How Spanx cut campaign time 4x and reduced paid acquisition costs 20–30% with Hightouch and Snowflake

Results at a glance

The challenge

Spanx had already invested in a traditional CDP to activate the customer data stored in Snowflake across paid and lifecycle marketing. Instead, the team found itself managing another copy of customer data without much confidence that it reflected what was actually in Snowflake.

That uncertainty made everyday marketing work harder than it needed to be. High-value audiences like customer lifetime value (LTV) segments were difficult — or sometimes impossible — to build, new audience requests often required vendor support, and channels like Google and Meta still relied on manual audience uploads. Historical customer data from before the Shopify migration was also difficult to activate, limiting how much of the customer journey the team could actually use.

The technology wasn't the only bottleneck. The process itself slowed the team down. Even straightforward audience requests could take days to fulfill, making it harder to launch campaigns quickly or experiment with new ideas.

After retiring the traditional CDP, Spanx relied primarily on its email platform. That removed the overhead of managing another customer database, but it still left the team without a scalable way to activate Snowflake data across paid and lifecycle marketing.

A new way of working

Spanx wasn't looking for another customer database. The goal was to use the data already in Snowflake without introducing a separate system of record or duplicating customer data.

Hightouch sits directly on top of Snowflake, allowing Spanx to build audiences from the same data warehouse where it stores all of its customer and purchase data. They can then sync those audiences directly into channels like Klaviyo, Meta, Google, TikTok, Bing, and Pinterest.

This eliminated the need for a separate CDP layer or vendor-managed audience workflows, ensuring that activation always reflected the same underlying source of truth used across the business.

During this shift, the team also expanded how they used historical customer data. As Spanx migrated to Amplitude — a product analytics tool that tracks how users interact with the website and app — the team backfilled historical purchase data so that every order and customer record reflected the full journey, not just activity captured after the migration.

Impact and metrics

The operational impact showed up immediately in how quickly and independently the team could move.

Instead of waiting days for new audiences, marketers now build and launch segments themselves in minutes. High-value audiences — such as the top 30% of customers by LTV — can now be created in roughly five minutes, compared to hours or vendor-assisted turnaround times previously.

Campaign execution speed improved at the same time. Seasonal campaigns that previously took three to four weeks now launch in about one week, with audiences automatically syncing across paid and lifecycle channels.

This shift also expanded what the team could realistically execute. The Loyalty Year in Review campaign, which delivers a personalized recap of each customer's behavior and preferences, previously would have required weeks of audience preparation and broad segmentation. With Snowflake attributes flowing directly into Klaviyo, the full audience build and data setup was reduced to a day or two. This enabled launch in about a week and drove a 5x+ lift in click rate versus the broader loyalty program.

Paid media activation scaled as well. Meta, TikTok, Google, and Bing audiences now sync automatically instead of requiring manual uploads. Over the past year, Spanx has decreased paid acquisition costs 20–30% on Meta with more effective targeting, alongside a ~10% increase in new-customer average order value.

The same infrastructure enabled new programs that were previously impractical. One example is the "Final Few" campaign, which dynamically triggers alerts when a shopper's viewed size is nearly out of stock by combining inventory, browsing behavior, and automated audience updates.

Spanx went from managing a separate customer database that slowed the team down to building and launching campaigns directly from Snowflake in minutes. The marketing team moves faster, owns more of the process, and runs programs that were not possible before — all without introducing another system of record.

The numbers