Plug in five numbers below. See exactly what dormant clients are costing you in customer acquisition cost, lifetime revenue, and CAC-to-LTV efficiency every year. Built by GlowRanked, California’s editorial register of medical spas, narrated by Aura.
Move the sliders to your shape. Output updates live. Defaults match a typical mid-size California med spa.
How many brand-new clients walk through your door each month.
Total ad + marketing spend ÷ new clients. Typical med spa CAC runs $150–$500.
What a typical visit brings in, blended across services.
Botox cycles ≈ 3–4/yr · Hydrafacial ≈ 6–10/yr · Body ≈ 4–6/yr.
Industry data: 50–70% of new med spa clients don't come back within a year.
LTV assumes a 3-year retained-client horizon. Numbers above are industry averages — your spa’s real numbers come out of the Client Reactivation Audit.
$909K
Total annual waste — CAC sunk on clients who don’t return, plus the lifetime revenue they would have brought. Estimate.
$45,000
Money you paid to acquire clients who didn't return. Of your $75,000 annual CAC budget.
$864,000
Each retained client = $4,800 over 3 years. This is what dormant clients would have brought.
7.7x
Healthy benchmark: 3x+. Below 1x means you're paying more to acquire than each client returns.
Which clients to start with. What to say to each. When to send. And what’s actually recoverable from your list — not the industry average, your real number. That’s the audit.
Need solutions?Book your Client Reactivation Audit30 min · see if our solutions fit your problem · if they don’t, I’ll point you at what doesCalculator runs are logged anonymously so I can improve the tool. No email, no identity. The spa picker is opt-in.
Most med spa owners can quote their average ticket from memory. Far fewer can quote their customer acquisition cost, and almost none can quote the percentage of that CAC they’re writing off every year on clients who don’t return. That’s the gap this calculator surfaces.
Customer acquisition cost (CAC)for a medical spa is the total marketing spend it takes to bring one new client through the door. It includes paid ads (Meta, Google, TikTok), agency or marketing manager fees, the cost of consults that don’t convert, and any first-visit discounts you ate to close the booking. Industry benchmarks from AmSpa’s Medical Spa State of the Industry surveys put typical CAC for an established med spa between $150 and $500 per new client, with high-spend boutique aesthetic practices running well above that in competitive metros like Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Newport Beach.
Lifetime value (LTV) for a retained med spa client is what they bring in across their tenure with you. The retention horizon is the variable that swings LTV most: a client who comes back twice and disappears has a very different LTV than one who anchors on Botox cycles for four years. The widely-cited 3:1 LTV-to-CAC ratio benchmarkassumes a 3-year retention horizon. Below 1:1, you’re paying more to acquire than each client returns — which means your bottleneck isn’t ad spend, it’s retention.
Dormant clientsare the ones who came in once or twice and never came back. Operator surveys consistently put 6-month lapse rates for new med spa clients between 50% and 70%. Botox-anchored spas tend to retain better — the treatment cycle does the rebooking work for them. Spas without a structured reactivation program lose the highest-CAC clients fastest: first-time injectors who didn’t get their follow-up scheduled at checkout, hydrafacial trial visits that never converted to a membership.
The CAC wastenumber in the output above is the most under-estimated figure on this page. It’s the ad spend you’ve already paid out that produced a client who didn’t come back. That money is gone — it produced zero retained revenue. Adding it to the lost LTV (the future revenue dormant clients would have brought if retained) gives you the total annual waste number at the top of the output panel. For a typical mid-size California med spa, that total runs into six figures every year, and it compounds.
The calculator stops there on purpose. It tells you whether you have a problem worth solving — not how to solve it. The specifics (which clients to reactivate first, what to say, when, and how much actually comes back from your list) live in the Client Reactivation Audit. Industry averages are useful for diagnosis. Your spa’s real numbers are what actually drive a campaign.
From Boulevard, Zenoti, Vagaro, Mindbody, or whatever PMS you run. Just the count, deduplicated by client.
Total ad spend + agency fees + consult give-aways ÷ new clients. That's your real CAC, not the per-channel one your marketing dashboard shows.
Count clients whose last visit was 6+ months ago. Divide by total clients seen 6+ months ago. That percentage is what we plug in as 'don't return after 6 months.'
Average ticket × visits per year × tenure horizon (3 years is a defensible baseline; some operators model 5).
(Lapsed clients × CAC) + (lapsed clients × LTV) = total annual waste. This is what most owners under-estimate by 3–5x because the CAC sunk-cost side is invisible.
CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost) is the total marketing and ad spend it takes to bring one new client through your door. For a med spa, this is usually calculated as: (monthly ad spend + agency/marketing fees + consultation give-aways) divided by new clients booked that month. Industry surveys typically put med spa CAC between $150 and $500 per new client, with high-spend boutique spas running $600+ in competitive metros.
The widely-cited benchmark is 3:1 — every dollar of CAC should return at least three dollars of lifetime value across the client's tenure with you. Below 1:1 means you're paying more to acquire than the average client returns, which is a sign your retention (not your ad spend) is the actual bottleneck. Above 5:1 usually means you're under-investing in growth.
Public industry data and operator surveys consistently land in the 50–70% range for new-client lapse rates at 12 months. Botox-anchored spas tend to retain better than facial-only spas because the treatment cycle naturally rebooks. Spas without a structured reactivation program lose the highest-CAC clients fastest — first-time injectors who didn't get their follow-up scheduled at checkout.
Multiply (clients who haven't returned in 6+ months) × (average ticket per visit) × (visits they would have made in 12 months). Then add back the CAC you spent acquiring those clients in the first place, since that ad spend produced zero retained revenue. This calculator does both — the 'lifetime revenue lost to dormancy' field is the pure-revenue side, the 'CAC wasted' field is the sunk-acquisition side.
CAC waste is the money you've already paid out — ad spend, marketing fees, consult give-aways — that produced a client who didn't return. It's a sunk cost. Lost revenue is the future income that client would have generated if they'd kept coming back. CAC waste shows up on your books today; lost revenue is the bigger long-term number. Owners feel CAC waste sharper because it stings now.
It's a 30-minute working session where Aura pulls your POS export and shows you four things this calculator can't: which specific clients to reactivate first, what to say to each one, when to send the outreach, and what's actually recoverable from your list (not the industry average — your real number). No slide deck, no pitch, no fee. You keep the audit afterward whether or not you hire The Comeback.
The Comeback is the productized service Aura runs after the audit: outbound to your dormant list, inbound coverage on missed leads, automated rebook flows. $2,250/month plus a $3,500 setup that stays paused until Aura recovers your first $3,500 from dormant clients. Standalone or bundled with Aura Verified (the credential).
The calculator runs on industry averages. The Client Reactivation Auditruns on your spa’s actual data — your PMS export, your CAC, your real lapse rate. 30 minutes, no slide deck, no pitch, no fee. You keep the audit whether or not you hire The Comeback afterward.
Book your Client Reactivation AuditBrowse the directory Aura screens, narrates, and verifies.
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