Customer Studio overview

Use Customer Studio to build audiences from your warehouse data, then activate them with syncs and journeys — without writing SQL.

Overview

Use Customer Studio to build audiences from your warehouse data and use them in syncs and journeys. Your data team prepares the data once; after that, you build audiences, preview who qualifies, and sync them to your tools without writing SQL.

Instead of rebuilding the same segments in every marketing tool, you define audience logic once and reuse it wherever you sync.

You can build audiences two ways:

• visually in the audience builder
• by describing the audience you want to the Agent

Then preview the results, refine the logic, and save the audience to use in syncs and journeys.

When to use Customer Studio

Use Customer Studio when your team needs to build audiences from warehouse data and use them across your tools.

You can:

• build audiences from warehouse data
• sync audiences to ad platforms, CRMs, and messaging tools
• automate lifecycle workflows with journeys
• preview and analyze audiences before launch
• compare campaign treatments with holdout or experiment groups
• use the Agent to create or refine audience logic

Example use cases

Exclude recent buyers from acquisition campaigns

Build an audience of customers who purchased in the last two weeks.

Sync that audience as a suppression list to Meta and Google Ads. As new purchase data lands in your warehouse, the audience updates automatically.

Send a welcome series after sign-up

Create a journey that starts when someone signs up.

Send a welcome email, wait three days, then branch based on whether onboarding is complete. Each sync sends the customer to your email platform at the appropriate step.

Core workflow

1. Your data team defines the schema.
2. You build an audience from that schema.
3. You preview and validate the audience.
4. You sync it to a destination or use it in a journey.
5. You measure results and improve the audience over time.

Define audience logic once

If your team frequently rebuilds segments in ad platforms, CRMs, or messaging tools, use Customer Studio as the single place to define that logic from warehouse data. Once you save the audience, sync it to the destinations where it needs to run.

Audiences update automatically

Audiences update as the underlying warehouse data changes. This is useful when qualification changes often — recent purchasers, active subscribers, or users who reached a product milestone.

Build lifecycle workflows with journeys

When you need more than a one-time sync, use journeys to build a scheduled workflow from an audience or event. This is useful for onboarding, re-engagement, and other lifecycle programs that depend on timing and conditional logic.

Validate before launch

Before you sync data to a destination, preview audience members, review audience size and trends, and use Insights to understand composition and overlap.

Get started

Customer Studio needs initial setup from data and platform teams before marketers can use it.

For data teams and platform admins

Data teams and platform admins prepare the foundation marketers work from. Steps 1–3 are required to enable marketers; steps 4–6 add capabilities as your team scales.

1. Connect your warehouse.
2. Add destinations.
3. Plan your data model, then define your schema with the parent, related, and event models marketers build audiences from.
4. Enable the Lightning sync engine (recommended). It's required for journeys, sampling, and warehouse sync logs.
5. Enable sampling (optional) to speed up audience previews on large datasets.
6. If your team uses Agents, add general models (optional) for agent queries that stay outside audience building and sync workflows.

Once the schema is in place, marketers can start building audiences right away.

For marketers

Start by creating your first audience.

From there, you can:

• preview who qualifies
• ask the Agent to refine the logic if needed
• sync the audience to a destination
• use it in a journey
• analyze it in Insights
• measure results in Intelligence

If you need a reusable value that is not already in the schema, ask your data team to create a trait. To build an audience from a question instead of an existing one, use Agents to draft an audience for you.

Use Customer Studio with other Hightouch products

Customer Studio uses the data models your team prepares in Hightouch, and connects the audiences you build to other activation and measurement workflows.

Choose the data you build audiences from

• Warehouse models — Data teams map warehouse tables such as users, events, and purchases into the schema marketers build audiences from.
• Identity Resolution — Use a Golden Record as the parent model when you want to build audiences from resolved customer profiles.
• Events — Use behavioral events such as page views, purchases, and app actions as audience conditions and journey triggers.

You can start with a schema built from your warehouse data. Add Identity Resolution or Events when your use case requires resolved profiles or behavioral events.

Activate audiences

Use syncs to send audience membership and traits to ad platforms, CRMs, messaging tools, and other destinations.

You can also use audiences as eligible populations for AI Decisioning, which optimizes which message, channel, and timing each person receives.

Measure audience and campaign performance

Use Insights to analyze audience composition and overlap. Use Intelligence to measure campaign and experiment performance from the same customer data.

Control data access and delivery

Use these tools to control what data Hightouch sends to destinations and who can access it.

• Subsets — Limit which records can be synced to specific destinations by region, subscription status, or compliance flags.
• OneTrust integration — Exclude opted-out users from audience syncs using consent data from OneTrust.
• Data masking — Redact or hash sensitive fields before Hightouch sends them to destinations.
• Schema Git Sync — Version-control your schema configuration in Git.

Supported sources

Only the following sources support Customer Studio:

• Snowflake
• Databricks
• Google BigQuery
• Amazon Redshift*
• Amazon Athena
• Azure Synapse
• MS SQL Server
• PostgreSQL
• Greenplum
• Microsoft Fabric

* Customer Studio may not work with Amazon Redshift Spectrum due to its limitations around nested data. To mitigate these, you can try to query a materialized view during your parent model setup.

Permissions

Access to Customer Studio features is controlled through custom roles.

Admins configure these grants in the Models tab of the custom role builder: View parent model data, Configure audiences & syncs, Manage traits, Configure journeys, and Publish journeys. The journey grants appear only when journeys are enabled.

See Roles for the full list of grants.