| Audience | Marketers |
| Prerequisites |
|
Hightouch lets marketers work directly with governed warehouse data. Your platform admin and data team set up access, schema, and guardrails first. After that, you can build audiences, run campaigns, and measure results within those boundaries.
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.
Before you start
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.
What you can do yourself vs. what requires setup
| You can usually do this yourself | Your platform admin sets this up | Your data team sets this up |
|---|---|---|
| Build and save audiences | Create workspaces and manage access (roles, SSO, groups) | Connect sources and configure sync engines |
| Preview and validate audiences | Set governance guardrails (subsets, destination rules, approvals) | Define schema, models, and traits |
| Reuse audience or sync templates | Create templates for audiences and syncs | Expose new fields when you need them |
| Launch syncs or journeys within your permissions | Connect destinations (either team) | Connect destinations (either team) |
| Review sync results and campaign performance |
Choose your starting point
What you do first depends on your goal.
| If you want to... | Start here |
|---|---|
| Build an audience and send it to a marketing tool | Create audiences |
| Run a multi-step campaign with branching logic | Journeys |
| Measure campaign lift or compare audience performance | Intelligence overview |
| Let AI choose the best channel, message, and timing | AI Decisioning overview |
Lifecycle Studio and Ad Studio are two additional product areas for marketers. Documentation for both is coming soon.
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
usersorcustomerstable. - 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.
2. Build an audience
Use Customer Studio to create audiences from the data available in your schema.
- Choose a parent model.
- Add filters using customer attributes, related data, or events.
- Preview the audience to verify the results look right.
- 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.
- Orchestrate a multi-step flow with Journeys, which support branching, delays, and conditional logic.
- Optimize delivery with AI using AI Decisioning, which selects the best channel, message, and timing for each customer.
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 campaign lift, compare audience segments, and track performance over time.
- Run Experiments to test audience variants and measure which performs better.
- Revisit your audience logic based on performance data, approval feedback, or error patterns.
Related products
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 an overview of how these products connect, see the Composable CDP overview.