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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 Data setup for setup details.

Before you begin

  • Access to the correct Hightouch workspace or Space
  • At least one schema configured by your data team
  • Two or three first use cases, agreed with your platform admin and data team
  • The destinations your use cases need. You can usually connect these yourself.
  • 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.

Plan your first use cases

Agree on two or three use cases with your platform admin and data team before setup. They decide which data and destinations get set up, and how you’ll measure results. The table below shows examples to start from. Pick the ones that fit your goals, or define your own. For each use case, note the audience, the destination, an owner, and the metric you’ll use to judge it. Record today’s baseline for that metric before you launch.

What you can do yourself vs. what requires setup

Find the docs for your task

Already working? Jump to the docs for what you want to do.

Core workflow

Most marketer workflows in Hightouch follow the same pattern: explore data, build an audience, create the message, activate it, and measure results. To see where each Hightouch product fits in your marketing stack, explore the interactive architecture diagram.
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

Create the message

Use Lifecycle Studio to plan campaigns and draft messages with an agent. The agent writes from your workspace’s business context, brand guidelines, and guardrails in Context Hub, and builds on your own templates and images.Most teams start with Messages, then move to Campaigns once they’re comfortable reviewing generated content.Before your first message, upload templates and images. The agent picks from these, so a range of template styles gives it more to work with. If drafts miss your brand’s tone or rules, ask your admin to update the business context or email guardrails rather than fixing each message by hand.Review and approve every message before it leaves Lifecycle Studio. Then send it one of two ways:
4

Activate your audience

Once you’ve built an audience, decide how to reach it.
  • Send messages from Hightouch with Native Delivery. Create email, SMS, and push campaigns and send them directly. Delivery and engagement results are written back to your warehouse.
  • Sync it directly to a connected destination (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.
Before you schedule a sync, run it manually and check the data in the destination. Before you launch a journey, test the journey logic. The test simulates how members move through the journey without sending data, and skips time delays.
5

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.
6

Monitor results and iterate

After launch, check how your audiences and campaigns are performing.
  • Set up alerts on your syncs so you hear about failures in Slack, email, or PagerDuty.
  • Review delivery, engagement, and deliverability for messages you send from Hightouch in Native Delivery reporting.
  • 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.
  • Revisit your audience logic based on performance data, approval feedback, or error patterns.

First campaign checklist

Use this checklist to get your first use case live.
  • You can sign in and see the right workspace, Spaces, and data
  • An audience for your first use case is built, previewed, and saved
  • The message is approved, in Lifecycle Studio, your ESP, or Native Delivery
  • You tested before launch: a manual sync checked in the destination, a journey test, or a Native Delivery test send and reachable count
  • A holdout or control group is set up in Intelligence if you want to measure lift
  • Alerts are set up on your syncs
  • You reviewed results after the first run

Troubleshooting

If something isn’t working, see the troubleshooting for the product you’re using:

Next steps

Last modified on November 5, 2026