Revolutionary community platform Disciple Media has leveraged Sisense to unlock deeper customer data and insights, opening fresh opportunities to scale creator economy

Sisense, the leading AI-driven platform for infusing analytics everywhere, announced that Digital community platform, Disciple Media, has chosen Sisense to unlock deeper insights into its sales and marketing functions, help fast-track business growth and supercharge customer lifetime value.

With the creator economy valued at over £78.1 billion, the market is ripe for disruption as more creators look for innovative ways to engage with their communities. Disciple Media provides a cloud solution that offers a custom online community space outside of mainstream social media channels. Unlike conventional social media, the platform encourages more direct engagement and targeted communication between hosts, community members and peers.

Founded by then electronic musician and label owner, Benji Vaughan, Disciple was initially created in 2015 for Benji to directly reach and engage his fans and audience digitally. Disciple has since evolved into a platform that enables and empowers community managers, business owners, influencers, coaches (and more) to build and own a private community platform. Creators like photography tutor Emma Davies, country music star Luke Bryan and fitness instructor Jasmine Mays are some of Disciple Media’s 600+ creator base.

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“I can’t imagine going back to the old ways of working now. The benefits of having a consistent and reliable source of truth reporting all of our key performance metrics have been a huge factor in Disciple’s rapid growth”

As a fast-growing community platform, in 2019, Disciple Media was on the hunt for a solution that would enable them to rapidly evaluate sales performance, assess funnel stage conversion rates and cost per lead, spot trends and identify fresh opportunities.

Additionally, they were looking for a solution that would help their customer success team scale to manage the increased demand for their service.

Sisense was selected as the business intelligence solution of choice because it could provide the ‘semantic layer’ on top of the company’s new Google BigQuery data warehouse. Immediately after deploying Sisense, Disciple Media was able to connect to all their data sources like Hubspot, Google AdWords, Google Analytics and Facebook Ads, and visualize data and infuse analytics via interactive dashboards.

With Sisense, trends surfaced quickly, and the teams could drill down into the data with filters for insights to more targeted marketing strategies that would reduce cost per lead and increase conversion rates. Disciple Media also discovered that with Sisense Fusion, they could perform sophisticated data analysis, filtering by location, demographics and behaviour to hone in on the ideal customer profile.

This innovative data-driven strategy resulted in Disciple Media attracting and retaining six times more customers, driving 75% improvement in their customer churn rate and tripling customer lifetime in only two years. Customer churn rate also reduced significantly from the pre-Sisense era when Disciple Media ran broader campaigns.

With Sisense analytics, the company has also been able to show increased return-on-investment (ROI), driving 100% business growth by attracting and retaining more customers. It has also enhanced the quality of customer success management without needing to hire additional staff.

Mark Downey, COO, Disciple Media said the Customer Success Manager and their Community Team now check the customised Sisense dashboard every day for insights into community performance metrics. It helps the team answer questions like new member registrations, engagement levels and posts that are trending up or down. It also helps them explore the data further to answer their own data questions.

“Sisense helps us slice and dice the data in the sales funnel quickly, without needing somebody to help me. Before we deployed Sisense, we were running a duct-taped system of exporting/importing CSVs, homebrew scripts and overly complex spreadsheets,” he said.

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“These slices have helped us define what our ideal customer looks like and how early in the funnel we can identify them. Being able to chop, slice and pivot the data quickly and easily at scale helps us adapt the ICP over time. So we know who the product is resonating with over the last six months.

“I can’t imagine going back to the old ways of working now. The benefits of having a consistent and reliable source of truth reporting all of our key performance metrics have been a huge factor in Disciple’s rapid growth,” Mark said.

Frankie Feast, Finance Director at Disciple Media said, “It was a big commitment for Disciple to deploy a data tool due to the initial cost involved. As a result of the time-to-value and the ROI we have received since using Sisense, it has been a great investment.”

Paul Scholey, Vice President of International Sales at Sisense says it is powerful to see Disciple Media unlock the value of infused analytics to revolutionise such an innovative creator marketplace.

“Disciple Media’s growth in customers, lifetime value and ROI is fantastic to see. These results are a testament to the power of infused analytics and how the power of Sisense can help transform businesses inside and out. We are thrilled to be on this journey with Disciple Media and cannot wait to see what the next 12 months bring,” Paul said.

Disciple Media is beginning to explore premium pricing and monetisation opportunities with potential value-add services with Sisense. They are also looking to provide customers with direct access to their community performance metrics within the Disciple Media platform which will offer more insight and actions. There is also the potential to become even more AI-driven and further embed the Sisense solution into the Disciple Media platform in the future.

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