“Pet insurance is a business with a large amount of white space,” said Sabrina Sebastian. “It was a great opportunity to expand awareness and penetration of pet insurance, which is currently less than 3% for all pet parents.”
In the year In 2019, global insurance provider MetLife It acquired PetFirst, a pet health insurance company founded in 2004. Following the acquisition, Sebastian, formerly CFO of PetFirst and now MetLife’s AVP for Pet Insurance Marketing, was assigned MetLife Pet Insurance division.
By 2021, there were approx. 135.2 million About with, Americans own dogs and cats 3.9 million American pets (mostly dogs and cats) are insured that year. As a growth-oriented business, MetLife saw a great opportunity to expand its pet insurance segment. They were using a traditional marketing workflow with highly skilled modular teams in marketing.
Sebastian said, “If we wanted to meet other teams, we would have done that, but this was a really normal way of doing things. We find that we have to rely on our technology partners, our data partners and our business partners.
This need has led to a shift from traditional marketing approaches to an agile marketing framework.
Bringing cross-functional teams together
Based on software development, Agile Marketing is a way for marketers to respond quickly to the changing needs of customers and produce successful business results. It is a team based approach using collaborative exercises. This new way of working empowers merchants to do the right thing for the customer at the right time, eliminating many wasteful processes.
“It’s a very natural way of working when you need to tap into another skill set or another opportunity outside of your core team,” Sebastian said. “When we start thinking about how we want to work and work differently, OK, what do we need to do that?” We asked ourselves.
MetLife was already using agile pods in certain parts of the organization. Their global CFO and other senior executives in the company provided Sebastian with the support he needed to transition from traditional marketing to an agile marketing approach.
“We had the support of the MetLife Global CMO and an executive sponsor. He was behind these efforts and he made everyone happy about it,” Sebastian said. “It’s been great to have this support from the very top and from senior management across all parts of the business. It takes a team that works really well.”
In addition to purchasing and management support, Sebastian focused on how to bring her multidisciplinary marketing teams together. Finally, she contacted all the groups that wanted to be involved in the process, including traditional marketing, content strategy, data and analytics, technology, and the more traditional IT and infrastructure teams.
“We went to those leaders and said, OK, we’re putting this team together and we’re developing a new way of working, and we want to leverage your resources,” Sebastian said.
Sebastian emphasizes the importance of starting with the basics and understanding that not everyone is a marketer when assembling cross-functional teams. Marketing had to step back and teach different groups what they were doing, why they were doing it, and how they planned to do it.
“Ultimately, we have to factor in the actual business goals we had in front of us,” Sebastian said. “Many of these people had never worked on Pete before. Secondly, many people have never been part of a marketing team before. So we had to do a lot of training and education and really make sure people were on the same page.
Being efficient from the ground up
To get the agile team up to speed with the pet insurance division’s new agile marketing approach, Sebastian’s team did some on-site training to ensure everyone understood the fundamentals and principles of directional marketing. This allowed the group to get to know each other.
“Part of an efficient marketing process is making sure the team stays connected,” Sebastian says. “There are daily meetings and various ceremonies to make sure everyone is on the same page throughout the process. We’ve also done a fair amount of training to get everyone comfortable and familiar with the team and we work together.”
The efficient marketing approach is collaborative. That extends to the way teams are led and managed. Instead of a manager or leader, there are Product Owners (POs) who facilitate communication and help people connect. One of the simplest marketing principles is that the team is self-directed and self-directed.
“It’s not that there’s no one in charge, but there’s no one who’s a boss,” Sebastian said. You depend on the team to manage yourself. We have a PO who does an amazing job of organizing all the necessary things and managing the tasks that a PO deserves.
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Focus on results and business impact
One of the biggest challenges Sebastian’s team faced, beyond team de-skilling, was adopting a more business-oriented mindset when it came to goals. That is, when teams are isolated from each other, they tend to focus on the goals of that team, which are focused on marketing, sales, technology, or business.
“The great thing about Agile is that the business goal is the guiding principle of what we all do every day,” says Sebastian. “So we’re making sure we stay close to the goal and understand the ‘why’ behind what we’re doing.”
Stacey Ackerman of NavigateAgile and Martech Contributor says, “Going 100 miles an hour to do the best you can is very common in marketing, but if you ask any client what goal they’re trying to achieve for their business or career, most marketers have no idea. What I love about agile marketing is that everyone from senior management to the back-end team is working together for the same result. So the marketers who are truly successful at efficient marketing are doing less with better results.”
MetLife’s agile approach focuses on results and adds value to engagement. It’s big-picture thinking that connects marketing activities to outcomes that add value to the business. “That’s definitely one of the ways we’ve seen change in our team,” Sebastian said. “We’re not just doing things. We’re really making an impact, adding value and helping us get closer to those big business goals.
Sebastian saw two key successes in implementing an agile marketing approach at MetLife. First, with many other agile pods in the company, her agile teams were able to blaze the trail for directional marketing. “We’re laying the groundwork for how an efficient pod should work. And we can share that knowledge across the organization.
Sebastian confirmed that they are selling more policies than they currently have. Year-over-year growth is in double digits. “This is definitely a way of working at MetLife that we want to expand, especially in the marketplace,” Sebastian said. We have seen significant impacts on the work we do.
“Another interesting thing is that we have a direct relationship with the consumer. MetLife is a voluntary benefits company, so a large portion of our efforts are in the group business, but we also have the opportunity to go direct-to-consumer with Pete. This is one of the reasons why PET is ideal for directional marketing. We’re all about getting pet parents where they are. Being able to connect with the consumer in a meaningful way, no matter where they find them, is important to us.
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The opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author, not Martech. Staff authors are listed here.