On this episode of the ProfitWell Report, Michal Sadowski, Founder and CEO at Brand24, asks us a simple yet widely debated question: How does design impact willingness to pay and growth?

Design has become a qualitative non-negotiable. If you don’t have good design, prospects tend to distrust the value of your product and ultimately customers may be wooed away from a better designed product.

At least that’s what you tend to hear devoid of any actual data, so to answer this question we gathered data from over seventy thousand customers and nearly three thousand companies. Here’s what we found.

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First up, to get a direct answer out of the way, great design definitely boosts willingness to pay.

We coded respondents perception of a company’s web and product design before measuring their willingness to pay. Those customers and prospects who perceived a company’s design positively had between an 18% and 41% higher willingness to pay than the median. Those on the negative perception side had 4 to 11% lower willingness to pay.

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What’s fascinating about these results is that this indicates that great design is a value added feature or aspect of the experience. Bad design doesn’t necessarily take much away from the value perception of a product. In other words, design drives higher value, but doesn’t detract from value.

So should you not worry about your poorly designed experience?

Well, not exactly, because when we look at retention, what you’ll see is that those individuals with a positive perception of the company’s design have roughly 8% to 12% better net retention than those who were neutral or had a negative perception.

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More research needs to be done here in particular, because like most things happening in the subscription market, the need for great and relevant design is becoming more and more important as a differentiator.

Yet, as the data suggests, if you don’t have the rest of your house in order, great design probably isn’t going to save you.

Well, that's all for now. If you have a question, ship me an email or video to neel@profitwell.com and if you got value here or on any other week of the report, we appreciate any and all shares on Twitter and LinkedIn. That’s how we measure if we should keeping doing this or not. We’ll see you next week.