What it costs you to get a member, and how to work out yours this week
Most boxes don't know what they pay for each sign-up. Without that number, any decision about advertising is blind. It takes twenty minutes with a spreadsheet.
The short answer
Add up everything you spent last month on getting clients and divide it by the sign-ups that came in that month. That's your acquisition cost.
The problem isn't the formula. It's that almost nobody includes every cost.
What has to go in
- Advertising: whatever Meta, Google or whoever took.
- Welcome offers: the first month at half price costs money too.
- Tools: what you pay for acquisition software, calendars or messaging.
- Your time, or the time of whoever handles the messages. If you spend an hour a day replying and you value that hour at €20, that's €600 a month nobody writes down anywhere.
That last point is the one that changes the result. A box that thinks it acquires for €40 is usually acquiring for €120 once the hours are counted.
What to compare it with
The acquisition cost on its own, in isolation, says nothing. It has to sit next to what a member leaves while they last:
monthly membership × months they stay on average
In a box with a €79 membership and an average retention of ten months, each member leaves around €790. The rule of thumb in the industry is that acquiring should cost less than a third of that figure. Above that the business narrows without anyone noticing until it's late.
How to work it out this week
Take a spreadsheet and three months of data:
| What | Where to look |
|---|---|
| Ad spend | The ads dashboard |
| Offers | How much you didn't charge on first memberships |
| Tools | The subscriptions you pay |
| Hours spent | Estimate it honestly and multiply |
| Sign-ups | Your management software |
Divide the total by the sign-ups. Do it month by month, not all at once: if one month had a campaign and another didn't, the average lies.
What almost always comes out
Two things repeat in every box we've looked at:
- Ad spend is fine. It's rarely the problem.
- The loss is between the message and the reply. You're paying to generate conversations that then aren't handled in time, so you're paying twice: once for the ad and once in members who never come in.
That's why fixing the reply usually lowers acquisition cost more than changing the advertising. You're not getting more interested people: you're losing fewer of the ones you already had.
A word on offers
Cutting the entry membership lowers the acquisition cost on the spreadsheet and raises it in reality: it brings in people who came for the price and leave when it goes up. Before touching it, look at how a box sets its price. If you're going to measure this, measure how many are still there after three months too. An offer that acquires cheaply and retains badly is more expensive than doing nothing.
Questions about this
Which costs should be included when working out what a member costs to acquire?
Everything spent on getting somebody in: advertising, acquisition tools, welcome offers, commissions and the time of whoever handles the messages, valued at what that hour costs. Leaving your own time out is the most common mistake and the one that distorts the number most.
What is an acceptable acquisition cost for a box?
It depends on what each member leaves. The rule of thumb: if acquiring costs less than a third of what a member pays across their whole life at the box, the business breathes. With a €79 membership and ten months of average retention, each member leaves around €790, so below €260 of acquisition cost there is margin.