Business Messaging Is Where Shoppers Now Expect to Reach You

The inbox has a line in the budget. It sits under support, next to headcount and ticketing software, and once a year somebody argues about whether it can be trimmed. Almost nowhere does it appear as a line that earns anything.

Consumers have been describing a different arrangement for years. Meta's State of Business Messaging report, conducted by Kantar across 11,056 online adults in 22 markets between April and September 2025, found 73.3% prefer messaging when communicating with a business, 74.6% trust a business more when they can exchange messages with it, and 72.4% say they're more likely to purchase from a brand that offers it.

Business messaging has become a purchase preference while most companies keep filing it under customer service. Reaching the revenue in it depends on one distinction, though, and the same research makes that distinction unusually clear: 79.3% of consumers want proof that a message is legitimate before they'll engage with it at all.

Wanting to be reachable and wanting to be messaged are separate things. Many brands have failed to recognize the gap between.

What Consumers Say About Business Messaging

Three quarters of consumers would rather message than call. That's not surprising. Anyone who has recently worked their way through a phone menu only to reach a department that closed already knows the value of messaging. The same research found 69% consider waiting on hold a waste of time, which is the same finding wearing different clothes.

Trust is the more useful figure. Almost 75% report trusting a business more simply because messaging is available, and that's before anybody exchanges a message. Reachability works as a credibility signal on its own. A company you can talk to reads as a company that'll stand behind what it sold you, and 66.8% say they get frustrated when messaging isn't offered as a contact option at all, so the absence is actively costing something rather than costing nothing.

Then there's purchase intent, which is the factor that should be moving budget. When 72.4% say the presence of messaging makes them likelier to buy, a channel is doing revenue work while being accounted for as overhead.

There's one more finding worth having for anyone nervous about automation. Roughly 67.7% agree that a response from an AI chatbot is helpful. This tells us that people are waiting for an answer rather than specifically a human being, and they've been fairly relaxed about where it comes from.

Why Brands Still Treat the Inbox as a Cost

Inbound messages arrive unpredictably, in volumes that refuse to scale with headcount, often about topics that won't sort into neat queues. They land with a team measured on tickets closed and time to first response, and nobody on that team gets compensated on revenue. The whole apparatus optimizes for deflection, and the metric celebrated in the quarterly review ends up being the message that never had to be answered.

Meanwhile those messages are stuffed with buying signals nobody is reading. A customer asking whether the larger size runs true, whether it ships before the fourteenth, whether it works on sensitive skin, hasn't filed a support ticket. That's a person at the counter with a wallet out and one question left between them and the till. The mismatch between what those messages contain and what the organization does with them runs underneath what DM data tells brands about how they should be paying, and the accounting has had it in the wrong column for a long time.

The Difference Between Reachable and Welcome

Here's where the Kantar findings get more demanding than the headline numbers suggest.

Nearly eight in ten consumers want proof that a message is legitimate before engaging with it. Not proof that it's relevant, or well-timed, or personalized. Proof that it's real. People who have spent years being messaged by strangers pretending to be their bank apply a default suspicion to anything arriving unprompted, and no amount of enthusiasm for messaging in the abstract overrides it.

That standard is nearly impossible to meet with a message the customer didn't ask for. It's trivially easy to meet with one they did. A person who typed a keyword thirty seconds ago to receive a link already knows exactly what's arriving and why. Legitimacy is established by the request itself, before a single word of the message gets read.

Which produces a short list of design rules:

• Trigger on stated intent, never on a follow, a page view, or a list membership
• Send what was asked for in the first message rather than teasing it to force another reply
• Keep the thread useful, because a conversation that only ever sells stops being a conversation
• Disclose the commercial relationship plainly, since a private channel raises the stakes on it

The last one slips away from people at scale, and what brands are responsible for when disclosure moves into DMs is better read before a campaign launches than after somebody raises it in a comment thread.

What Business Messaging Looks Like Inside a Creator Campaign

The version most brands picture is a support widget bolted onto a website, which goes some way toward explaining why it keeps losing budget arguments. The version that produces revenue starts somewhere else.

Linka builds business messaging into creator campaigns through Meta DM automation. A shopper comments a keyword on a creator's Instagram or Facebook post, and a tracked direct message goes out immediately carrying the product, the offer and the next step. Because the shopper initiated it, the legitimacy question resolves itself.

From there they move to a dynamic discount conversion page built for that campaign, holding the product, the creator's recommendation and the offer in one tracked place, with code copies, clicks, leads and purchases all registering against the campaign that produced them. Between campaigns, approved products sit inside creators' AI Shopping Agents, an always-on multi-brand experience that keeps answering questions after a post stops circulating.

The qualified DM counts as a compensable event in its own right, so creators earn for producing the conversation as well as for whatever sale follows. Brands can connect existing programs through AWIN, Rakuten, CJ, Impact, Shopify or a direct product feed rather than rebuilding anything they already run.

How to Measure a Channel You've Been Deflecting

Business messaging keeps losing budget arguments because it produces no number anybody can defend in a room full of people holding spreadsheets.

All of that changes the moment a conversation becomes a tracked, priced event. A qualified DM carries a unit cost, the thing coupon and loyalty partners have always had and conversational channels never did. Once it has one, the inbox can be compared against every other line in the program instead of living off in a separate conversation about customer experience that finance ignores.

The transcript is the second return, and over time probably the larger one. Conversation-level intelligence shows what buyers asked, what they objected to and what moved them forward, in their own words, before any money changed hands.

It's worth noting that the Kantar study was commissioned by Meta, which sells business messaging, so read it as a well-sampled but interested source.

The Channel Your Customers Already Chose

Consumers have made the preference plain across every measure the research took, and they attached one condition to it. They'll talk to you readily, provided the conversation starts with them.

Most brands have built a system whose proudest achievement is the message that never got answered, then compensated by occasionally sending messages nobody asked for. Both halves of that get it backwards.

Business messaging doesn't need selling to your customers. They've been asking for it in survey after survey for years. It needs moving out of the cost column and into the one where you count the money coming in.

Want to see what business messaging produces when it's tracked as performance? Book a call with Linka or explore Linka's affiliate marketing platform for brands to turn the inbox into a measurable line in your program.