If you were going to redesign the traditional lifecycle marketing workflow for an AI-first world, what would it look like? My hunch is very, very different.
A few weeks ago, I reached out to a few of my lifecycle marketing friends to show them a private preview of our latest product here at Hightouch: Lifecycle Studio.
Truthfully, I don’t ever really talk about Hightouch in this community, and that’s an intentional choice on my part. But today is an exception because I genuinely believe this is what the future of lifecycle marketing is about to become. And also thought it was very timely given my recent post about the codification of Lifecycle marketing.
I can’t share everything we discussed in those conversations, but I did get permission from a few folks to share their initial reactions (more on that below).
I’m actually doing a deep dive into all of this on July 10th in our first-ever (community-exclusive) virtual workshop. Slots are filling up very quickly, so make sure to save your seat before it’s too late.
Before I share their reactions though, I want to give some quick context to better tee-up their perspectives.
A quick history lesson
Hightouch was built on a simple idea: make it super easy for marketing teams to act on all of their customer data in any marketing channel. That idea gave rise to the Composable CDP (which redefined the entire industry). As a result, we got really good at solving the foundational data problems, which consequently is now the most important factor for successful AI deployments.
The TL;DR on Lifecycle Studio
One of the things that makes Lifecycle Studio really unique is that the platform can act as a composable context layer, pulling in context wherever it lives. This is quite different from other tools with bolted-on AI features, and it unlocks an entirely new way of working for lifecycle teams. Here’s what the team at Thumbtack had to say about it:
Without going too far into the weeds, here’s a really condensed breakdown of how it works:
(1) Context
Everything you’d translate to a new hire, you can input directly into Lifecycle Studio as context for the agents to operate on: your brand guidelines, visual identity, images, email templates, best practices, and anything you want to define guardrails. And the platform integrates wherever you already work (Figma, Adobe, Notion, Google Drive, etc.)
(2) Briefs
Because the system has context on the customer and your brand, you can literally just talk to an agent to create a full campaign brief (fully editable) before you build your campaigns. What’s wild is that you can do all of this without ever submitting a single ticket to your data team, and the entire brief is grounded in your customers' actual behavior.
(3) Campaigns
Once you approve the brief, the agent generates fully-drafted messages across every audience segment simultaneously, using your actual approved templates, images, and copy guidelines. So if your brief surfaces four segments worth targeting, you get four distinct campaigns back, all of which you can directly edit within the UI, or just instruct the agent to change.
(4) Reviews
Before your campaigns ever reach a stakeholder, a brand review agent can automatically run through them first. The agent can flag anything off-brand or out of compliance, so that when they hit legal or creative for sign-off, the obvious stuff is already fixed. Basically, instead of five rounds of back-and-forth, there’s one final approval process.
(5) Orchestration
Once your campaigns are approved, you can sync those campaigns along with the underlying audiences directly to your ESP, which means teams can operate with much more autonomy and move a whole lot faster.
Honestly, I’d love your thoughts/feedback on all the above, so shoot me a reply if you have questions or if you want to learn more.
Thoughts from the community
I’ve been in marketing my entire career. The thing that always kills a little bit of my soul is all the red tape it takes to bring an idea to life and launch it. And I know I’m not the only one who feels this way either.
So with that, I thought I’d leave you with some perspectives from different folks in this community. Here’s what they had to say about this new world of agentic lifecycle marketing:
"This technology is completely reimagining the traditional lifecycle marketing workflow, and it unlocks a world where teams can move at the speed of their ideas to deliver personalized experiences in a way that's never been possible before."
"There's never been a better time to be a marketer. This is the first technology I've seen that eliminates the countless steps and cycles required to launch a campaign. For the first time, teams can execute faster and more efficiently, using the complete context of all their customer data to deliver on-brand experiences in any channel."
“Hightouch is always on the cutting edge of new technology and personalization. I’m excited about how this product can help lifecycle teams spend less time managing workflows and more time focused on customer experience. It feels like a smart way to scale personalization without making things more complicated.”
"For my entire career, I've seen teams struggle to share learnings and apply them across channels. (Pour one out for all the abandoned 'best practices' and 'quarterly experiment results' docs and spreadsheets.) What’s most exciting about Lifecycle Studio is that it can actually absorb context and learn from performance to make every campaign smarter."
One more thing…
The number one question every lifecycle marketer should be asking right now: “What does the AI-native version of my workflow actually look like?” I’m going to be breaking all of this down on July 10th, so make sure to reserve your spot before they’re all gone.
In the meantime, I want to leave you with one last thing.
The longer I work in marketing, the more I realize the end goal never changes. Reach the right person with the right message at the right time. The way you achieve that has and always will change though. You can’t fall in love with technology; you have to fall in love with problem-solving. That’s what separates great marketers from everyone else.
As the CEO of Figma, Dylan Field puts it: “Good enough is no longer good enough.”