Recover abandoned Fillout forms with personalized nudges

Every weekday at 9am, find the people who started filling out my Fillout form but never finished it, and win them back with a specific, personalized reminder.

Start by pulling draft submissions from Fillout using List Form Submissions with the in-progress status filter. Fillout's submissions filter defaults to finished responses, so you have to pass status=in_progress to get the drafts back. This is the entire basis of the workflow: most form tools never expose the responses that were started and abandoned, and those are exactly where the lost revenue sits.

For each draft, compare the questions the person actually answered against the ones they left blank, so you know precisely what is still outstanding for that individual. Skip any draft that is less than 24 hours old, since those people may simply still be working on it. Skip any draft that has been sitting for more than 14 days, since those are stale and not worth chasing. Also skip any draft where no email address has been captured yet, because there is no way to reach that person.

Before emailing anyone, check the nudge ledger I keep in a Zite table using Fillout's List Records. If a ledger row already exists for that draft submission ID, do not contact the person again about the same draft. After a nudge goes out, write a row back using Fillout's Create Record, capturing the submission ID, the person's name and email, the date the nudge was sent, and the list of sections that were still outstanding at the time.

Send each recoverable draft a short reminder with Gmail's Send a Message. Greet the person by the name they already typed into the form, and name the specific sections or questions they still have left. Specificity is the whole point: a message that says "we still need your W-2 and your bank statements" gets action, while a generic "please complete your form" gets ignored. Keep it to a few friendly sentences, include a direct link back to the form, and make the number of remaining items obvious.

Let the tone escalate with the age of the draft. Something around three or four days old should be a light nudge that mentions how many items remain. Something around a week old should spell out the specific items still needed. Something approaching the 14 day cutoff should read as a final reminder.

Finish by posting a summary to my ops channel with Slack Bot's Send a Message. Cover three things: who was nudged today and what they still owe, who completed their form after an earlier nudge (compare the ledger against submissions that have since finished), and which question people abandon the form on most often. That last part matters most, because knowing the exact question where people quit tells me how to fix the form itself instead of chasing individuals forever.

If there are no recoverable drafts on a given day, post a short note saying so rather than staying silent.