What's Your Retention Score?

What is a customer retention score?

A customer retention score is a single number that represents how well your business keeps the customers it acquires. The score blends seven measurable retention behaviors: visit frequency, time between visits, contact list size, communication cadence, offer redemption, channel coverage, and lapsed-customer reactivation. Each input maps to a benchmark from primary industry research (Square 2025 Loyalty Report, Mailchimp 2024 Email Benchmarks, IBISWorld 2025, Mindbody Wellness Index 2024).

The reason this matters: most local businesses can describe their acquisition cost (cost to get a new customer) but cannot describe their retention rate (percent of customers who come back). That blind spot is expensive. A typical local business loses 50 to 70 percent of new customers after the first visit (Mindbody Wellness Index 2024 for service businesses; Square 2025 Loyalty Report for retail and food). A retention score forces the math to the surface so you can see which lever to pull first.

How to read your score

• 80 to 100 means your retention engine is working. Customers come back, you reach them through the right channels, and lapsed customers get reactivated. Most businesses scoring here have a wallet pass program and a structured customer database.
• 60 to 79 means you have the basics but are leaving revenue on the table. Usually one or two specific levers are missing: cadence-aware reminders, a lapsed-customer win-back sequence, or a wallet-pass push channel.
• 40 to 59 means retention is happening by accident. You have customers who come back, but you do not have a system that brings them back when they drift. Most local businesses score here.
• Below 40 means you are running an acquisition treadmill. Every dollar of marketing spend is buying a one-time visit. The fix is structural: build a contact database, install a capture flow, and start communicating with customers between visits.

What to do with your score

The score is diagnostic, not prescriptive. After you have it, look at the seven sub-scores and find the lowest two. Those are your highest-ROI fixes for the next 90 days. Compare your score against the customer retention rate by industry benchmarks for your specific vertical so you know whether you are above or below average. Then run the math on what closing the gap is worth using the retention ROI calculator. Most operators discover that even a five-point retention improvement is worth tens of thousands of dollars per year.

The quiz takes about three minutes. There is no email gate, no signup required. Save your results and check back quarterly: the score should move as your retention work compounds.

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Based on data from 4,000+ local businesses. Try the ROI calculator to see the dollar impact.