Customer Studio overview

Customer Studio is where you build audiences from your warehouse data and use them in syncs and journeys.

Your data team prepares the data once. After that, you can build audiences, preview who qualifies, and activate campaigns without writing SQL.

What you'll learn

• What Customer Studio is
• When to use Customer Studio
• Example use cases
• How the core workflow fits together
• How to get started, by role
• How Customer Studio fits into Hightouch
• Supported sources

Overview

Customer Studio helps you turn warehouse data into marketing audiences and lifecycle workflows.

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

You can build audiences in two ways:

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

Then, you can preview the results, refine the logic, and save the audience for use in syncs and journeys.

When to use Customer Studio

Use Customer Studio when your team needs to define audiences from warehouse data and use them in downstream tools.

You can:

• build and maintain audiences from shared customer data
• activate those audiences in ad platforms, CRMs, and messaging tools
• coordinate scheduled lifecycle workflows
• compare treatments with holdout or experiment groups
• validate audience size, overlap, or composition before launch
• build or refine audience logic with the Agent

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 activate it with a sync 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, Customer Studio gives you a single place to define that logic using warehouse data. Once the audience is saved, you can sync it to the destinations where it needs to run.

Keep campaign targeting current

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

Run scheduled lifecycle workflows

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

Validate before launch

Before sending data downstream, teams can 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. If you need to build an audience from a question instead of an existing audience, use Agents to draft an audience for you.

How Customer Studio fits into Hightouch

Customer Studio is where marketers turn warehouse data into audiences and journeys, then activate them in downstream tools. It reads from the same warehouse that powers the rest of the platform, so the audiences you build stay aligned with your analytics and every tool you send to.

What Customer Studio uses

• Models from your connected source — Data teams map warehouse tables like users, events, and purchases into the schema marketers build audiences from.
• Resolved identities from Identity Resolution — A Golden Record model can serve as your parent model, giving marketers a deduplicated view of each customer.
• Behavioral events from Events — Streamed events like page views, purchases, and app actions become audience filters and journey triggers.

What Customer Studio sends

• Audiences to destinations — Syncs deliver audience membership and traits to ad platforms, CRMs, and messaging tools on a schedule or in real time.
• Eligible populations to AI Decisioning — AI Decisioning targets your audiences, then optimizes which message, channel, and timing each person receives.
• Audiences and traits to Intelligence — Charts, funnels, and experiment results draw on the same audiences and schema, so measurement stays tied to activation.

You don't need every input. A schema built on your warehouse tables is enough to start building and activating audiences. Identity Resolution and Events layer on when you want a unified profile or behavioral triggers to build from.

Manage data governance

Customer Studio includes tools for controlling what data reaches destinations and who can access it.

• Subsets — Scope which records can be synced to certain destinations by region, subscription status, or compliance flags.
• OneTrust integration — Automatically exclude opted-out users from audience syncs using your OneTrust consent data.
• Data masking — Redact or hash PII fields before they reach destinations.
• Configure Schema Git Sync — Version-control your schema configuration with Git Sync.

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, Configure journeys, and Publish journeys. The journey grants appear only when journeys are enabled.

See Roles for the full list of grants.