If paused/draft you’re losing 8-12% of cart-abandoners. EM-FLOW-001 fires.
At a glance
Real-time status indicator for the Dotdigital programme tagged as “abandoned cart” in the merchant’s account. Returns one ofActive,Paused,Draft,Errored, orNot Found. If anything other than Active, the brand is losing 8 to 12% of cart-abandoners they would otherwise have recovered. This is the single most expensive automation to leave broken; the EM-FLOW-001 alert fires on any non-Active state.
Calculation
Calculated automatically from your Dotdigital data. See the At a glance summary above for what the metric tracks and the worked example below for a typical reading.Worked example
A UK B2C health-supplement brand running on BigCommerce with Dotdigital. Monthly Dotdigital-attributed revenue typically £140,000. Scenario A: programme is Active
The abandoned-cart programme is the single biggest revenue contributor in the entire Dotdigital account.
Scenario B: programme accidentally paused on 14 Apr 26
A marketer paused the abandoned-cart programme to test a new content variant on 14 Apr 26 and forgot to re-activate it. The programme stayed paused for 9 days until the next Vortex IQ alert review. Impact:
Headline Dotdigital Total Revenue for the month dropped from £140,000 to £121,300, a 13.4% drop. The brand could see the drop on Email-Attributed Revenue but couldn’t immediately tell what caused it; this card would have surfaced the cause in real time.
Scenario C: programme is Errored
A theme update on 28 Apr 26 broke the
{{cart.items}} personalisation token in the email body. The programme fired, but every email rendered with [BROKEN] in the cart-contents block. Open rate held; click rate halved (because the broken cart-contents made the email look spammy); recovered revenue dropped from £62,400 monthly run-rate to roughly £14,000 over the affected window. The Dotdigital programme status flipped from Active to Errored after the third failed render-attempt; this card would have caught it within hours, where the typical brand discovers it weeks later when they look at the monthly report.
Sibling cards merchants should reference together
Reconciling against the vendor’s own dashboard
Where to look in Dotdigital: r1-app.dotdigital.com → Programmes for the full programme list with status badges. Click into the abandoned-cart programme to see the visual canvas, the trigger configuration, the step content, and the recent execution log. The execution log is the fastest way to diagnose an Errored state, it lists the exact failure mode (missing token, broken pixel, suppressed contact, etc.). For the trigger validation: Engagement Cloud → Insights → Conversion Tracking → Abandoned Cart Setup shows whether the cart-page pixel is firing correctly. Test it from the brand’s own production cart to confirm the pixel sees the abandonment event. Why our number may legitimately differ from Dotdigital’s dashboard:
Cross-connector reconciliation:
Known limitations / merchant FAQs
My programme is Active but recovery rate is much lower than 8 to 12%. What’s wrong? Three usual suspects, in order of likelihood: (1) the trigger wait time is too short or too long, (2) the cart-contents personalisation is broken (so the email shows generic copy instead of the actual products), (3) the programme has been re-targeting customers who already received it within the last 7 days, leading to fatigue. Check Dotdigital’s per-step performance under Programme Reports → Step-Level Stats; if Step 1 has good open-rate but Step 2 has low click-rate, the content is the problem. If Step 1 itself has low open-rate, the wait time or send-time is the problem. The programme says “Errored”. What does that actually mean? Errored means the most recent execution failed. The most common causes: (a) a{{cart.items}} or {{contact.firstname}} token couldn’t resolve because the contact data is incomplete, (b) the product feed URL has changed and Dotdigital can’t pull the linked product images, (c) the Insights pixel on the cart page has been removed or moved, so the trigger fires on stale data. Drill into Dotdigital’s Programme → Execution Log for the exact error.
My programme is Active but no contacts are entering it. Why?
Almost always a pixel problem. The cart-abandon trigger requires the Insights pixel to fire on the cart page with a valid cart object. A theme update, a CDN change, or a new checkout extension can silently break the pixel. Test by opening the brand’s own cart page in an incognito browser, abandoning the cart, and watching the Insights → Real-Time Activity feed in Dotdigital. If no event appears, the pixel is broken.
Should I include a discount in my abandoned-cart emails?
Depends on margin and brand. High-margin and discount-comfortable brands include 10% in the third email; low-margin and luxury brands intentionally don’t, because the abandon recovery comes from urgency and product-pull rather than price. Test both. Dotdigital’s benchmark data suggests +1.5 to 3 percentage points of recovery rate when a discount is included on Step 3, but it can train customers to abandon on purpose for the discount, which depresses the headline conversion rate over 6 to 12 months.
What’s the right wait time before the first email?
Dotdigital’s default is 1 hour. The right answer for most B2C brands is 1 to 2 hours. Below 30 minutes you catch contacts who are still actively shopping and are about to convert anyway, so the email is wasted. Above 4 hours the impulse moment has passed. Test 1h vs 2h and pick the better recovery rate.
Can I exclude customers who recently purchased?
Yes, and you should. Add an exit condition: “Skip this programme if contact has placed an order in the last 7 days”. Without this, a customer who places an order, immediately starts a second cart, then abandons it (very common after browsing for the next purchase) will be hit with abandoned-cart copy at a moment when they’ve already converted today.
Why does the alert fire on Draft state? I’m building a new programme.
This is intentional. The card only treats one programme as the “live” abandoned-cart programme; if the brand is building a new version and the old one is paused while the new one is in draft, the brand has no abandoned-cart automation running at all. Confirm there’s an Active programme handling the trigger before muting this alert.
The programme fires fine for desktop carts but not mobile. Why?
The Insights pixel sometimes has a different namespace on mobile vs desktop themes (e.g. dmptv2 vs dmptv2_mobile). Check that the cart-abandon event fires from both. The Insights → Real-Time Activity feed will show the user-agent of each event; if all events are desktop user-agents, the mobile pixel is missing.
My account has 2 abandoned-cart programmes, one for first-time buyers and one for returning. Which does Vortex IQ track?
Vortex IQ identifies the primary programme by trigger type and template tag. If two programmes both match, the most recently activated is reported. To track both separately you need two card instances, raise this with the Vortex IQ team.