the company.  

His core business expertise in driving customer-centric digital marketing strategies, data-driven decision making, and innovative marketing optimizations has helped him deliver large scale growth.  

Nikhil has helped organizations realize their growth potential – at the intersection of data/analytics, product experience evolution and effecting meaningful influence on customer’s life cycle. 

Nikhil’s experience:

As the Senior Vice President of Subscription Revenue & Growth for Gannett Media Inc., Nikhil: 

• Led a team of 100 “remote” customer experience, performance marketing and marketing operations specialists to drive consistent 40%+ digital subscription growth and $1B in subscription revenue across 250+ publications and USA TODAY.  
• Integrated lifecycle marketing efforts to centralize and consolidate paid media spend across traditional and performance marketing channels  
• Drove consistent, sequential improvements (30% over 2 years) in customer acquisition costs (CACs) through optimized media buys, audience segmentation, creative & message testing, funnel optimization and other CRO efforts  

As the Vice President of Subscriber Acquisitions for GateHouse Media  

• Led a team of traditional and digital marketing professionals responsible for driving subscriptions for all 150+ GateHouse Media publications with specific focus on the top tier properties that represented ~ 60% of consumer revenue  
• Built a net new digital marketing organization in a startup environment within the Corporate Consumer Marketing team – managing paid digital channels, onsite optimization efforts, improvement of user experience through checkout flow, unlocking new platforms for content distribution & monetization  
• Delivered consistent improvement in campaign performance and efficiency through realigning media spends and optimization growth hacks to drive 50%+ growth in digital net adds YoY  
• Managed a $11 million acquisition budget to drive over 250,000 subscription starts across multiple GateHouse markets through paid media channels  

Prior to pivoting to the previous role at GateHouse Media, Nikhil held the role of Vice President of Marketing, where he:  

• Led a team of marketing professionals responsible for driving over $47 million in consumer & business revenue through – data analytics, new go-to-market strategies, partnerships, engagement tools and business development initiatives.  
• Led the transition of digital platforms – audience analytics , user experience management SaaS platforms and digital engagement tech stacks (Sales Force Marketing Cloud).  
• Instrumental role in 4x increase in engagement through social media efforts (30K Facebook fans in December 2014 → 130K fans in 2017) resulting in over 23% of traffic coming in from Facebook (average monthly UVs 3 million).  
• Initiated data science initiative focused on customer lifetime value, leveraging first party data and deliver contextually relevant, predictive content marketing and acquisition efforts that helped drive 25%+ lift in subscription revenue.  
• Led the transition team post-acquisition by GateHouse Media – and successfully reinstituted content partnerships, community engagement & sponsorship commitments with all the local central Ohio businesses.