After you've created the first version of your email, clone it two additional times and include which time of day the email should be associated with. In the below example, "Email name" would be the name of the email and the time of day would be associated with the morning, afternoon and evening sends.

Navigate to workflows by clicking on "Automation" --> "Workflows". Create a new workflow and name it "<Email Name> - Peak Engagement Time of Day" where <Email Name> is the same used in the prior step. Next, select "Start from scratch" in the top left and choose "Specific Date" as how you want the workflow to start.  You'll want to select the day that you want your email to send.

The date and time you select would be the cutoff point where any new members of an active list would not be enrolled. For example, if you say the cutoff point is at 8:00am on Monday and a contact becomes a member of the active list at 8:05am on that Monday, they would not be included in the mailing.

3
You'll now want to select the active or static list(s) that you want to send the email to for this test. Click inside the "Contact enrollment trigger" step.

Choose the triggers that decide how a contact enters this workflow.

5
Select the list(s) you want to send the email to. In the example below, we're selecting the list that is called "100K List".


Underneath the delay (which is the cutoff point for any new members of the starting list(s) being able to start the workflow), click on the "+" symbol to add a workflow action step.

Search for "split test automation" and click on "(Beta) Five cohort split test automation"

(Beta) Three cohort split test automation

Underneath the split test automation step, click the "+" sign to add another workflow action step.

Select the "Value equals branch" and click on this.

Click "2. (Beta) Three cohort split test automation"

2. (Beta) Three cohort split test automation

Click the checkbox for "Create a separate branch for each value in this property". and click "Next"

This will automatically create 3 cohorts where each cohort will represent a time of day. For example, Cohort A = Morning, Cohort B = Afternoon, Cohort C = Evening, etc. For each branch, you'll rinse and repeat the following steps. Click on the "+" sign to add an action step underneath "Cohort A".

Next select the time of day that corresponds to the time you want to test. For example, for Cohort A, you'll want to select the corresponding time that is the morning time you want to test.  In this example, we're testing 8 AM.

Underneath cohort B, you'll test how the afternoon cohort performs.

Select another delay to an afternoon time.

In this example, the afternoon time is "1:00 PM".

Underneath cohort C, you'll test how the evening cohort performs.

In this example, the afternoon time is "6:00 PM"

You should never see contacts flow down the none met step, however, If you want to take a belt and suspenders approach, you can treat this branch as a default branch. What we recommend doing here is to clone everything under the "Cohort A" branch and place it here.

Underneath each "Delay" in each cohort, you'll want to add a "Send email" action step. You'll click the "+" sign.

Select the email that corresponds to each cohort. For example, "Cohort A" would be the morning email, "Cohort B" would be the afternoon email and so on. You'll repeat this step for each cohort.

Once the structure is set, click on "Review and publish".

You'll then select "Yes, enroll existing contacts who meet the starting criteria". For any new contacts that meet the starting criteria, they will automatically be added up until the cutoff day / time.

Yes, enroll existing contacts who meet the trigger criteria as of now

You can then compare the success of how each time of day performed using the "Compare emails" function on the marketing email performance screen.

Finding your peak email engagement time of the day with HubSpot