80% of Agency Revenue Lives in the DMs — Here’s How We Manage It at $700K+/Month
Eighty percent of agency revenue comes from DMs.
Not from posts. Not from subscriber count. Not from viral content moments. From direct, one-on-one conversations between your chat team and the people on the other side of the screen.
Think about what that means for a moment. The single function most agencies treat as an execution afterthought — hire some chatters, give them account access, check in occasionally — is generating four out of every five dollars in the business.
At Aruna, we’ve built a chatting operation spanning 60+ creators that supports over $700,000 per month in managed revenue. The system behind that number isn’t complicated. But it is specific. Every element was built by observing what works, measuring it, and standardizing the practices that consistently produce results.
Most agencies wing it. Here’s what it looks like to not wing it.
The Chat Team Structure That Actually Scales
The first mistake agencies make is treating all chatters as equivalent. They’re not. Effective chat operations have a defined hierarchy with distinct roles and clear accountability at each level.
Junior Chatters
Fresh hires learning account-specific tone, subscriber psychology, and platform mechanics. Junior chatters work under direct supervision and don’t touch high-revenue accounts until they’ve demonstrated baseline competence — typically two to four weeks of structured training.
What they handle: incoming message response on lower-complexity accounts, basic subscriber qualification (new vs. returning vs. high-spend), and entry-level PPV delivery.
What they don’t handle: revenue-critical account interactions, high-spend subscriber relationships, or any situation requiring real-time pricing judgment.
Senior Chatters
Proven performers with consistent MSR and PRR metrics above target. Senior chatters handle higher-value accounts, run subscriber reactivation campaigns, and make real-time pricing decisions within defined parameters.
What they handle: all revenue-driving account interactions, escalation when subscribers show high purchase intent, and complex whale subscriber relationship management.
Team Leads
Experienced former senior chatters who now manage four to eight chatters each. Team leads own QA spot-checks, performance coaching, and escalation decisions that chatters don’t have authority to make independently.
What they handle: weekly QA reviews, chatter coaching and development, escalations, and direct reporting to operations management on team performance.
QA / Operations
The function that tracks performance data across the entire operation, identifies trends before they become problems, and coordinates with creator success managers when account-level strategy needs to change.
This structure isn’t bureaucracy — it’s clarity. Every chatter knows who their team lead is, what escalation looks like, and exactly how performance is evaluated. That clarity is what drives accountability. Ambiguity is where underperformance hides.
The KPIs That Actually Predict Revenue
Tracking revenue alone tells you what happened last week. The right KPIs tell you what’s going to happen — and where to intervene before revenue suffers.
Messages Sent Ratio (MSR) — Target: 60%+
MSR measures what percentage of your chatter’s interactions are proactive outreach versus reactive responses. A 60% MSR means 6 out of every 10 conversations were initiated by your chatter.
Why it matters: reactive chatters wait for subscribers to message first. Proactive chatters re-engage cold subscribers, follow up on unopened PPVs, and run relationship-maintenance campaigns between content drops. The revenue difference between a 40% MSR chatter and a 70% MSR chatter on the same account is not marginal — it’s significant enough to justify the entire investment in training and oversight.
Purchase Response Rate (PRR) — Target: 6%+
PRR measures the percentage of messages sent that result in a purchase. Six percent means 6 out of every 100 messages your chatter sends generates a transaction.
This is the conversion efficiency metric. High MSR with low PRR means your chatters are reaching people but not converting them — almost always a training and messaging quality problem, not a subscriber quality problem.
Average Basket Rate (ABR) — Target: 2%+
ABR measures what percentage of subscribers make a purchase in a given period. Two percent means 1 in 50 subscribers is buying something in the timeframe you’re tracking.
ABR is the account health metric. A declining ABR signals a disengaging subscriber base or a PPV pricing and positioning problem. Both are fixable — but only if you catch them early. Most agencies don’t have this number. They find out their account is declining when the creator asks why revenue dropped.
Revenue Per Chatter Hour
Total account revenue divided by chatter hours logged on that account. This metric right-sizes your team allocation and identifies where additional chatter investment yields the highest return.
Subscriber Segmentation: The Framework Most Chatters Skip
The fundamental insight behind elite chatting performance: different subscriber segments require entirely different approaches. A single-message strategy deployed uniformly across an entire subscriber base is leaving 30-40% of revenue on the table.
New Subscribers (0-30 days)
The priority is relationship building and first purchase. New subscribers are evaluating the creator and the experience. The first DM sets the tone for the entire subscriber relationship — get it wrong and you’re building on a weak foundation.
Goals: welcome warmly, establish creator persona, qualify interest level, and create the first purchase opportunity within the first week without feeling aggressive. Ask questions. “What kind of content are you most into?” is simultaneously relationship building and subscriber intelligence gathering. Their answer tells you exactly what to pitch.
Regular Subscribers (30-180 days, moderate spend)
These fans have demonstrated loyalty but haven’t reached their purchase ceiling. The priority is deepening the relationship and moving them toward higher-value purchases — without rushing the progression and burning the relationship.
Goals: maintain consistent engagement, introduce higher-ticket PPVs and bundles, build toward purchase lock-in events like exclusive content drops, live interactions, or custom content opportunities.
Whale Subscribers (high-spend history)
Your highest-value subscribers require the most personalized treatment. Whales don’t respond to mass-blast PPV messages. They’re in it for the relationship — and they know the difference between a genuine interaction and a copy-paste pitch sent to 500 people simultaneously.
Whales convert on custom content, direct interaction, and exclusive access. Not on the same PPV being offered to everyone else. Treating them like regulars is one of the fastest ways to lose an account’s highest-revenue subscribers permanently.
Cold Subscribers (60+ days without a purchase)
Re-engagement campaigns, not standard chat. The tone shifts to curiosity and re-qualification: “Hey, haven’t heard from you in a while — wanted to check in.” Sometimes cold subscribers re-engage. Often they don’t. The key is not burning relationship capital with aggressive sales pitches to someone who’s already disengaged. The sequence is: re-establish connection first, then if interest returns, create a purchase opportunity. Skipping straight to the pitch produces spam-level conversion.
The Psychology of Selling in DMs
This is where most chatting operations fail. They treat DMs as a transaction channel when subscribers are paying for something fundamentally different: a feeling of connection, exclusivity, and genuine interest.
When that feels manufactured or pressured, subscribers leave — and they rarely come back. The chatters who consistently outperform aren’t the ones with the most aggressive sales tactics. They’re the ones who understand that purchase follows relationship.
Practically, this means:
Lead with genuine interest, not product. “I saw you’ve been a subscriber for a few months, how have you been?” before “here’s a PPV” isn’t a soft sales technique. It’s what creates the relationship context that makes the PPV feel like an offering rather than a pitch. That distinction is the difference between conversion and cancellation.
Mirror the subscriber’s energy. Playful subscribers want playful. Reserved subscribers want respectful distance until they signal otherwise. Reading tone and adjusting is a learnable skill — and one we train explicitly. A chatter who responds to a reserved subscriber with over-the-top energy is doing damage, not building relationship.
Create desire before revealing price. The most effective PPV sequences build anticipation before the price appears. Describe what the content delivers in terms of the subscriber’s stated preferences. Make them want it first. Then name the number.
Urgency must be real. “Limited time” that never expires, “exclusive” content available to 500 subscribers — subscribers notice when urgency is manufactured. Trust erodes quietly and then suddenly. Scarcity and urgency work when they’re genuine: limited custom content slots, time-sensitive pricing, content genuinely going to a small group.
Accept “no” gracefully and stay in relationship. A subscriber who declines a PPV today is still a subscriber. A chatter who handles the decline with grace and stays in conversation will get a yes next week. Pushy follow-up after a clear no is one of the fastest ways to lose a subscriber permanently — and the subscriber will attribute that experience to the creator, not the chatter.
Onboarding a New Chatter: The Two-Week Framework
Chatter performance in the first 30 days on an account sets the trajectory for months. The investment in structured onboarding pays for itself within the first few weeks of improved conversion.
Week 1: Training Before Account Access
New chatters don’t get live account access in week one. The entire first week is:
- Platform mechanics and account structure
- Agency SOPs: messaging frameworks, escalation paths, subscriber segmentation rules, prohibited topics
- Creator briefs for assigned accounts: creator persona, content categories, limits, pricing strategy, subscriber demographics
- Shadowing: reviewing sample conversations from senior chatters to understand tone and technique in real context
No revenue accountability in week one. The goal is a solid competency baseline before they touch anything that matters.
Week 2: Supervised Access
New chatters get access to lower-traffic accounts with direct team lead oversight. Initial conversations are reviewed before being sent, then spot-checked as confidence builds. The team lead gives specific, calibrated feedback on each conversation — not general direction, but line-by-line coaching.
MSR and PRR are tracked from day one of access. The performance review conversation happens at the end of week two, focused on coaching and development rather than consequence. Performance accountability comes after competency is demonstrated.
After two weeks of supervised access, chatters performing at baseline — MSR 50%+, PRR 4%+ — move to independent work with continued weekly QA reviews. Those not at baseline get an additional week of structured support.
Technology’s Role in Chat Performance at Scale
The question of which subscribers to prioritize on a given day is, at scale, a data problem. With 60+ creators and hundreds of subscribers per creator, chatters cannot manually evaluate intent signals across their entire account queue. They need tooling that surfaces the right conversations at the right time.
This is a core function of our proprietary API. Subscriber data that isn’t available through the platform’s standard interface — purchase history patterns, engagement cadence, intent signals — gets surfaced to chatters in real time. The result: chatters spend their most productive hours on the highest-conversion opportunities rather than working a queue in chronological order.
For agencies without that infrastructure, the immediate priority is at minimum having chatters flag and prioritize high-spend subscribers manually, and using available platform analytics to identify engagement patterns.
The ceiling on manual prioritization is real and specific. Past 10-15 creators, the volume of subscriber interactions outpaces what any chatter can evaluate manually. That’s where technology stops being a nice-to-have and becomes a hard requirement if you want to keep scaling.
The Chatting Mistakes That Quietly Drain Revenue
Even agencies with good systems make avoidable errors that compound into significant revenue leakage over time.
Blast messages with no segmentation. Sending the same PPV pitch to every subscriber simultaneously destroys the illusion of intimacy that makes subscriptions valuable. Subscribers who receive a message clearly sent to thousands of people feel like they’re on a mailing list, not in a relationship. Segment before you blast. At minimum, separate new subscribers from returning ones and whales from regulars.
Ignoring the previous interaction. Every conversation should start with context. A chatter who opens with a generic line when the subscriber messaged three days ago about something specific is signaling that nobody remembered the conversation. Good chatters review the last three to five messages before engaging. Elite chatters make the subscriber feel like the conversation never stopped.
Over-pitching to cold subscribers. When a subscriber hasn’t engaged in 60+ days, leading with a PPV produces spam-level results. They need re-engagement before they need a pitch. Sequence matters: re-establish connection, qualify interest, then — if interest is present — create a purchase opportunity.
Treating all creators the same. Each creator has a distinct brand, tone, content niche, and subscriber demographic. A chatter who handles a fitness creator’s account identically to how they handle a lifestyle creator’s account is doing both creators a disservice. Creator-specific training isn’t optional — it’s the minimum standard for quality management.
No accountability for declining performance. A chatter whose PRR drops from 7% to 4% over six weeks has a solvable problem — usually a coaching issue. Agencies that wait until performance collapses before acting spend far more on chatter turnover than on the development investment that would have prevented it.
Compensation Structure That Drives the Right Behavior
How you pay chatters shapes how they perform. Pure hourly compensation creates no incentive to convert. Pure commission creates pressure to pitch aggressively, which damages subscriber relationships and increases cancellations. The structure that works combines both.
Base pay covers the hours and gives chatters stability. It eliminates the desperation-selling behavior that comes from purely commission-dependent roles — behavior that consistently destroys subscriber relationships and nets less revenue long-term than the base pay cost.
Performance bonuses tied to MSR and PRR create incentive alignment without creating pressure to convert at any cost. The bonus rewards quality conversion, not volume.
Top performer recognition — beyond compensation, public acknowledgment of chatters who consistently hit or exceed KPIs matters for retention. Your chat team is the revenue engine of the business. They should feel that way. The agencies where chatters feel like replaceable headcount have turnover problems that cost far more than any recognition program would.
One important calibration: don’t tie bonuses to raw revenue without controlling for account quality. A chatter on a $20K/month account will always generate more dollars than a chatter on a $5K account, even if the latter is performing at a higher level. Normalize by account potential before making comparative assessments.
Build It Like a Performance Engine, Not a Cost Center
Most agencies treat chatting as a cost center — hire people, pay them, hope revenue comes out the other end. The agencies at the top of this market treat chatting as a performance engine with defined inputs, measurable outputs, and a continuous improvement cycle.
The difference is structure, KPIs, training, segmentation, and technology deployed at the right scale.
If you’re running an agency and want to see this system installed — SOPs, training frameworks, KPI dashboards, segmentation playbooks — the application page is where that conversation starts.
For the operational overview of how chatting fits within the broader agency infrastructure, see The 7 Systems Every Creator Agency Needs to Survive.