Your Instagram DMs are an Untapped Goldmine

Last month, I ran an experiment.

As the newest member of the Tildei GTM team, I’ve quickly learned just how fast-paced an early-stage startup can be. Every day, we are trying something different. Amidst all the noise, it can be easy to lose track of the bigger picture. 

So, after 4 weeks on the job, I wanted to take a step back - or rather, a step in. I spent hours inside Instagram Direct Messages (DMs) observing how our target brands are interacting with their customers. 

Long story short? They aren’t. 

Of the 100 brands I reached out to, 58 of them didn’t respond at all. Of the 36 that did, most of them (70%) took over 30 minutes to get back to me. In the fast-paced worlds of social media and online shopping, that’s an eternity.

Clearly, most brands aren’t prioritizing engaging DM experiences. 

But should they?

‍The Opportunity in the DMs‍

‍The Success of SMS 

The average brand is no stranger to email and SMS marketing, with the latter surging in popularity over the last couple of years. For good reason, too. Open rates of 98% are unheard of for emails. The results speak for themselves:

• 72% of people have made a purchase after receiving a text from a brand
• 86% of consumers made 2+ purchases in the last year from SMS messages
• 65% of people who made an SMS-driven purchase in the last year say that texts caused them to buy sooner than they originally intended

(Data from Klaviyo’s 2024 SMS Consumer Report) 

Given the success of SMS marketing, it seems fair to question why brands should care about Instagram DMs too. 

‍How Instagram is Different

The thing is, almost every brand is already using Instagram. Today, there are over 200 million business accounts on the platform. Most of these have hundreds, thousands, even millions of followers who are, or once were, interested in their products. 

Almost every consumer is using it too. And not just to chat with friends or watch funny Reels. Nearly 47 million people in the U.S. will make a purchase through Instagram this year. 

These aren’t the same conditions as email and SMS - Instagram’s existence as a social platform positions it uniquely for conversation between brand and buyer. 

More specifically, Instagram can facilitate more conversations with consumers who are more interested in having them. Think about it: brands are posting multiple times a week in their Feed and multiple times a day via Stories, often alongside ad campaigns and influencer partnerships. Each of those posts is an opportunity for your followers to start a direct  conversation with your brand and lead to a purchase.

Needless to say, both parties benefit: 

• Consumers get to initiate the conversations they need, in a platform they are already using, without feeling like they are being spammed
• Brands get to cut through the fluff and focus their conversational power on the consumers they know are interested in buying

This is  a different kind of interaction than email and SMS messages - one that is more relevant, and more personal. If Feeds and Stories are where brands show their personality, the DMs are where consumers can feel it and experience it first hand in a conversation - using the same visually engaging interface that they already use to message their friends every day. 

Using AI to Drive These Conversations at Scale

The problem with personalization is that it isn’t scalable. Or at least it wasn’t, until the emergence of AI agents. To make the most of your DMs, AI tools are more than a ‘nice to have’. They are necessary.

Solving for Speed 

The average human attention span is around 8 seconds, and it’s most likely even shorter in social media environments  like DMs. Consumers are easily distracted by other notifications - both in and outside of Instagram - and eager to get back to their dopamine-inducing Discover page. 

If a brand wants to retain a person’s interest, they need to act fast. Not only does this improve their chances of a conversion, but it also boosts the consumer’s perception of the company (51% of the most memorable brands on social media respond quickly to customers).

By meeting consumers in their DMs, in real-time, brands unlock the opportunity to convert a potential buyer during the tiny timeframe, while they are actively interested, in a way that isn’t possible over email or SMS. And bear in mind, 84% of us say we have made impulse purchases before. Responding a handful of seconds later could be the difference between a buy and a nice try. 

Level Up Your CDP 

The best thing about fast replies is that they are a catalyst for more fast replies in a back-and-forth dialogue. And each of those replies becomes  a data point that can be used to improve future interactions - both in and outside of the DMs. 

Very quickly, you turn Instagram into a third central marketing channel, interconnected with email and SMS and feeding valuable data back into your CDP. The consumer experience improves across each of those channels as a result. 

Personalize in a Way Humans Couldn’t

When was your last order? What new products have since been added to the store? What questions did you ask the website chatbot last week? 

These are the kind of mid-conversation considerations only an AI agent could make. By drawing in data like this from other parts of your marketing stack, AI facilitates a much greater level of personalization at a faster speed than your average human agent. More often than not, that could be the difference between a new purchase and another “I’ll think about it”. 

Training the Consumer

Clearly, there is a lot of hidden value in your DMs waiting to be unlocked. But right now, the majority of consumers aren’t thinking about the DMs as a channel for meaningful communication with brands. The results of my experiment indicate as much. 

In order to get the most out of your newly supercharged DMs, brands need to be proactive about initiating conversation. 

The Importance of Calls to Action

You can easily encourage conversations  by signposting your conversational abilities with calls to action throughout your Instagram account. Here are three obvious places where you could include a conversation-focused CTA:

• Posts - Ask your followers to comment on the Post using a specific keyword in order to receive a DM starting a conversation. For example, you might be a bakery and you post recipes that use your products. In addition to mentioning your product in the Post’s caption, you can tell users to comment a keyword in order to receive a link to the product directly in their DMs. 
• Stories - A similar scenario can play out via Stories too. Maybe you are a clothing company just launching a new limited edition hoodie series. Throw up a story signposting the hoodies, telling users to reply with  a keyword in order to get early access to the series. 
• Ads - Unlike Posts and Stories, Ads support a direct ‘click to conversation’ flow. You might be a jewelry company that likes to run Instagram ads. Bolster that effort by offering a ‘Click to chat with a stylist’ button at the bottom of the ad, taking the user to the DMs and kicking off a conversation.  

Once users see how frequently you are directing them to the DMs, how easy it is to have a conversation, and how well you are able to handle the questions that they ask, they will also start to initiate more DM conversations on their own accord. 

Just like that, you have added a third key channel for your marketing - one that is uniquely centered around conversation and complements your existing communication over SMS and email. 

Conclusion: Time to Embrace the DMs 

Starting out on my DM experiment, I had little idea of what to expect. The results ended up painting a much clearer picture than I would’ve predicted: most brands simply aren’t focused on driving conversions in Instagram DMs at the moment.

And that’s understandable. Answering all of their DMs has traditionally taken a significant amount of manpower. And often, the organic engagement doesn’t justify it.

We don’t think this needs to be the case. Recent advancements in AI give brands the ability to drive engagement and DMs, at scale, in a more personalized way than ever before. And with each of these comments, replies and DMs, the algorithm pushes your brand another step up the engagement ladder, fueling the next wave of follower growth. 

So, take the plunge. You’re already investing in email and SMS marketing. What’s stopping you from betting on Instagram too? You might just unlock your next marketing goldmine.