A/B variants
Most copy steps (Connection request note, Send message, Comment on a post) accept multiple variants. Outpilot picks a variant per
lead and reports performance per variant.
Adding variants to a step
In the sequence editor, click any copy step. The detail panel has a
Variants section with + Add variant.
You can have up to 5 variants per step. Each variant is a fully independent body — different opener, different CTA, different length.
How variants are selected
Outpilot uses a simple rotation: as new leads enter the step, the next variant in the rotation is selected. Once every variant has been used, the rotation wraps. Result: roughly equal traffic per variant over time, with no clumping.
The rotation is deterministic per lead — running the same lead through the step always picks the same variant. So if you re-run a lead through a campaign, they don’t suddenly see different copy.
Performance dashboard
Open the campaign’s Variants tab. For each step that has variants:
| Metric | Per variant |
|---|---|
| Sent | How many leads received this variant |
| Replied | Replies attributed to leads who got this variant |
| Reply rate | replies / sent |
| Accepted (for connection requests) | acceptance rate |
Numbers appear after 50 sends per variant — below that, the sample is too small to be meaningful.
Retiring a variant
Once a variant is clearly worse than the others (~20% lower reply rate after 100+ sends each), retire it:
- Open the step’s Variants panel.
- Click Retire on the loser.
- New leads only see the surviving variants. In-flight leads who already received the retired variant aren’t disturbed.
You can Unretire later to revive the variant — useful if you want to re-test it with edits.
Tips for good A/B tests
- Test one thing at a time. Two variants that differ in opener, middle, AND CTA tell you nothing. Change one element.
- Run for 100+ sends per variant before reading results. Reply rates have huge variance at small N.
- Test high-traffic steps first. The opener gets the most volume; variants on a step deep in the sequence take weeks to gather signal.
- Don’t auto-retire prematurely. Acceptance rate can swing 30% week-over-week purely from random LinkedIn behavior.
- Retire bad variants but keep diversity. Two equally-good variants in rotation make the campaign look less robotic than a single repeated opener.
Variants on connection requests
Connection-request notes are length-capped at 300 characters by LinkedIn. A common pattern:
- Variant A — “Mutual interest” angle (3rd-party connection or shared group).
- Variant B — “Specific praise” angle (calling out their specific recent post or talk).
- Variant C — Short and direct (“Saw your work on X — would love to connect”).
Outpilot reports acceptance rate per variant on the Variants tab. Differences of 5–10 percentage points are common; double-digit differences are usually copy quality, not the variant strategy.
Sales Agent variants
The Sales Agent automatically generates 3–5 variants per outbound step from your sales brief. They show up in the variants panel just like manually-created ones, with the same retire / unretire controls.