The Hightouch Blog - All

Why 2026 Lifecycle is an entirely different game

Why top brands are paying ~$225k and ditching campaign managers for system engineers.

Marketing Suite Fatigue

Is the “safe choice” of using a marketing suite starting to sour? My recent conversations with enterprise teams suggest the answer is yes, and this post explores why.

The one audience you actually shouldn't re-engage

What Calm learned from one lifecycle experiment that you can implement in your own program.

Learn from our favorite 2025 campaigns like “Spotify Wrapped”

Get inspired by brands that shared usage with their customers this year to deepen loyalty and engagement.

The 7-part system behind Amazon’s Black Friday machine

The 7-part framework that Amazon uses to turn Black Friday into a 12-day optimization loop for 200M+ Prime members.

Making your ML models more valuable with AI Decisioning

Amplify your ML investments with AI Decisioning

How smart retailers protect holiday profit: Maximizing retail media margins

Retail Media Networks are a valuable new profit center, but inefficient processes and traditional onboarding platforms introduce costly delays and fees. Discover how a composable, warehouse-native CDP model simplifies the workflow and unlocks a faster, higher-margin retail media operation.

How smart retailers protect holiday profit: Reducing waste in paid media

See how retailers decrease wasted impressions, expand audience reach, and boost ROAS by resolving fragmented customer identity and activating cleaner data signals with a Composable CDP approach.

How smart retailers protect holiday profit: Plugging costly LTV leaks

Learn how retailers plug lifetime value leaks caused by slow data, fragmented identity, and disconnected channels, and how a Composable CDP turns customer signals into high-impact loyalty, cross-sell, and winback campaigns.

Data Warehouses 101 for Marketers

Too many tools can hide the real issue holding marketing back. Discover how a data warehouse creates a true single source of truth.

Introducing Hightouch's integration with Google Ads Data Manager API

Sync audiences and conversions to a single destination and use them across Google Ads, Display & Video 360, Google Analytics 4, and more.

What marketers miss about Spotify Wrapped

Every year, countless brands fall into the “Spotify Wrapped trap” and try to recreate the magic of Wrapped, missing the core reason why this campaign is such a success in the first place.

Lessons from +10 billion marketing decisions made by AI

What two years of real AI deployments taught us about modern marketing, enterprise scale, and building the future of marketing workflows.

Are traditional CDPs marketing's most disappointing tool?

Learn about the limits that keep CDPs from delivering on their promise of a real customer 360, and how a composable approach changes what’s possible.

The AI prompt every lifecycle marketer should know

Insert any company name and instantly reverse engineer their CRM strategy.

Understand why your messages perform — and what to do next

Introducing Content Analysis & Suggestions for AI Decisioning

Hightouch Agents: An AI platform purpose-built for marketing teams

Move 10x faster across the entire marketing workflow with Hightouch Agents.

How we Uncovered a Race Condition in Aurora RDS

The same week us-east-1 went down due to a race condition bug in their DNS management system, we found another race condition bug in AWS Aurora. Here’s how we proved it 😎 .

How to build a lifecycle testing framework that actually drives revenue and results

How to run lifecycle tests that compound over time, protect your P&L, and create a culture of real learning.

What nearly a decade at Litmus taught me about email deliverability

What actually impacts deliverability? What do you do if you burn a domain? What’s a healthy unsubscribe rate? The most up-to-date advice on all things email deliverability.

5 patterns killing your CRM program (and how to fix them)

I’ve worked with 30+ CRM teams on retention and growth, and the same five mistakes show up across every one I’ve worked with.

The data warehouse powers the best AI

Today’s launch of Snowflake Intelligence exemplifies the potential of AI that’s powered by your complete data.

Target vs. Best Buy: comparing 2 of the largest CRM programs

I bought the exact same item from Target and Best Buy to break down their CRM program.

Introducing ID Express: One-click UID2 activation to The Trade Desk

Sync audiences and conversion data to The Trade Desk in a faster, easier, and privacy-conscious way.

Introducing Hightouch’s Batch integration

Create, test, and automate your CRM strategy with Hightouch and Batch

The complete Conversion API schema resource: Better attribution and optimization, across each ad platform

As pixels break and privacy tightens, Conversion APIs offer a more effective way to send event data server-to-server. But every platform is different. Our guide breaks down what each one requires.

Your ESP is not the problem.

Replatforming won't fix your marketing. Rethinking your methodology will. AI Decisioning is the missing piece.

What is a winback campaign? Fix the timing, targeting, and discount trap

Winback campaigns are deceptively simple. And easy to get wrong. This breakdown examines common pitfalls related to timing, targeting, and over-discounting.

The 5 timeless lifecycle marketing truths that work across any industry

The timeless strategies that have worked across Home Depot, IGN, and Grammarly — and still work in 2025.

What if the best marketing decision is no message at all?

Introducing Smart Suppression for AI Decisioning: Predict which messages will drive results, and send only those that matter

Welcoming Akilesh Bapu: Leading the AI Agents at Hightouch

After spending the last six years redefining healthcare with AI, Akilesh is joining us to do the same for marketers.

AI Decisioning for Gaming and Sports Betting

How gaming and sports betting are using AI agents to drive growth, protect margins, and retain customers.

Inside the CRM program Powering Academy Sports + Outdoors

I collected 8+ months of emails from one of the largest sports retailers in the country to break down their lifecycle program.

Build and activate your own multi-vendor identity graphs with Hightouch and Narrative

Build, own, and activate your own multi-vendor identity graph in Snowflake to maximize audience reach and performance across 250+ channels.

The Holiday marketing playbook is broken. Here’s how to fix it with AI agents.

Learn how retailers are replacing traditional holiday campaigning with intelligent agents that can personalize every customer interaction at scale — turning their most demanding revenue season into their biggest opportunity.

What actually matters in lifecycle marketing in 2025?

A 5-part framework for building a high-performing lifecycle program that drives retention, loyalty, and LTV.

Stop overthinking your lifecycle program: 4 simple optimizations you can make today

The most overlooked areas that lifecycle teams often ignore, which actually move the needle.

The #1 mistake lifecycle teams make: the reactive sending trap

Here’s why most lifecycle programs plateau — and the framework I used to grow LTV at Peloton, Casper, and Thirty Madison that avoids it.

How Starbucks powers personalization for 34.5M loyalty members

Uncover the CRM and lifecycle system that Starbucks uses to power email personalization for millions of loyalty members.