Senior Manager, Marketing Strategist (behavior change marketing)

We’re building a world of health around every individual — shaping a more connected, convenient and compassionate health experience. At CVS Health®, you’ll be surrounded by passionate colleagues who care deeply, innovate with purpose, hold ourselves accountable and prioritize safety and quality in everything we do. Join us and be part of something bigger – helping to simplify health care one person, one family and one community at a time.

Driving member behavior change is a critical strategy in Aetna's mission to offer our members affordable health benefits coverage and access to quality care. This role defines and evolves how Aetna approaches behavior change marketing at scale—leveraging advanced analytics, experimentation frameworks, and a strong voice-of-customer POV to drive measurable improvements in engagement, health outcomes, and cost of care.

POSITION SUMMARY
The Behavior Change Marketing Strategist defines and leads how Aetna designs, tests, and scales behavior change marketing: owning the strategy, experimentation approach, and performance outcomes of consumer engagement campaigns. The role drives better health outcomes and lowers total cost of care for over 25 million Aetna members – driven by predictive models and advanced analytics. There will be a heavy focus on improving member health plan engagement through focused communications supporting Commercial and Medicare products including the use of care management services, plan benefit education, and incentive programs. Additionally, there is a focus to support Aetna’s Mental Wellbeing member outreach. The goals of the campaigns are to improve healthcare outcomes for members. The individual will support an ongoing scaling of AI-based tools utilization focused on operational excellence.  

This role is required to be based in our New York City office, 2-3 days a week on-site, with flex days.

In this role, you will operate at two levels:

Strategic leadership (primary)

• Define marketing strategy, experimentation roadmap, and growth opportunities

• Establish frameworks and best practices adopted across teams

• Drive innovation in member engagement approaches

Execution oversight (secondary)

• Ensure high-quality delivery through pod team and partners

• Guide teams on implementation, but not own day-to-day execution directly (we are cross-functional in nature so you will dive in occasionally to support team members, while remaining primarily focused on strategic leadership and team enablement)

What sets successful candidates apart

• Demonstrates a clear, opinionated point of view on member communications in healthcare

• Brings a well-articulated approach to segmentation, messaging strategy, and test design—and can apply it across multiple use cases

• Challenges existing approaches and introduces new strategic directions grounded in data

Fundamental Components:

1) Strategy and Impact

• Evolve and operationalize how Aetna designs, tests, and scales behavior change marketing

• Prioritize opportunities and tradeoffs across campaigns and initiatives based on expected business value and learning potential

• Own the outcomes of end-to-end campaign delivery, ensuring teams and partners execute against clearly defined strategy, hypotheses, and success metrics

• Develop a clear, evidence-based voice-of-customer POV, synthesizing behavioral, clinical, and engagement data

• Translate this POV into distinct, differentiated communication strategies

• Translate marketing strategy into measurable business impact, including engagement, health outcomes, and cost-of-care reduction

• Partner as a strategic peer to Data Science, shaping business cases, measurement frameworks, and value realization

• Become a subject matter expert on Next Best Action (NBA) topics to provide thought leadership within the department and across Aetna Marketing, to potentially spearhead new priority initiatives such as a testing backlog for further personalization and segmentation work

2) Experimentation & Learning Leadership

• Own and drive a portfolio-level experimentation strategy, aligned to business value levers

• Define and prioritize a test roadmap across campaigns, segments, and channels

• Ensure all campaigns are anchored in clear, outcome-based hypotheses and contribute to the broader experimentation roadmap

• Translate results into scalable marketing strategies, not one-off learnings

3) Operations

• Ensure teams leverage Agile processes and artifacts (e.g., test briefs, hypothesis backlogs, execution plans, launch checklists) to enable scalable execution

• Guide cross-functional teams to deliver innovative, high-quality member communications

  • Guide and influence copywriters and designers to develop compelling creative that reflects strategic intent

  • Ensure alignment with Salesforce Marketing Cloud architects and channel owners to enable accurate, scalable implementation

• Establish operating models and governance that enable high-quality, scalable execution (taking on an agile philosophy for rapid velocity and daily iteration)

Interview Process

Candidates will be asked to:

• Present a clear point of view on how marketing should drive behavior change in healthcare, supported by examples or frameworks

• Walk through a testing framework they’ve used to scale impact

• Demonstrate how they translate insights into strategy

Required Qualifications 

• This role is required to be based in our New York City office, 2-3 days a week on-site, with flex days.

• Demonstrated past experience in leading direct consumer marketing campaign strategy and/or operations; ideally 7+ years relevant work experience

• Strong marketing background, with proven results leading marketing campaigns (digital channel experience strongly preferred)

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience working in an Agile methodology and/or rapid test and learn environment (either directly with marketing campaigns or in a product development environment)

Education

Minimum Bachelor's degree or equivalent experience.  Advanced graduate degree preferred (e.g., MBA, MPH).

Pay Range

The typical pay range for this role is:

This pay range represents the base hourly rate or base annual full-time salary for all positions in the job grade within which this position falls.  The actual base salary offer will depend on a variety of factors including experience, education, geography and other relevant factors.  This position is eligible for a CVS Health bonus, commission or short-term incentive program in addition to the base pay range listed above.  This position also includes an award target in the company’s equity award program. 
 

Our people fuel our future. Our teams reflect the customers, patients, members and communities we serve and we are committed to fostering a workplace where every colleague feels valued and that they belong.

Great benefits for great people

We take pride in offering a comprehensive and competitive mix of pay and benefits that reflects our commitment to our colleagues and their families.

Additional details about available benefits are provided during the application process and on Benefits Moments.

Qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment in accordance with all federal, state and local laws.