How to Add a Dynamic Add-to-Cart Block in Klaviyo

You’ve spent time and money driving traffic to your store. A visitor browses your products, adds something to their cart — and then disappears.

It happens constantly. Nearly 70% of online shopping carts are abandoned before checkout. That’s not just a metric. That’s real revenue walking out the door.

Klaviyo’s dynamic add-to-cart block is one of the most effective tools you have to win it back. It pulls the exact products a shopper left behind and drops them — automatically — right into your email. No manual work. No guessing what they wanted.

This guide walks you through exactly how to set it up, step by step.

What Is a Dynamic Add-to-Cart Block in Klaviyo

A dynamic add-to-cart block is a smart content element inside a Klaviyo email that automatically populates product data — images, names, prices, and a direct purchase link — based on what a specific contact has added to their cart or browsed on your site.

Instead of sending a generic “you left something behind” email, you’re showing them exactly what they wanted. That specificity is what makes it work.

Emails with personalized product recommendations generate 6x higher transaction rates than non-personalized messages. Dynamic blocks are how you get there at scale — without manually building a unique email for every customer.

Why This Block Is Worth Setting Up Today

Let’s put some numbers on the table so you understand what’s at stake.

• Cart abandonment rate across ecommerce averages between 68% and 72% depending on the industry
• Cart abandonment emails achieve open rates of 39–45% — nearly double the 20–21% average for standard email campaigns
• A three-email abandonment sequence recovers up to 15% of abandoned carts, compared to around 5% for a single follow-up
• Klaviyo reports that ecommerce businesses using personalized flows see email as a channel driving 20–30% of total online revenue
• Triggered emails like cart abandonment flows generate 4x more revenue per email than batch campaigns

The dynamic add-to-cart block is the engine inside all of this. Without it, your cart recovery emails show generic product images that don’t match what the customer actually wanted. With it, every email feels tailored — because it is.

What You Need Before You Start

Before you build the block, make sure these pieces are in place:

A connected ecommerce integration. Klaviyo works natively with Shopify, WooCommerce, BigCommerce, Magento, and most major platforms. Your store must be integrated so Klaviyo can receive real-time event data.

Klaviyo tracking installed on your site. The klaviyo.js snippet (or your platform’s native integration) must be firing correctly. This is what captures “Added to Cart” and “Viewed Product” events.

A Klaviyo account on a paid plan. Dynamic product blocks require a connected catalog and event tracking, which are available across paid tiers.

Once those three things are confirmed, you’re ready to build.

How to Add a Dynamic Add-to-Cart Block in Klaviyo

Connect Your Product Catalog

Go to Catalog in your Klaviyo account and confirm your product feed is syncing correctly. If you’re using Shopify, this happens automatically once the integration is active. For WooCommerce or custom platforms, you may need to set up a product feed manually or through a plugin.

Your catalog is the source of truth for the dynamic block. Without accurate product data flowing in, the block won’t populate correctly.

Enable Event Tracking on Your Store

In your Klaviyo account, navigate to Integrations and confirm your platform integration is active. Then verify that the following events are tracking:

• Added to Cart — fires when a product is added
• Started Checkout — fires when checkout begins
• Viewed Product — useful for browse abandonment flows

You can confirm these by going to Activity Feed and watching for real-time events as you test actions on your site.

Klaviyo tracks over 300 data points per customer profile by default, which gives you rich data to personalize with — but the cart block specifically depends on “Added to Cart” or “Started Checkout” events being accurate.

Create or Open Your Abandoned Cart Email

Navigate to Flows and either open your existing abandoned cart flow or create a new one using the Abandoned Cart template.

Inside the flow, click into the email step you want to edit. This opens the email editor.

Add the Dynamic Product Block

Inside the email builder, look at the Content Blocks panel on the left side. You’ll see a block labeled Product or Dynamic Product Block depending on your Klaviyo version.

Drag this block into your email layout in the position where you want products to appear. Most high-performing abandoned cart emails place the product block:

• Directly below the opening hook (“You left something behind…”)
• Above the primary CTA button
• As the visual centerpiece of the email

Once dropped in, the block will show a placeholder until it’s configured.

Configure the Block to Pull Cart Items

Click on the product block to open its settings. You’ll see a dropdown or configuration panel that asks how the block should source products.

Select Event Data or Cart Items as the source. This tells Klaviyo to pull the specific products from the triggering event — meaning the exact items in that person’s cart.

From here you can configure:

Number of products to show. Most brands show between 1 and 3. Showing too many clutters the email. Showing just 1 works well for single-item abandonment.

Product display fields. Toggle which fields appear: product image, product name, price, variant details. Price is especially important — emails that show the price alongside the product see 12–18% higher click-through rates than those that omit it.

Add to Cart / Shop Now button. This is the CTA inside the product block. Customize the button text, color, and link. By default, Klaviyo links this to the product page. You can also configure it to link directly to a checkout pre-filled with those items if your platform supports it.

Customize the Layout and Styling

Click into the block’s visual settings to match your brand. Adjust:

• Font family and size for product names and prices
• Image size and crop style (square vs. rectangular)
• Button color and border radius
• Spacing and padding between multiple products

Keep the design clean. Email recipients form a first impression in under 50 milliseconds. If the product block looks cluttered or off-brand, people click away before they’ve processed what you’re showing them.

Add a Fallback for Empty Carts

Klaviyo lets you set a fallback experience in case the cart data doesn’t load. This matters more than most people realize — around 8–12% of abandoned cart emails are opened hours or days later, sometimes after the cart has been modified or cleared.

In the block settings, look for Fallback Content or Show When Empty. You can either hide the block entirely or replace it with a static product recommendation or promotional message.

Setting a fallback keeps your email looking intentional rather than broken when data isn’t available.

Preview and Test Across Devices

Use Klaviyo’s built-in preview tool to check how the dynamic block renders. Click Preview and select a test profile that has recent cart activity to see the block populate with real data.

Then send yourself a test email and check it on:

• Desktop (Gmail, Outlook)
• Mobile (iOS Mail, Gmail app)

61% of email opens happen on mobile devices. If your product block displays correctly on desktop but breaks on mobile — images too large, text overflowing, buttons too small to tap — you’re losing more than half your potential clicks before a single person sees it properly.

Klaviyo’s editor shows mobile preview by default, but always send a live test to a real device.

Activate Your Flow

Once the email looks right across devices, return to the flow and set the email step to Live. Make sure your entire flow is active and that the trigger filter (e.g., someone who added to cart but hasn’t purchased in X hours) is configured correctly.

A typical setup sends the first email 1–4 hours after abandonment, with a follow-up 24 hours later and a final reminder at 48–72 hours. Brands using a three-step abandonment sequence recover 69% more revenue than those sending only one email.

Common Mistakes to Avoid

Sending too soon. If someone just walked away to grab their credit card, hitting them with an abandonment email in 15 minutes feels aggressive. Most brands see best results with a 1–2 hour delay on the first email.

Skipping the subject line test. Your dynamic block only gets seen if people open the email first. Subject lines like “You left something behind” dramatically underperform against personalized versions like “[Product name] is still waiting for you.” Personalized subject lines increase open rates by 26%.

Not suppressing recent purchasers. If someone abandoned a cart, then came back and bought the item five minutes later, they should be excluded from the flow immediately. Set up a Placed Order suppression filter inside your flow to prevent this.

Using only one email. A single abandoned cart email recovers roughly 5% of carts. A properly structured three-email sequence recovers 15% or more. The dynamic product block in each email reinforces the purchase intent across multiple touchpoints.

How to Track Performance of Your Add-to-Cart Block

Klaviyo provides flow-level analytics. Track:

• Open rate — benchmark is 39–45% for cart abandonment
• Click rate — benchmark is 8–12% for well-configured product blocks
• Revenue per recipient — the clearest signal of whether the flow is working
• Conversion rate — percentage of flow recipients who complete a purchase

Run A/B tests on the product block layout (1 product vs. 3 products), button color and copy, and placement within the email. Even small changes can shift click rates by 20–30% based on Klaviyo’s published benchmarks.

What Klaviyo’s Dynamic Block Can’t Do

The dynamic add-to-cart block is powerful, but it has one major limitation: it only works with people already in your Klaviyo list.

Someone new to your store — who hasn’t subscribed yet, or who browsed without identifying themselves — stays invisible. You can’t send them a cart recovery email because you don’t have their contact information.

This is the ceiling on email-based recovery: you can only reach the people you already know.

For reaching net-new prospects before they ever land on your site — the decision-makers who would benefit from your product but haven’t found you yet — outbound channels like LinkedIn do what email flows simply can’t.

LinkedIn gives direct access to over 65 million decision-makers, with response rates that typically run 15–25% compared to the 1–5% seen in cold email. When email flows handle the warm base and LinkedIn outbound handles net-new pipeline, you’re not relying on a single channel to grow.

Conclusion

Setting up a dynamic add-to-cart block in Klaviyo is one of the highest-leverage moves you can make in email marketing. You’re not sending generic messages — you’re showing people exactly what they wanted, at exactly the right moment, automatically.

The steps are straightforward once you understand the logic: connect your catalog, confirm event tracking, add the product block to your flow email, configure it to pull cart data, and test before going live.

The numbers back it up. Cart abandonment flows routinely drive 20–30% of email channel revenue for ecommerce brands that run them correctly. A dynamic product block is what makes those flows feel personal rather than automated.

Build it once. Let it run. Measure and iterate.

And when you’re ready to extend beyond email — to reach the prospects who haven’t found your store yet — that’s where a structured outbound system picks up. SalesSo builds those systems. Book a strategy meeting to talk through what that looks like for your pipeline.