Recover unfinished responses

Some people start your form and stop halfway. With Form abandoned, a workflow starts when that happens, so you can send them a reminder with a link that reopens their answers, add them to a sheet or a CRM, or tell your team in Slack. This is a Pro feature.

Before you start

Turn on Save unfinished responses in the form’s Settings. Form abandoned works on those saved answers: without it there is nothing to start from. The trigger’s settings warn you when it’s off, and so does the publish dialog.

Set up the trigger

1. Create a workflow (or open one) and click the trigger at the top of the canvas.
2. Under Start this workflow when, pick Form abandoned.
3. Under After, pick how long someone has to be inactive: 30 minutes, 1 hour (the default), 2 hours, 1 day or 2 days. It’s counted from their last answer.
4. Add the steps, then publish.

A workflow starts once per unfinished response. It doesn’t start if the respondent comes back or submits before the delay is over. If they return later and stop again, they aren’t reminded a second time by the same workflow, even after you publish a new version of it. Responses that went quiet more than a day before the delay ended are skipped, so switching a workflow on never reminds people who stopped weeks ago.

Send a reminder

Add a Send reminder step. It’s the Send back for changes step, which after Form abandoned is named for what it does there:

• Respondent email: one of the form’s Email questions, as always. Someone who left before typing their email can’t be reminded.
• Subject and Message: leave them empty for “Pick up where you left off” and “You started your form and your answers are saved. Continue whenever you’re ready:”, or write your own.
• The link is added automatically. It opens the form with their answers filled in, on any device, and they carry on from there. When they submit, it’s their response, with the next response number, like any other.

A link stops working when the unfinished response is submitted or deleted, and 30 days after the last answer. Opened after that, the form starts empty with a short note.

A reminder sequence

To remind someone more than once, put a Wait between Send reminder steps: Send reminder, Wait 2 days, Send reminder. When they submit, the rest of the workflow stops, so nobody gets a reminder for a form they already finished. The run shows “Stopped: the response was submitted”. Coming back without submitting doesn’t stop it: if they leave again, the next reminder still goes out.

At most 3 messages per unfinished response reach the respondent; further ones are skipped. That counts every Form abandoned workflow on the form together, and every step that messages the respondent: Send reminder, and Email steps sent to one of the form’s answers. A skipped step says so in the run, and the steps after it still run, so a note to your team still goes out. The publish dialog warns you when one workflow has more than 3 of them.

Reminders only go to the address the first one went to. If the respondent changes their email answer afterwards, later reminders to the new address are skipped, and the run says “Skipped: the email address changed since the first reminder”.

Through the built-in sender, a reminder needs the respondent to pass the form’s spam check before their answers are saved, so nobody can make your form email an address they typed and then left. The same check runs whenever the form’s spam protection is on. This happens in the background; nobody sees anything.

Which steps you can use

After Form abandoned you can use Email, Slack, Microsoft Teams, Google Sheets, Notion, Airtable, Webhook, Condition, Route, Wait and Send reminder. An Approval can’t follow it (nothing was submitted to approve), and neither can SMS or Send to app: Zapier, Make and n8n only receive submitted responses.

Steps get the same answers they would for a submitted response, so conditions, routes and mappings work the same way. A few things only exist once a form is submitted:

Variable	After Form abandoned
Response # and Revision	Empty: nothing was submitted.
Response URL	Opens the unfinished response under Responses, In progress.
Resume link	The link that reopens their answers. Only here.

Send the resume link only to the respondent: whoever has it can finish the form as them.

Test it

Test runs the workflow on sample answers as an unfinished response: no response number, and a sample resume link. As with any test, steps that send something are mocked unless you switch them to run for real; a Send reminder step only sends in a real run.

Privacy

Respondents aren’t told that their answers are saved before they submit. If your respondents are in the EU, mention in the form or in your privacy policy that answers are saved as they are typed, and that you may remind them to finish.

To limit abuse, an unfinished response keeps a hash of the respondent’s IP address, never the address itself. A hash is a pseudonym rather than anonymous data, and it is deleted with the unfinished response.

The resume link is taken out of the address bar as soon as the form opens, so it isn’t left in the browser history or a copied link.