Persado uses AI to transform your business with the power of words. This article teaches you about how Persado uses Full Experiments (or Experiments for short) to go beyond traditional A/B testing and identify the right words for your audiences with mathematical certainty. Depending on your agreement, you may or may not not be able to perform Experiments.

After reading, you will understand:

An Experiment is Persado’s method of creating, testing, and broadcasting the precise words and phrases to drive the most engagement with your audience. Experiments are the practical application of our wealth of knowledge about experimental design. They allow us to test thousands of permutations of a single message and gain feedback from your audience on what resonates with them and what doesn’t.

After running an Experiment with Persado, you will have insight into:

Experiments are Persado’s unique solution to the challenges presented by A/B testing - a frequently used strategy that compares two different versions of a message. Google, for example, reportedly ran 7,000 A/B tests in 2011, 40 of which were just to determine which shade of blue earned more clicks. These tests can be time-consuming, difficult to scale, and easily biased - particularly when there are multiple different elements between the two versions tested.

Persado’s Experiments instead employ experimental design principles, like balance and orthogonality, to decide which variations - or Variants - of a message we should test that are statistically representative of a much broader pool of combinations. This means we can test thousands of elements in a message more efficiently than humans alone ever could.

Unlike A/B testing, experimental design gives us insight into which elements of your message had the greatest impact. The more Experiments you run, the more sophisticated an understanding we develop about the content that speaks to your customers.

While the principles of experimental design are complex, running an Experiment typically occurs in 6 key steps:

The inputs for an Experiment start with you in the Discovery phase. Here, you provide a control message and other key data points, such as your desired channel, audience size, desired launch date, and key performance indicators (KPIs). This activity is all handled within Portal; it should only take about 5 minutes to submit.

After the Persado team reviews these inputs, they’ll recommend a testing plan and timeline. Once the testing plan is agreed upon, your content moves into the Experiment Creation phase.

In the Experiment Creation phase, Persado works its magic with its proprietary language database to create Variants of your message - usually 16, a number determined by our experimental design. These Variants are designed to test 6 key elements of your content: narrative, emotion, description, CTA, formatting, and positioning. Once Variants are prepared and go through quality review, Persado submits them for your review and approval in Portal.

Exploration is the “learning” phase where we execute your Experiment. Once the Variants of your message are created, Persado helps your team deploy these Variants plus your control to a test audience, allowing Persado’s platform to “explore” and discover what works and what doesn’t.

Data inputs from real-time audience engagement powers an Insights Analysis. Here’s where we learn which emotions and elements of your message resonated most with your audience and make a data-driven decision on which creative combinations should be deployed in the Broadcast phase.

Broadcast Execution is the “earning” phase of the Experiment. The Broadcast Variants - typically 1 to 3 - are designed to outperform the control of the Exploration phase. Your team deploys these Variants alongside the original control message to the remainder of your audience in order to maximize performance, similar to how you would deploy the winning message after the completion of an A/B test. The biggest difference is that a Persado Broadcast message isn’t necessarily the best message from the Exploration. It’s a combination of the strongest elements from the Exploration phase.

In the final step, Results Analysis, Persado reports on outcomes from the Broadcast phase and how your message performed in the market, such as overall impact on conversions and incremental revenue. The more Experiments we perform together, the more we will understand which elements of your message made the biggest impact on your conversions and KPIs.

Leveraging Persado generates higher performing creative content with mathematical certainty, so we recommend allowing the Persado champion message to stay in market for some time, from 3 to 6 months, to continue to drive performance.

With experimental design, we can explore thousands of variations of your message all in 1 Experiment, and quantify the precise impact of every word, phrase, or creative element. More learning and earning is a natural result. That’s how Persado uses Experiments to transform your business.

For more information, please visit the Experiment Lifecycle infographic.