A Variant is a marketing message designed to outperform your control message (if applicable) that Persado generates using its Motivation AI platform and proprietary marketing language database. When it comes to which Variant a user sees with Dynamic Motivation, our multi-armed bandit determines which Variant is most likely to motivate an individual user to act in real time.

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 goes through how to review, revise, and approve your Variants for Dynamic Motivation so they can be deployed to your audience.

Log in to Portal. You automatically land on the home page and can see all your campaigns, along with what stage they’re in.

You can easily view the stage your 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 campaign to view all Variants created and/or approved for it, depending on the stage. If your Variants have not yet been created, you’ll only see the 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.

Your account team can also create saved views with the selected filters, which appear in the left-hand navigation bar on the campaign dashboard. For example, you could create a view with all campaigns that are “Pending Revision” in the “Web Page” channel.

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 campaign to access your content. You’ll also receive a notification in Portal when your Variants are ready, via the bell icon in the top right of the global navigation. Once you click into your campaign, you’ll then see each Variant broken down by its components and tags.

If there are multiple Topics in your campaign (not applicable to Shopping Cart because there aren’t different content types on this page), there will be tabs at the top of your Variants page for you to toggle between Topic Variants.

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 campaigns: your narrative, emotions used, descriptive element, functional (CTA) element, formatting, and positioning.

When you hover over the headline text, for example, you can see the emotional tag used, such as “fascination.”

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

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

If you’d like to make revisions, you can either select an alternative Variant or leave comments. Manual editing is not available. To leave a comment, you can:

A Persado expert decides which elements of your message to provide alternatives for. If available, these appear in Portal by clicking on the pencil icon while hovering over an element, under the label 'Recommended Alternatives.'

We recommend using the comment box for general questions and revision requests you’d like to send to your Persado team. If there’s someone specific you want to address, you can tag individuals by typing the ‘@’ symbol, followed by a name. If “Teams” is set up for your account, you can also tag a team in the comments.

Examples of helpful feedback:

Examples of less helpful feedback:

The more specific you can be about why an element of the Variant isn’t working, the higher the chance we can find a more effective solution and avoid similar language in the future.

For more information, check out our article on Best Practices for Variant Feedback.

Once you’ve finished requesting revisions, click the ‘Request Revision’ button to submit your comments to the Persado team. A confirmation pop-up displays asking if you’ve addressed everything and to remind you the SLA timeframe may be reset.

If you think of something else that needs to change after your comments have already been submitted, simply click ‘Update Revision.’ You’ll then be able to leave comments again. Once you’ve finished, click ‘Submit Update.’

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.

Persado incorporates feedback to the Variants based on your agreed-upon SLAs. Once your feedback has been incorporated and you and 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.

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