How to Calculate Your Massage Rebooking Rate

How many of your clients come back again and again? It’s a lot more cost effective to get clients to come for repeat appointments than it is to constantly try to get new clients in, right? And a steady clientele of regulars can give you and your business the financial stability you need. So there’s a key metric that needs to be tracked so you can be sure you’re keeping a good number of your clients as regulars and you’re not just guessing and assuming things are fine. And that’s your rebooking rate. So let’s look at how you calculate that number and what it means for your goal setting and plan moving forward.

Knowing your KPIs, or key performance indicators, is really important; one of those being your rebooking rate. And calculating that rebooking rate is pretty simple actually. You only need to know two numbers…

• Your total service count
• The number of rebooked appointments

So your total service count is simply the number of massages you’ve performed over a period of time. And the number of rebooked appointments is the total number of appointments any client had after their first. So we take your rebooked appointment number and divide that by your total service count. And that is your rebooking rate as a percentage. So let’s look at an example with some very general numbers to keep this simple…

Let’s say you’re looking back at 2021, and you had a total of 1,000 massage appointments. And if 700 of those appointments were all subsequent appointments, that means you take 700 divided by 1,000 and you get .70 or 70%. So you had a rebooking rate of 70% for the year. That means 70% of your appointments for the year were with repeat clients.
If you saw 924 clients for the year and 812 of those were rebooked appointments, then that’s a rebooking rate of 87%. Make sense?

Now, let’s say you’ve not been tracking your number of rebooked appointments and you don’t want to go back through all of last year’s calendar and add those up manually…even though it would be helpful for comparison…I get it. So moving forward, that means marking each client that comes in as either new or rebooked and keeping track of that total service count and total new vs. rebooked client counts readily available so you can calculate this. If you don’t want to do the math, you may want to check out our spreadsheet that does all that for you. It’s available over HERE and all you have to do is plug in your sales and expenses and it calculates all your KPIs like this for you. It’s important to be able to see these kind of metrics monthly, quarterly, and yearly.

Ok, now what’s the point in calculating this? Well, it’s going to give you some insight into whether your rebooking strategy and efforts are working or not. If your rebooking rate is only 50%, you’ll want to get that up for sure, right? For most massage businesses, maybe not all, but the majority of you, for sure, you want a pretty high rebooking rate. So start by setting small goals. If it’s 50% this month, focus on fine tuning your rebooking strategy and getting that up to 55% next month. And then 60% the next. If you can do bigger jumps of 10 or 15% each month, fantastic, but even those small increases add up, so don’t invalidate the importance of those too. Especially if you’re the kind that has really been slacking on proactively trying to rebook clients.

So, while there’s a lot of metrics you can track in your business, your rebooking rate is a really important one. You could say it’s the stability metric for your business. If 90% of your clients are coming back, that’s like saying your business is 90% stable. Obviously there’s more to full business stability than that, but that’s some serious financial stability you can lean into for assurance. Again, go over and check out our Financial Tracker Spreadsheet that helps you calculate this rebooking rate and a whole bunch more. It’s just a one-time cost of $30 and you can use it year after year.