Today, we’re extraordinarily proud to partner with Databricks on their launch of Data Intelligence for Marketing, a solution that brings AI-powered activation and intelligence directly to marketing teams through technology partners like Hightouch.
Databricks is on a tear. They grew over 60% year-over-year in 2024 thanks to an excellent track record in large-scale computing, machine learning, and data warehousing. They’re loved by data teams and used to drive performance across a wide range of industries, like helping financial institutions detect fraud, manufacturers optimize supply chains, and healthcare companies automate claims processes.
At Hightouch, we’re bringing those same performance benefits to marketers through our Composable CDP and AI Decisioning platform that sits directly on the Databricks Intelligence Platform. Marketers at companies like Domino's, PetSmart, and Grammarly use Databricks and Hightouch to improve performance and deliver delightfully personalized campaigns across marketing and advertising channels.
Why marketers should adopt Databricks
Traditional CDPs are failing to meet marketers' needs. They require lengthy 6-12 month implementations, are inflexible and expensive, and create additional security risks by storing PII in an external data store.
That’s why we invented the Composable CDP and why traditional CDPs are scrambling to release composable alternatives. Unlike legacy systems, a Composable CDP reads directly from your existing data in the lakehouse—no copying, no moving—so you get flexibility, affordability, and speed from day one. It’s also why Databricks invested in us.
The Databricks Data Intelligence Platform offers several compelling benefits as the foundation of your Composable CDP and broader martech stack:
- Build a complete view of all your customer data at a low cost - The Databricks Lakehouse offers the strengths of the data lake and the data warehouse. The data lake provides a cost-effective place to store any data type (structured, semi-structured, and unstructured) without driving up costs or worrying about fitting everything into a perfect customer profile at the outset. Once data is in, the warehouse can structure data from the data lake to make it usable for activating audiences, orchestrating journeys, and analyzing marketing performance.
- Enhance campaigns with powerful AI and ML models - Most enterprise data science teams have powerful models to predict buyer propensity, affinity, churn, and more. But most teams struggle to get those models into the hands of marketers who can use them to enhance campaign performance. By centralizing your marketing on top of Databricks, marketers get instant and fully-governed access to the data science team’s work. Very quickly, campaign performance improves, and the data science team’s value increases. Win-win.
- Handle real-time data at scale - Databricks can easily ingest and query massive amounts of real-time data. Tools like Mosaic AI Model Serving and MLflow can make machine learning inferences to perform advanced personalization in real-time too, like surfacing product recommendations or dynamically changing a promotional offer based on predicted sensitivity to discounts.
- Keep your data private, secure, and governed - With Unity Catalog, your data team can organize, govern, and control access to all that data while making it easily understandable and usable by marketing. This ensures the marketing team can confidently run campaigns using accurate, compliant, and up-to-date data.
“The Databricks Data Intelligence Platform has everything marketers wish they had in their martech tools but don’t. It can affordably store all of the rich and complex data about their customers, handles huge volumes of data in real-time, and has a powerful AI/ML workbench. Marketers adopt all these strengths when they use a Composable CDP, like Hightouch, that integrates directly with Databricks.”
Tejas Manohar
Co-Founder & Co-CEO at Hightouch
Hightouch transforms Databricks into a marketing powerhouse
Databricks and Hightouch are a partnership of brains and brawn. Databricks is the brain - giving marketers hyper-intelligence at scale by housing customer data, discovering new insights, and AI models in a single unified platform. Hightouch is the muscle, putting all of that intelligence to work across advertising and marketing channels.
Hightouch’s Composable CDP works by sitting directly on Databricks, enabling marketers to access all of that rich data to power marketing campaigns by activating advertising audiences, orchestrating lifecycle journeys, personalizing communications, and measuring campaign performance.
Hightouch makes use of Databrick’s flexible data schema, unlocking personalized campaigns by moulding to your needs instead of forcing you to mould to our own rigid view of the world. This means that a pet retailer can create segments based on which pets their customers own, a streaming company can segment on subscription status and engagement minutes, and a B2B Saas company can segment on associated accounts and workspaces across their application.
You define the objects, attributes, and relationships that represent your business, and then Hightouch transforms your Databricks schema into a fully customized audience builder and journey canvas that your marketing team can use to run creative and effective personalized campaigns.
Once your ideal schema is defined, marketers can activate data in many different ways:
- Advertising - Suppress and target audiences with personalized ads across paid social, search, programmatic, and CTV platforms. Collect events and send enhanced Conversion API signals back to ad platforms to improve ROAS.
- Journey orchestration - Orchestrates journeys across email, push, SMS, and paid media platforms with unprecedented flexibility.
- Personalization - Enhanced customer experiences with personalized messages, like surfacing user insights to create your own Spotify Wrapped-like campaign.
- AI Decisioning agents - Use AI agents to determine the best email, SMS, or push notification to deliver to each customer, autonomously optimizing millions of decisions across messaging, sequence, channel, and timing.
And all of that is done without storing a copy of your data in our platform, which ensures that security risks are minimized and that privacy and governance can be handled with ease:
- Privacy & compliance - Manage a global opt-out system directly from your source of truth in the warehouse, ensuring every channel adheres to your customer’s data-sharing preferences and opt-outs.
- Global enterprise data governance - Manage marketing across global regions, brands, and business units while keeping data separate, secure, and fully governed.
“With the Databricks and Hightouch partnership, customers get the best of both platforms. They get the flexibility, scalability, and AI tooling from the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform, plus the ease of use of Hightouch’s audience activation, journey orchestration, and AI decisioning solutions. Together, we’re helping marketers increase marketing efficiency and effectiveness faster than ever.”
Rob Saker
Global VP of Commerce Industries GTM at Databricks
How marketers use Databricks with Hightouch today
Companies across a wide range of industries are already seeing the performance benefits of Data Intelligence for Marketing through their partnership with Hightouch and Databricks:
Domino’s automates omnichannel journeys on Databricks to drive incremental revenue
The lifecycle marketing team at Domino’s took a lakehouse-native approach with Databricks and Hightouch to automate their customer journeys. This new approach enabled the marketing team to generate more incremental revenue through advanced lapsed customer win-back and web-to-app conversion campaigns. Thanks to Hightouch’s measurement features, they can run test-and-holdout groups to prove the incremental value of the campaigns they create.
“Databricks and Hightouch offer us the ability to activate on our data so that we are speaking to our customers based on where they are in their relationship with the brand. This has had a noticeable impact compared to our previous “batch and blast” campaign approach.”
Mark Messing
Vice President of Global Digital Marketing at Domino's
Grammarly personalizes billions of emails and uses machine learning to optimize 9-figure ad budget
With Hightouch and Databricks, the Grammarly marketing team centralized B2B and B2C workflows through a fully flexible schema that supports ad optimization and lifecycle personalization across channels. Accessing ML models in the lakehouse helped them train Google Search to focus ad spend on high-propensity users, which increased LTV by 4.1%. Hightouch also powers Grammarly’s personalized “insights” emails, turning massive product usage datasets into billions of engaging retention-driving messages.
“If we had to get rid of Hightouch, we’d riot. It underpins our entire marketing funnel and strategy. Marketing is all about personalization, and that’s what Hightouch gives us.”
Trevor Luescher
Marketing Systems Architecture at Grammarly
PetSmart runs delightful and effective loyalty campaigns for 70M+ members
PetSmart uses Databricks and Hightouch to send over 4 billion personalized emails annually through Salesforce Marketing Cloud, driving double-digit sales growth and increasing customer engagement by over 150%. By personalizing every touchpoint, PetSmart improved campaign performance, grew loyalty activations, and boosted incremental sales up to 25%.
“We saw the opportunity to increase the quality and scale of how we use data so we can better serve pet parents, leading us to leverage [Databricks and] Hightouch. Our goal was to connect our customer data and marketing automation platform and drive advancements in our personalized marketing.”
Bradley Breuer
VP, Loyalty and Personalized Marketing at PetSmart
Mews creates personalized multi-touch journeys with Databricks and Hightouch
Mews uses Databricks and Hightouch to automate personalized marketing campaigns, achieving email open rates of 50% and click-through rates of 4%. Mews now segments audiences in minutes and runs sophisticated multi-touch journeys to educate, up-sell, and convert existing customers.
“We can granularly target thousands of customers and surface specific information to specific users based on their historical data and their behavioral data. Doing this, we’ve been able to convert more leads and generate more revenue.”
Bethany Goetcherian
Customer Marketing Manager at Mews
Get started with Data Intelligence for Marketing today
The future is clear: Marketers are going composable. By adopting Databricks and Hightouch, marketers can activate real-time data, personalize customer experiences, and deliver tangible results without the complications of data silos and rigid platforms.
Looking ahead, the next frontier for marketers is integrating AI Decisioning into their stack—unlocking smarter, faster, and more automated customer experiences directly on Databricks.
Interested in turning Databricks into your CDP? Reach out to our team to talk to a specialist.
