What Does One New Customer Cost You?

Not sure where to start? Try one of these, then change the numbers to yours:

Step 1 of 3

What is one customer worth to you?

Not what they pay once — what they're worth in total before they stop buying from you.

What they pay you in a typical month Their membership, tuition, or regular order. Just the money from this one customer.

How many months they usually stay Your best guess is fine. Most people underestimate this.

What's your profit margin? 60% What's left out of every $100 they pay you, after staff, materials, rent and card fees — but not advertising. If you charge $100 for a class and staff and supplies cost $40, that's 60%. A round number is fine.

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One customer pays you this much in total

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And this much of it you actually keep

Step 2 of 3

What does it cost to get one?

A lead is anyone who calls, fills in a form, or messages you because of an ad. Not clicks, not website visitors — actual humans getting in touch. All three of these are on your dashboard.

Cost per lead If you spent $2,000 last month and got 50 leads, that's $40.

Leads you received per month Last month's total, or a typical month.

Leads who enrolled or purchased Of those leads, how many became paying customers?

Run kids classes? Here's a typical path from lead to member

30%of leads book a trial class.Common planning figure. No published study tracks this step yet.
30%of families who book a free trial go on to a paid class, usually within a month.Sawyer, 13M+ kids activity bookings in 2025
54–60%of first-time trial students enroll at gymnastics, swim, cheer and dance programs. Next to Sawyer's 30%, that suggests roughly half of booked trials show up.iClassPro, 2024–2025 customer data
About 9 in 100leads become paying members (30% × 30%). At $10 a lead, that's about $111 to win one member.Our math, from the figures above

Use your own numbers above whenever you have them. This path is a starting point if you don't.

Advertising cost to win one new customer

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Under $1 back
losing money $1 to $3 back
tight $3+ back
healthy

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Step 3 of 3

So what should you be spending?

There's no magic budget. It depends on how many new customers you want and what each one costs you to win.

New customers you'd like each month 10 Drag it. Everything below updates.

Leads you need to receive	—
What you'd spend on ads to get them	—
What those customers pay you	—
What you keep after paying for the ads	—
Most you should ever pay for one lead	—

Treat this as a ceiling to grow toward, not a target for next month. Most local businesses build up to it gradually — and the figures hold at any budget, because what a customer costs you doesn't change with how much you spend.

In plain English

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Go through this with me — 30 mins →

Where these figures come from

Cost to win a customer = your cost per lead, divided by the share of leads that buy. If one in five buys, you need five leads, so a customer costs five times one lead. What you keep per customer = what they pay you in total, times your profit margin.

The "$3 back" line is a widely used rule of thumb, not a law. It leaves room for the overheads this page doesn't ask about, and for customers who don't stay as long as you hoped. Some businesses are fine at $2; some need $5. Treat it as a starting point for a conversation.

Every figure in your results comes from what you typed. If something looks wrong, one of the inputs is wrong — change it and look again. The kids program path in Step 2 is for reference only. The trial booking and enrollment figures come from two published datasets: Sawyer's 2026 Children's Activity Industry Report (13 million+ bookings in 2025) and iClassPro's 2025 benchmark study (gymnastics, swim, cheer and dance programs). The 30% of leads who book a trial is a common planning figure; we couldn't find a published study that measures that step.