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Platform admins and data teams set up access, schema, and governance before marketers start working. This guide focuses on what marketers do after that setup is complete. See Workspace setup and Technical setup for setup details.
Explore the interactive architecture diagram — see how data flows and where each Hightouch product fits in your marketing stack.

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Before you begin

  • Access to the correct Hightouch workspace or Space
  • At least one schema configured by your data team
  • At least one destination available for activation
  • A role with permission to create audiences or launch campaigns
If something looks missing after you log in, it may be expected governance rather than a bug.
  • Can’t see certain audiences or syncs? Your platform admin may use Spaces to limit which resources are visible to each team, organized by region, brand, or business unit.
  • Missing customer attributes or events? Ask your data team. They define which data appears in the audience builder through the schema.
  • Can’t access a destination? Platform admins control which marketing tools are connected and may use destination rules to restrict which records can be sent to specific channels, or approval flows to require review before changes go live.

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What you can do yourself vs. what requires setup

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Choose your starting point

What you do first depends on your goal.
Lifecycle Studio and Ad Studio are two additional product areas for marketers. Documentation for both is coming soon.

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Core workflow

Most marketer workflows in Hightouch follow the same pattern: explore data, build an audience, activate it, and measure results.
1

Explore the data available to you

Start by understanding what you’re building with. Your data team defines a schema that determines which customer attributes, related models, and events appear in the audience builder.
  • The parent model is your main dataset — typically a users or customers table.
  • Related models add supporting context like accounts, subscriptions, or product catalogs.
  • Events are timestamped actions like purchases, logins, or cancellations.
  • Traits are computed values (aggregations, most-recent values, or custom formulas) defined by your data team. You use them as filters when building audiences.
Your platform admin may have configured subsets that limit which records you can query, for example by region or brand. If you’re only seeing a portion of the data, you’re likely seeing the data relevant to your team.If you’d rather ask questions than click through filters, use Agents to explore customer data and campaign performance in natural language. Instead of writing SQL or filing a ticket with your data team, describe what you want to know and the agent returns answers grounded in the same warehouse data that powers your audiences. You can save prompts as recurring reports that run on a schedule.
2

Build an audience

Use Customer Studio to create audiences from the data available in your schema.
  1. Choose a parent model.
  2. Add filters using customer attributes, related data, or events.
  3. Preview the audience to verify the results look right.
  4. Save the audience.
If your team uses audience templates, start there. Templates reduce setup time and help enforce consistent campaign logic across teams.
3

Activate your audience

Once you’ve built an audience, decide how to get it into your downstream tools.
  • Sync it directly to a destination your data team has already connected (ad platforms, ESPs, CRMs) using audience syncs.
  • Build a multi-step flow with Journeys, which support branching, delays, and conditional logic. For example: a customer abandons checkout → wait 2 hours → send a reminder email → if no purchase after 24 hours → send an SMS with a discount code. Journeys evaluate on a schedule, so members enter, advance, exit, and sync when the journey runs.
  • Optimize delivery with AI using AI Decisioning, which uses reinforcement learning to pick the best channel, message, and timing for each customer. You define the goal and AI Decisioning learns what works over time.
4

Launch with guardrails

Depending on how your workspace is configured, some controls may apply automatically when you activate an audience.
  • Approval flows may require a teammate or admin to review changes before they go live.
  • Destination rules may automatically exclude records that don’t meet channel or consent requirements.
  • Subsets may limit which records you can include in an audience based on region, brand, or compliance boundaries.
These guardrails are configured by your platform admin or data team. They’re designed to let you move quickly without bypassing data controls.
5

Monitor results and iterate

After launch, check how your audiences and campaigns are performing.
  • Review sync status from the sync detail page to see whether records were delivered, rejected, or errored.
  • Use Intelligence to measure results. Splits divide audiences into test and control groups to measure incremental impact. Holdouts withhold a portion of an audience to establish a baseline. Dashboards track campaign metrics over time and let you drill into performance by audience, treatment, or trait. Results write back to your warehouse, so your data team can include them in broader reporting.
  • Run Experiments to test audience variants and measure which performs better.
  • Ask an Agent to analyze campaign performance in natural language — compare segments, spot trends, or generate a recurring report without writing SQL.
  • Revisit your audience logic based on performance data, approval feedback, or error patterns.
These products work alongside Customer Studio and may already be set up in your workspace. Ask your admin if you’re unsure what’s available.
  • Identity Resolution: Unified customer profiles across devices and channels.
  • Events: Campaign triggers based on customer actions, either as scheduled batches or in real time.
  • Match Booster: Improved ad platform match rates through identifier enrichment.
  • Real-Time Personalization: In-session experiences that respond to what a customer is doing right now.
For a deeper walkthrough of the marketing workflow, see the Customer Studio overview.
Last modified on August 25, 2026