A Variant is a marketing message designed to outperform your control message that Persado generates using its AI algorithm and proprietary marketing language database. Variants are at the heart of each of your campaigns: they’re the messages we test and analyze in market to identify champions to broadcast to your customers.

A key part of the Variant creation process is engaging you and your team to review and approve Variants in Persado Portal. This step-by-step guide will teach you how to review your Variants, make revisions, and approve your Variants so they can be deployed to your audience.

Log in to Portal. You automatically land on the home page and can see all your Experiments and Predictive Content.

You can easily view the stage your Experiment or Predictive campaign is in by checking the ‘Stage’ column on the home page.

Some key stages you may see include:

You can click on the name of any Experiment or Predictive Content to view all of the Variants created and/or approved for it, depending on the stage they’re in. If your Variants have not yet been created, you will only see the New Content Request Form with the information you filled out for this campaign.

You can easily filter your campaigns by stage by selecting the ‘Filter’ icon. You can select as many stages as you want.

Once your Variants are ready, you’ll receive an email notification that it's time to review! You can access the Variants directly from the email; or, in the 'Content tab' in Portal, you can click on the associated Experiment or Predictive Content. You’ll then see each Variant broken down by its tags.

As you review your Variants, you’ll notice different parts of your messages are underlined and color-coded. This is because Persado breaks up your messages into key elements that we test in our Experiments: your narrative, emotions used, descriptive element, functional (CTA) element, formatting, and positioning.

When you hover over a part of the subject line’s text, for example, you can see the emotional tag used, such as ‘curiosity.’

When reviewing a Variant for Predictive Content, you may be able to select a different option to the highlighted element. First, hover over the element you’d like to change until the ‘Comment’ and ‘Paraphrasing’ icons appear. Please note the Paraphrasing feature is only available for Predictive Content, not Experiments.

Click the ‘Paraphrasing’ icon on the right. A list of options will display (if available) showing the original phrase as well as recommended alternatives. If you want to see more options, click ‘See AI-Generated Alternatives’ to create more possible variations. Click the option you want to go with; the Variant automatically updates and saves.

The pencil icon may also allow you to make manual edits to the Variant text. Click on the text within the textbox of the Variant to see if you can revise the phrase directly to update capitalization, punctuation, and more without having to request a revision (only available in Predictive Content, not Experiments).

If you need to share Variants with your internal team members who may not have access to Portal, you can download the Variants in Excel format by clicking the ‘Download’ icon, then ‘Messages as Excel.’

If you’re happy with the Variants as they appear, simply click ‘Approve Variants’ at the top of the page.

If the kind of change you want to make to the Variant can’t be done with the Paraphrasing tool or manual edits, click “Request Revision” and let the Persado team know what you need, and we’ll get to work.

Before requesting a revision, it's important to review all requested revisions and comments in the revision summary. You can easily reference all comments to Variants (sorted by Variant version) in the remarks panel to make sure all of your team's feedback is captured.

When you're ready, click ‘Submit Revision’ to log your feedback. This will send your comments to the Persado team, where they’ll get started on updates.

If you’re collaborating with teammates to discuss Variants prior to formally requesting a revision, there are three places you can comment:

We recommend using the comment box for general questions you’d like to ask your Persado team. You can tag individuals who you want to respond to the comment or collaborate with by typing the ‘@’ symbol followed by a name. For element-specific revisions in Predictive Content, we recommend using the Paraphrasing feature when possible.

If you think of something else that needs to change after your Variants have already been approved, simply leave comments as above and click ‘Submit Revision.’

If you ever need to review past versions of your Variants, you can select the date/version from a dropdown menu near the top of the page. If there are no previous versions, the date of the current version displays instead of a dropdown menu.

Generally, we recommend you only use the manual editing function to make minor edits (e.g., capitalization, grammar tweaks, etc.), since changing any Variant completely will impact performance. You and the account team will continue agreeing on the final language used for an Experiment or Predictive Content, but with manual editing, some of the back-and-forth is reduced.

Persado incorporates feedback to the Variants based on your agreed-upon SLAs. Once your feedback has been incorporated and all members of your team approve, click the blue ‘Approve Variants’ button at the top right of the page.

These approved Variants are considered final. If any changes are needed before deployment, please contact your Persado team so they can update the Variants and ensure a valid test.

The Persado team will now assist in deploying your Variants. Your next major checkpoint will be reviewing the results of your Variants.