Instagram ROI: DMs Drove $8K in Revenue

Emeric:
You can actually sell on Instagram and track if it’s working. You are doing significantly well on social. You were one of the first users that had a very impressive e-commerce revenue.
Kate:
Total market of social is probably at least 50% of sales.
Emeric:
Wow. I need to learn more. Welcome to The Social ROI Hotseat Podcast. My name is Emeric Ernoult. I’m the CEO of Agorapulse. And since 2011, I’ve been obsessed by proving that social media was more than likes, than followers, that it was actually delivering a real return on investment and a business impact that can be measured. At the beginning of 2022, Agorapulse launched a social media ROI tracker and report. And since then I’ve been on a quest, the quest of social media ROI success stories you can learn from and be inspired by. This is why this podcast exists and I hope that thanks to what you’re going to learn following it, you too will be measuring the business impact of social media on your business or the business of your clients. Let’s get on with the show.
Hey, I’m super excited today because I am interviewing Kate Tietje. Kate and I, we spoke for the first time, I think that was in November of 2022 when you joined Agorapulse and you were one of the first users that had a very impressive e-commerce revenue on our social media ROI report and I was like, “Wow, I need to learn more about these guys. They seem to do an amazing job at measuring the impact of what they’re doing on social.” And I got to talk to you and your team several times and the more I learned from what you’re doing, the more I thought I really need to get Kate on the show because she has done so many things that are very not intuitive that I don’t see many other people doing, that I thought sharing that with the world would be super beneficial. So Kate, you started Earthley Wellness, that’s the name of your business at the end of 2015. So it’s been run now, almost eight years at this?
Kate:
Yeah, because that was end of December and it’s only March.
Emeric:
But I mean, you’re not rookie at running this e-commerce business. You’ve been at it for quite a while, so you have a bit of experience. We can put it this way. As far as I remember, social has always been a very important piece, a very important component of growing the business and growing the audience around the business and we’ll get to that later, but came the need for measuring it a little bit better and that’s how we got to meet and that’s how we got to get together back in November. So the first thing I’d like to start with is share with us what is Earthley Wellness? I’d love to hear it from you and not try to describe it myself because I’m probably not going to do as good as a job as you would do. Tell us what Earthley Wellness is and does and how it came to be.
Kate:
Sure. So we are a natural wellness company. We make a number of different products. We have a supplement line, a skincare line, cleaning line, herbal tincture, it’s just a number of different things that we make and our motto is to change the way the world sees health care. And to us basically that means that we think that all modalities that exist out in the world, whether it’s this western medicine that’s kind of dominant right now or herbalism or naturopathy or whatever it is, should all be equal and that consumers should have equal access to all of them rather than one system just being dominant. And so, we’re trying to teach people about these other systems and that they exist and that they’re accessible and affordable and how to use them because a lot of people didn’t grow up with this and I didn’t either.
I didn’t grow up with this so much either. When my daughter was born, she’s 15 now, so she’s not a baby anymore, but she was born in 2008 and she had a bunch of food allergies and chronic diaper rash and stuff, and I took her to all these different Western doctors and they pretty much told me nothing was wrong with her or just live with it, or one of them finally just prescribed this antibiotic cream for her rash because she looked at it for all three seconds and said, “Well, bacterial, so just use this.” I tried it once, it didn’t help her rash, it flared her eczema, and I said, “This is ridiculous. This isn’t helping my kid.” I threw it in a drawer and I said, “I’m going to find something else.”
So I started researching herbs and I made a very early version of what became our all-purpose soap, and I tried that on her and by the next diaper change, the rash was almost completely gone. And I said, “Okay, there’s something to this. This is really the path that I want to go down.” And after that, I started just researching herbs constantly. Every time we had a health need, I was like, “What can I use? What can I make to take care of this?” I started a blog in the fall of 2009 after my second baby was born because I just really wanted to tell everybody what I was learning and I wanted to find that audience that cared because the world wasn’t quite as much into it in 2009 as they are today. And the blog started to grow as the world started to get more into this kind of thing.
And we reached a point in 2015, 16 where there was a lot of recipes out there and people were asking, “I love this concept. I want to do more of this, but I’m busy and I’m not a DIY person. I’m never going to make these things, so can you please just sell this to me?” And I really wanted the answer to be yes, but my husband had been working a full-time corporate job and I had four and then five and then six little kids. And so, it was a lot to say yes to, but he quit his job at the end of 2015 and we decided to try something and we started launching some of our most popular things that had been recipes on the blogger that we had used for ourselves, and it just really took off.
Emeric:
Oh, that’s amazing. I didn’t know that your husband left his job to join and help you start the business. That’s an amazing family story. Okay, I can totally see that. So 2008, 9, you start the content story telling your story about, “Hey, this is working for me,” did you know that? And then you start blogging and writing about that for six years. So a long time. It took you six years to get to a point where you have enough of an audience. So it started to generate interest for, “Hey, sell me this product.” You’re telling me how to do it. That’s what you were doing, telling them how to create the medicine and then many of them said, “That’s amazing, but I don’t have time for this. Can you sell it to me?” And that’s where the whole Earthley Wellness e-commerce business started.
Kate:
Yes.
Emeric:
That’s really cool. So in 2015 when you start selling the product, you already had a big following, you already had a community. Was that community already online on Facebook and Instagram and all these social networks or where was it? How was it alive? Where was it living?
Kate:
We were pretty much just on Facebook at that point. We had both a public page and a group. Well, actually the group didn’t come about I think until sometime in 2016, but that was the whole thing around that time, was everybody was starting groups. But primarily it was the public page that we’d had since probably 2010, I want to say.
Emeric:
So the public Facebook page since 2010, the Facebook group, 2016. And then when did you start the Instagram presence?
Kate:
I want to say that Modern Alternative Mama, which is the blog’s name, had an Instagram presence from 2015 or 16. It was around that same time when we were getting going, it’s never grown significantly because I can’t figure out what I want to talk about. But then we started the Earthley Facebook and the Earthley Instagram, and those have been quite a bit different and more successful as you’ve seen there.
Emeric:
Okay. And if you could give us a little bit of numbers on how many followers, fans, likes you have on the page, how many people are following you on Instagram and how many people do you have in the group? Just to have an idea of the size of the audience because when we start talking about the numbers, the revenue, the conversion and all that stuff, it would make more sense if we have an idea of the size of the audience is.
Kate:
Sure. So we still actively use the modern Alternative Mama Facebook today, and that’s about 80, 85,000 I think followers there. On the Earthley Facebook, it’s around 75,000. And on Earthley Instagram, we just hit 70,000 yesterday.
Emeric:
Okay. So it is pretty significant, but it’s not huge by any means. I mean, if you are working on a niche topic where a bunch of people are interested but not necessarily the entire world, which would be the kind of topics you’re working on, it is totally achievable for anybody who’s working in an area like that. So it’s not like, “Oh my God, I heard what Kate has built as a community before she could make business, thanks to social media. There’s no way I can build an 80,000 people Facebook group.” It’s actually doable. So that’s good news for everybody who would have a passion and would like to create a business out of their passion with that. So that’s cool.
Okay, my next question to you is really about when it all got started, did you have an idea of how your go-to market to use the specific term that marketers and business people are going to use when they want to put a product on the market? Did you have a clear idea of how you would market the product and what different channels you would use and if you would use paid and if you would use mostly Facebook or mostly the group or mostly Instagram or an email list or anything else? Were you clear on that or did you just say, “Hey, they want my product, let’s go and build it and try things and we’ll see what sticks?” How did that work out?
Kate:
Well, I had experience before that in being an affiliate and marketing from the other side of things for other people’s products. So that was kind of what I knew. And I sort of started there. I didn’t have an overarching marketing strategy when I got started. I just knew that I was going to leverage the audience that I already had. So we focused heavily on using primarily the Facebook group at the point where we were really launching our own products and we would just share in that group a lot. Every time people would ask a question like, “What do we do if my kid got a bump or something like that?” Like oh, well, an arnica. So we would always draw links to the products. When we did that. And then we also tried to build the email list. In the first nine months, we had gotten about a 1,000 people on the list.
It was nothing amazing or anything, but we focused on building that. We knew that social, especially since we talk about sort of a controversial thing, wasn’t something that we could always know that we could control. And plus we don’t ever have access to all the data. We can’t reliably connect with every single person because, of course, they decide who they’re going to show it to or how many they’re going to show it to, that kind of thing. Whereas the email list was something that we could have a little more control over. But both were really important because how do you get them to be on your website or to be on your email list? Well, you have to find them where they are. And where they are is on social media. So social media was definitely a huge part of our strategy.
Emeric:
That’s a very good point. It is amazing to actually own the relationship. One could argue that not everybody on Facebook is going to see what you post and what you say, but so not everybody will open your emails or read them or receive them in the first place. So no channel is perfect. You are losing a certain amount of the message you’re putting through because people are busy, they’re not ready, they’re not behind their screen. They have a spam filter or the Facebook algorithm has decided that you’re not going to see that. So combining all these channels is definitely very smart and the way to go. Back to what you said, you got to find them where they are, which is what you did by building the group and the page and the Instagram account. One thing I’ve noticed with your practice that’s very unique is that you never sell in the content itself. So when you go on your Facebook page or your Facebook group, there is no sales pitch on the content.
The content is about, “Oh, your kid has a rash. This is how you can cure it, and these are the medicine that you can use that are natural, plant-based. They’re not going to create any reaction or allergy or anything.” And “Oh, that’s interesting.” And then it’s in the conversations about the content that you are actually doing, not the sales pitch, but the direction like, “Hey, this is where you can buy it.” So it’s in the comments, it’s in the conversations, it’s not in the content itself. The content itself in your case is almost always about helping and providing very valuable information. It’s only when people start conversing with you about, “Oh, I’m very interested about that comment. How can I buy this? How can I find that? How can I learn more?” That the link to the product gets. How did that come to you? Because that’s pretty unique. I’ve never seen that before. People are always going for the sale as quickly as possible, and you don’t do that. So why did that come to be?
Kate:
Well, we looked at a lot of our competitors’ websites or their social media, and we noticed that even if they had a following that was much larger than we were, 200,000, 500,000, whatever, that each of their posts was getting maybe five likes, they weren’t getting any real interaction at all. And it makes sense because it’s a really loud world, it’s a really busy social media. People scroll through, they see hundreds of posts a day. If it’s just a straight-up sales pitch or just a link where they’re basically like, “Look how cool our product looks and you should try it.” It’s white noise, it’s in the background, they’re just going to keep on scrolling. They don’t really care. But if you engage them in a discussion or you tell them like, “Hey, do you have this health concern?” They’re going to maybe stop. They’re going to look at it and then they’re going to be like, “Yeah, that’s me. I can identify, I can see myself in that.”
And then they’ll talk to you and then they develop a level of trust with you. And then you can start suggesting things to them and then they’ll click through and they’ll buy. And just beyond that social media, they don’t want you to leave their platform. They make more money if you stay on and keep scrolling and see the paid content and all the things like that. And so, if you put the link directly in the post, oftentimes, unless you’re going to promote it, of course, if it’s a paid ad, that’s fine. But other than that, they push those lower in the newsfeed because they don’t want you to click to go somewhere else. They want you to stay where you are. So if we don’t put that link there, then it’s more likely to get seen by more people, then we can have more conversations and then we can drop links in the comments once it’s already getting seen and the algorithm’s already picked it up and then it’s just going to get a better result.
Emeric:
So that’s basically what you’re doing on Facebook mostly. But what’s really impressive with you guys, I’m not going to give any numbers in terms of sales, but I can share the number of individual sales. In those Facebook comments, you’ve sold 74 products in the past 30 days, and it’s just to give a perspective. In private messages, you’ve sold 530. So that’s significantly more. It’s also for significantly more money and it’s all in private messages. So those private messages are happening in private conversations, so not in public conversation in the comment, and they’re mostly happening on Instagram. It was super surprising and actually very exciting to me. So you can actually sell on Instagram and track if it’s working. I was super excited by that. So tell me more about how these conversations on Instagram private messages are happening. What’s the trigger and where are they coming from and how do you get to the sale through private conversations there? I’m really curious to learn more about that.
Kate:
So it’s primarily the stories that we’re doing. So we do one feed post per day and it’s fine and it certainly drives a lot of traffic and a lot of new followers and things like that, which means the post gets seen more and that’s worth it and good. But using the stories, we do anywhere between 10 and 20 stories a day and we will directly say, put a link in there and say, click this link or message us if you have a question about this, whatever it is. And so, we’ve kind of built up this reputation that if you private message us, you’re going to get a response from a real person, you’re going to be able to dialogue with someone.
And so, they’ll literally message us and they’ll tell their story, here’s my need, here’s going on. And then we have someone who will message them back and they’ll give them advice as best they can. And then if relevant, they’ll also drop a link to a product. And it’s not just by this every single time, it’s also trying to show that we care about you as a person and even if we don’t have something that’s going to help you, we’re going to refer you to something that can. And now there’s just a lot of private messages that come in because they trust us and then we can share products and advice with them.
Emeric:
Yeah, I can totally see that because you made 600 sales happen in the past 30 days through those conversations and comments using Agorapulse, but you also generated 7,500 visits, so many more visits than actually transactions. So there’s a lot of you trying to help them and position yourself as a source of truth, a source of new information, helpful information. So little by little, they build trust and you build trust with them. And it’s not all about getting the sales as quick as possible and as fast as possible. It’s about building the community and getting the traffic to the blog and the useful content. So eventually they all become loyal customers and repeat customers I suppose. Do you measure what repeat customers you have? Is this something you’re following?
Kate:
I mean, we do of course, have customer data. We know I could look up how many people had ordered, how many times, things like that. We know that about 50 to 60% are returning customers, 40% are new, and that’s just because we’re growing so quickly. So it’s going to be a high percentage that are new.
Emeric:
And do you know what is the role of social within all this? Putting paid and organic on two different pods? Do you have an idea when you look at those, do you look at that data on your point of sale analytics software or your e-commerce analytics software? Do you see what’s the role of social?
Kate:
So it can sometimes be hard to measure because every platform says that they are responsible for a huge percentage of sales, probably slightly more than they are. But we think that it’s responsible for maybe about 10 to 15% of total sales at this point. And that doesn’t include people using social as an affiliate. It doesn’t include paid social. So the total market of social is probably at least 50% of sales.
Emeric:
15%, 15?
Kate:
Of all socials about 50. But then just the organic that has only my internal team is probably about 15.
Emeric:
15%. And would you say that those 15% are significant for you? That they’re very important to the business?
Kate:
Yeah, because it’s not only about those immediate sales, it’s about driving people to get on our email list. It’s about developing that relationship with people. They’ll come back and it might not be a click through Instagram, but then they’re buying again. But it’s because they found us on Instagram.
Emeric:
What I find absolutely amazing with the Earthley Wellness, story with your story is that yes, and you’re totally right. Social is an amazing driver of relationship, trust, community and ongoing bond building that leads to commerce, business sales and you’ve amazingly nailed that part. But what most people think is that this is the only thing that social is going to give you. What you’ve also nailed is having some level of business in that. So you are not only looking at social as a channel to build trust relationships and ultimately the business will happen elsewhere. You’re using social to build trust, community. And also, there’s some business going on here, which is 15% is really amazing. It’s really great. Have you always sold through social or is it something that came a little late or organic social? I mean, is it something that was mainly paid, an email at first or has organic social always been an important channel for you for the business impact purpose?
Kate:
Organic social has always been really key for us because when we’re a debt-free company, so we didn’t have outside funding, we didn’t have all this money coming in for a marketing budget when we first got started, and we couldn’t have afforded those other options even if we had wanted to right away. They came later, we do those things now, but if we hadn’t had organic social and hadn’t gotten creative with it, then we wouldn’t have been able to market at all.
Emeric:
I love that. One question obviously that I’m very selfishly interested about is, so you came to us, you came to Agorapulse at one point, what was the trigger? How were you doing all this before and what triggered you to look for a different solution and settle with ours?
Kate:
So we didn’t have any solution at all throughout most of-
Emeric:
No tool.
Kate:
Yeah, we didn’t have any tools. And we had started right about a year ago, I think it was in January of 2022. The team had grown and we were being more deliberate in our strategy and we didn’t have any way to measure anything that we were doing. And we had just formalized all this stuff and we wanted to be more efficient with our time and we wanted to ensure that everyone was being effective with what they were doing. And there’s about 14 of them now. You can’t watch everything 14 people are doing. You need a tool to help you with that one. And it was throughout, I guess, the middle of the year, we were like, “We really need some way to measure this better than we are.”
And so, we started seeking a tool and we were looking for one that was affordable for us, that allowed us to have really good metrics and insight into what the individual team members were doing as well as just overall how effective we were. And there’s a lot of tools out there, but a lot of them focus on just being a calendar. You can just schedule your posts through this. And we had used, I guess, a couple of those in the past. But we were like, “We are ready for this next level of things.” And so, we stumbled upon Agorapulse and here we are.
Emeric:
And part of the things that are different with us is this social media ROI report. So when you first saw what was in there, did it tick, did you get, “Oh, that’s interesting. That’s one of the things I would like to get and improve at” or what was your reaction to the first time you looked at our ROI report?
Kate:
That was kind of like, I honestly didn’t realize that it was there right away. I was looking at all the other reports first-
Emeric:
Interesting.
Kate:
… to see what the content was doing and kind of stuff I’d been looking at before, but in more detail than I had seen before. And then when I saw that, I was like, “Oh gosh, I can see who is being the most effective, channels are really driving the actual revenue and not just clicks and post views.” And it’s made me go, “Wow, we need to make some changes because Instagram’s doing amazing. And Facebook is fine, it’s worth it, but it could be doing better than it is.” And so, Shauna is my social media manager. You’ve met her. We’ve talked a lot about. Well, Sonia, who actually happens to be Shauna’s mom is the one who’s running Instagram right now.
So we’re like, “Well, let’s see how we can get Sonia to share her secrets here so that everyone can use these.” But I wouldn’t have necessarily thought that because the traffic coming in from all social, when you look at all of the paid and the affiliates and things like that, it looks like it’s pretty even between Instagram and Facebook. But then looking at that social ROI-
Emeric:
It is not.
Kate:
… and looking at what [inaudible], no, it’s not as far as what’s really driving the revenue. And so, we’re like, “Wow, there’s some opportunities here.” So that’s really what I was thinking.
Emeric:
I love this and it’s actually very true. When you look at your Google Analytics data overall, Facebook and Instagram seem to generate the same amount of traffic and conversion and revenue. When you go dig into what you’re actively doing through your private message and comments on Facebook mostly and private message on Instagram, Instagram is far ahead of the pack and this is not something you could guess. You’re absolutely right. Looking at the GA data, the Google Analytics data, it is not something you can guess. It is absolutely not appearing there and not visible there. So that’s great insight. I love that you’re saying because I saw that Sonia was doing amazing when I look at the dollar amount that she was bringing in every month. And the fact that you use that as, “Hey, can you teach everybody else in the team what you’re doing so they can do more of that?”
That’s exactly what I had in mind when I was thinking about what the ideal social media our right dashboard would be. And by the way, that’s a V 0.5. We have a V 1 that’s coming up in the pipe and it’s going to get better. Which leads me to the question, what’s the next step for you? What do you want to do next and what would be the next improvement that you’d like to do on how you do organic social to drive more business and how you use a tool to help you with that?
Kate:
So I’m actually putting my team through some trainings and we had our first one this week and we have them every couple of weeks for a little while here. But I’m teaching them to understand better who our target customer is. They know the demographics, but understanding the psychographic, what is she thinking? What is she feeling? How are you going to connect with her? So teaching them that so they can produce content that’s going to engage even more often than it is. Some of them are still afraid to link because we have had such a focus on don’t be salesy, don’t be, ‘buy my crap’ is what I call it. Don’t do that. People don’t like that. So now some of them are like, “Ooh, I don’t want to link too often.” And so, we’re working on changing their view of that.
It doesn’t always need to be a product. It could be a blog post, it could be a free download, it could be something that’s just useful to them rather than asking for a sale in particular. But we’re working on how and when to link and how to see yourself as being useful. And then just in the comments, we’re trying to improve the quality of interaction like, they’re doing a good job in terms of responding to most comments and making them feel good. But sometimes there’s more questions that we could be asking so they’ll come back and dialogue with us or there’s even more support that we could show or that we’ve been there that we understand even more ways to develop that relationship and that trust that they have with us. And so, basically getting optimizing what we’re already doing.
Emeric:
That’s really cool. Okay, well, we are getting to the 30-minute mark, which is usually I think a good amount of time for an audio video interview. So I want to be respectful of your time and of the audience as well. For the audience, if you are interested by Earthley Wellness and plant-based medicine, and they’re probably the best, you should check if you are. I’m going to put the link to the website and the Facebook properties and Instagram in the show note, and you definitely should check them out. Kate, thank you so very much for sharing your story with us. I didn’t share exact numbers, but you are doing significantly well in general for a first time entrepreneur, so congratulations for that. And you’re definitely doing a lot on social, so you’re very successful on social. I wish we were as successful than you are in generating revenue from social. So you’re definitely an inspiration and I am pretty sure that a lot of people are going to be inspired and super interested by your story. So thank you so very much for joining me today.
Kate:
No, thank you for having me.