Daily usage (Marketers & business teams)


Audience	Marketers, business users
Prerequisites	Access to the correct Hightouch workspace or Space At least one schema configured by your data team At least one destination available for activation A role with permission to create audiences or launch campaigns

Hightouch lets marketers work directly with governed warehouse data without waiting on CSV exports or one-off audience builds. Your admins and data team set up access, schema, and guardrails first. After that, you can build audiences, run campaigns, and measure results within those boundaries.

Admins and data teams set up access, schema, and governance before marketers start working. This guide focuses on what business users 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 team may use Spaces to scope visibility 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? Admins control which tools are available and may enforce destination rules or approval flows.

What you can do yourself vs. what requires setup

You can usually do this yourself	Your admin or data team sets this up
Build and save audiences	Create workspaces and manage access
Reuse audience or sync templates	Connect sources and destinations
Launch syncs or journeys within your permissions	Define schema and parent models
Review sync results and campaign performance	Configure subsets, destination rules, and approval flows

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 users or customers table.
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 — that your team can define and reuse across audiences.

Some data may be scoped automatically by subsets, which limit the records you can query based on governance rules your data team has configured.

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 an ad platform, ESP, or CRM 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 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.

These products work alongside Customer Studio and may already be set up in your workspace. Ask your data team 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.