“Pet insurance is a business that has a huge amount of white space,” said Sabrina Sebastian. “There was a significant opportunity to expand awareness and penetration rate of pet insurance which is less than 3% for all pet parents today.”
In 2019, international insurance coverage company MetLife had actually obtained PetInitially, a family pet medical insurance business established in 2004. After the acquisition, Sebastian, PetFirst’s previous CFO, and now MetLife’s AVP for Pet Insurance Marketing, was charged with growing the MetLife Pet Insurance department.
In 2021, there were roughly 135.2 million dogs and cats owned by Americans, with about 3.9 million U.S. animals (mainly dogs and cats) guaranteed that year. As a growth-focused business, MetLife saw a substantial chance to broaden the family pet insurance coverage department. They’d been utilizing a standard marketing workflow with modular groups that were extremely experienced in marketing.
Said Sebastian, “If we needed to tap into other teams, we would do that, but it was a really traditional way of working. We discovered that we also needed to rely heavily on our tech partners, our data partners, and our business partners.”
This requirement is what drove the shift from a standard marketing technique to a nimble marketing structure.
Bringing cross-functional groups together
Agile marketing, which has its roots in software advancement, is a method for online marketers to react quickly to the altering requirements of consumers and drive effective business results. It’s done through a team-based technique utilizing collective practices. This brand-new method of working empowers online marketers to do the ideal thing for the client at the correct time, getting rid of a great deal of inefficient procedure overhead.
“It’s a very natural way of working when you need to tap into another skill set or another opportunity that exists outside your core team,” said Sebastian. “When we started to think about how we wanted to operate and work differently, we asked ourselves, okay, what do we need to be able to do that?”
MetLife was already utilizing nimble pods in specific departments within the organization. Their international CFO and other senior leaders within the business offered the assistance that Sebastian required to move from a standard marketing to a nimble marketing technique.
“We had the support and the executive sponsorship of the MetLife global CMO. He was behind these efforts and got everybody else excited about that,” said Sebastian. “It was great to have that support starting at the top and from senior leaders in all areas of the business. It really does require a cross-functional team.”
In addition to buy-in and assistance from management, Sebastian was concentrated on how to assemble her multidisciplinary marketing group. She eventually approached all the groups that required to be associated with the procedure consisting of conventional marketing, material technique, information and analytics, innovation, and the more conventional IT and facilities groups.
“We went to those leaders and said, okay, we’re putting together this team and we’re putting together a new way of working and we want to tap into the resources that you have,” said Sebastian.
When combining cross-functional groups, Sebastian stressed the significance of beginning foundationally and comprehending that not everyone is an online marketer. Marketing required to take an action back and inform numerous groups on what they were doing, why they were doing it, and how they were preparing to get it done.
“Ultimately, we needed to get them ingrained in the actual business goals that we had in front of us, said Sebastian. “A lot of these people had never worked on Pet before. Then secondarily, a lot of the people had never been part of a marketing team before. So, we had to do a lot of training and education and really just make sure folks were on the same page.”
Getting nimble off the ground
To get the nimble group up to speed with the family pet insurance coverage department’s brand-new nimble marketing technique, Sebastian’s group did some on-site training to make certain that everyone comprehended the structures and concepts of nimble marketing. This likewise enabled the group to be familiar with each other.
“Part of the agile marketing process is just making sure that the team stays connected,” said Sebastian. “There are daily stand-up meetings and different ceremonies that take place throughout the process to make sure that everyone is on the same page. We also did a fair bit of education and work on our side to make sure that everybody was comfortable and getting to know each other as a team.”
The nimble marketing technique is collective. That encompasses the method groups are lead and handled. Instead of a single supervisor or leader, there are Product Owners (POs) that help assist in interaction and keep individuals linked. One of the concepts of nimble marketing is the group is self-functioning and independent.
“It’s not that there’s not someone in charge,” said Sebastian, “But there’s not someone who’s the boss. You depend on the team to manage itself. We have a PO that does an amazing job of organizing all of the things that need and managing the activities that a PO should.”
Dig deeper: Introducing a thorough guide to the Agile Marketing Navigator
Focusing on results and business effect
One of the greatest obstacles that Sebastian’s group needed to get rid of, beyond the de-siloing of groups, was to adopt a more business-focused frame of mind when it concerned objectives. That is, when groups are separated from each other, they tend to concentrate on the objectives of that particular group, whether it’s marketing, sales, innovation, or business.
“The great thing about Agile is that the business goal is really the guiding principle of what we’re all working towards every single day,” Sebastian explained. “So we’re making sure that we stay close to that goal and understand the ‘why’ behind the work that we’re doing.”
Said Stacey Ackerman, partner at NavigateAgile and MarTech factor, “It’s really common in marketing to be going 100 miles an hour trying to do as much as possible, but if you ask anyone what goal they’re trying to achieve for the business or the customers, most marketers have no idea. What I love about agile marketing is that everyone from senior leaders to the team executing the work is aligned and working towards the same outcome. Therefore, marketers that are really succeeding with agile marketing are actually doing less work with better results,”
MetLife’s nimble technique is concentrated on results and including worth versus simply being hectic. It’s a big-picture frame of mind that connects marketing activities to those results that include worth to the business. “That’s one of the ways that we really have seen a shift in our team,” said Sebastian. “We’re not just doing things. We’re doing things that are really impactful, are adding value, and are helping us get closer to those big business goals that we have.”
Sebastian keeps in mind 2 crucial accomplishments from having actually carried out a nimble marketing approach within MetLife. The initially is that, while there were already numerous other nimble pods within the business, her nimble group has actually had the ability to blaze the path for nimble marketing. “We’re laying out the foundation for how an agile pod should work. And we’re able to share that knowledge across the organization.”
Sebastian validated that they’re offering more policies now than they ever have. Year over year development remains in double digits. “This is definitely a way of working that we’d like to continue to expand at MetLife, specifically in the marketing space,” said Sebastian. “We’ve seen really significant impacts from the work that we’ve been doing.”
“The other thing that’s interesting is that we have a direct connection with the consumer. MetLife is a voluntary benefits company, so we have a large portion of our efforts concentrated in the group business, but we also have the opportunity with Pet to go direct to consumer. That’s one of the reasons that Pet was a good fit for agile marketing. We’re all about meeting pet parents where they are. Being able to connect in meaningful ways to the consumer, regardless of where you find them, has been really impactful for us.”
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