Customer Retention Rate

Customer retention rate measures how many of the customers you had at the start of a period were still buying from you at the end of it. A common formula is: (customers at the end of the period minus new customers gained during it) divided by customers at the start, multiplied by 100. A retention rate of 80% means four in five of your existing customers came back.

It matters because keeping a customer is usually cheaper than winning a new one, and because most independent businesses cannot see the number at all. Example: a cafe with 300 known customers in March and 320 in April, 60 of whom are new, retained 260 of its March customers: about 87%.

Retention rate is the complement of churn rate (retention 80% means churn 20%). It is different from repeat-visit share, which asks what proportion of visits were repeat rather than what proportion of customers stayed.

A loyalty program makes retention measurable because it gives every joined customer a record. The Loyal-T Cards dashboard separates new visits from repeat visits, which is the raw material for a retention figure. It reports what your team recorded; it does not count visits that were never scanned.