How durable is the revenue you already have?
Acquisition buys the first order. Everything after it is retention. Score three things together: how often customers come back, how much of your email and SMS revenue is automated, and which lifecycle flows are actually live.
How this score is calculated
Most retention tools report one number: a repeat rate, or a channel's share of revenue. A single number tells you where you stand but not what to do about it. This one is composite, because the three inputs fail in different ways and each points at a different fix.
Automated mix = min(100, automated flow share ÷ 40 × 100)
Flow coverage = sum of the weights of every live flow
Score = (Repeat × 0.40) + (Mix × 0.30) + (Coverage × 0.30)
Automation gap = max(0, 40% − automated share) × owned revenue × 12
Repeat-rate gap = max(0, category target − repeat rate) × monthly revenue × 12
The 40% automated-mix target is the load-bearing number here, so it is worth saying where it comes from. Three independent datasets land in the same place: automated flows account for roughly 37% to 45% of owned-channel revenue while making up a tiny fraction of total sends. Owned channels are the ones you control rather than rent: your website and blog, email, SMS, your app, and your own social profiles. This score measures email and SMS, because those are the two that report revenue per send. That gap between volume and value is the whole argument for flow work. Below the 40% floor, revenue is coming from manual sends that have to be re-earned every week.
The 7 lifecycle flows are weighted rather than counted, because they do not carry equal revenue. Welcome and abandoned checkout are 44 of the 100 coverage points between them, so a store missing those two sits in a very different position than one missing list hygiene.
Sources used to calibrate
- Klaviyo, 2026 Email Marketing Benchmarks. Across 183,000+ brands, automated flows drive close to 41% of total email revenue from just 5.3% of sends, with revenue per recipient roughly 18 times campaign level and click rates of 5.58% against 1.69%. klaviyo.com/products/email-marketing/benchmarks
- Klaviyo, 2026 SMS Marketing Benchmarks. Across the same dataset, SMS flows account for 7.6% of sends but 45.2% of SMS revenue, at roughly 8 times campaign revenue per recipient. klaviyo.com/products/sms-marketing/benchmarks
- Omnisend, Email Marketing Statistics. Automations make up about 2% of email volume yet generate 37% of email-driven sales, at $2.87 per automated email against $0.18 per campaign email. omnisend.com/blog/email-marketing-statistics
- Shopify, average customer retention rates by industry. Used as the cross-category anchor for the mixed-vertical target, alongside the roughly 30% average retention reported across brands on the Decile customer data platform. shopify.com/blog/average-customer-retention-rate-by-industry
- Category repeat-rate spread. Per-vertical targets sit inside published ranges that run from roughly 10% for durables and general retail up to 60% and above for subscription, which is exactly why a single flat benchmark misreads most stores. Reported ranges differ between datasets depending on lookback window and how a repeat customer is defined, so each target is the floor of healthy for that category rather than a precise line.
Sources last checked August 2026.
Two assumptions worth knowing. The repeat-rate gap treats one point of repeat-rate improvement as roughly one point of revenue improvement at your current order-value mix, which is directional rather than a forecast. The automation gap is deliberately conservative: it re-prices your existing owned revenue against the 40% floor and does not assume the total grows, even though the per-recipient data above suggests it usually does. Both are here to size an opportunity, not to promise an outcome.