Testing Product Names for SaaS: How to Choose Names for New Features

Having a great SaaS name places you in a great location on this map, closer to your target customers and farther away from your competitors, which is exactly what your unique brand needs. But testing product names is an important process that many might see as futile.

Choosing the best name for your SaaS product can delicately position your brand to customers by understanding their needs and appealing to their emotions while communicating your brand values. Basically, the best SaaS name understands and speaks the customer’s language based on their customer feedback, and if you’re not sure how to do that, then keep reading!

With 73% of business organization indicating a massive transition of their apps to SaaS, and the SaaS market’s growth rate estimated to reach $157 billion by the close of 2020, there’s no better time to invest in getting a SaaS name that’s not only intriguing and SEO friendly but also capable of drawing some companies that prefer SaaS over other delivery methods.

Why Your SaaS Product Needs A Strong Name

Your product name is the first contact customers would make with your brand, and it might either attract or repel them from your brand. Of course a great logo and professional business cards are another essential components, but the brand name is what customers will remember for long. Everything about how customers perceive your business brand is all in the naming, and here are some reasons you need one:

To Get Your Customers Attention and Drive Sales

The more memorable your SaaS product’s name is, the more likely customers would find it easier visiting your brand. Microsoft is currently the largest SaaS provider in the world and an enormous chunk of that was made possible by some of their memorable brand names like LinkedIn and Office 365… names that address their customer’s needs.

To Build Your Brand and Attract Great Talents

Everything that goes into brand naming isn’t just focused on attracting new customers to your SaaS product but also brilliant talents that believe in your brand’s potential, and would gladly help it reach its goals.

How Do You Get the Right SaaS Name?

Although your heart might be in the right place, if your SaaS product doesn’t have a strong SEO friendly name, it’ll never attract customers and drive sales as you want. And to craft the best name for your product, you need to:

Assemble Your Team for Testing Product Names

Brainstorm

Usually, this is the first thing you’d have to do after getting your team together. Write as many names as you can come up with. It doesn’t matter if the names sound great or not, just take a few days and get that note pad filled with names that catch your product’s vision, mission and values. 

Use a Dictionary/Thesaurus

It might sound cliché, but by flipping through a dictionary, you could see a name that fits your brand.

Take Jeff Bezos for instance; he chose the name Amazon after looking at a dictionary because the name appealed to his online brand.

To create an SEO friendly domain name, consider adding SaaS to the end of the name.

But these aren’t the only paths to a strong business name.

In addition to traditional methods, you can also explore the convenience and creativity of an AI business name generator, which can generate compelling and distinctive names for your company or for company’s new products.

Plan B: How to Go About Testing Product Names

Timing is everything in business and having a Plan B is a perfect solution if you’re having any difficulty with the methods we’ve discussed above.  

Plan B: Consider seeing branding professionals 

The beauty of consulting a naming agency is that they’ve acquired a wealth of knowledge and experience with generating strong names for businesses, they understand the rules and nuances involved, but most especially they know when to break these rules so your brands can display its uniqueness.

We recommend using them to speed up your business process.

What an SEO Friendly SaaS Name Needs

Endeavour that your product’s name meets these needs:

• It needs to be unique. A unique business name can be easily found on SERPs. Amazon and Tesla both have a strong SEO rank.
• If your brand name isn’t abstract, make sure it contains words that people actually search online. Shopify is a great example.

Now you’ve got the Name, Let’s Test its Potency

Let’s say you’ve assembled your team, shared every detail about your SaaS product’s purpose and its values, and as time went on, they generated lots of potential names and you’re literally confused about which one to pick.

The best way around this would be to consider each possible name for your SaaS product carefully and to do this effectively; we suggest you use this checklist:

The Deliberation Checklist

1.  Does it Communicate Value?

Your SaaS product’s name is going to be the first thing customers would see, so you need to make sure it communicates the value you provide them. E.g. Google, and Microsoft Office Online.

2. Would Customers Pronounce and Spell it easily?

The name of your SaaS product shouldn’t be difficult to spell or pronounce because it’ll negatively affect you when customers search for your product online.

3. How Memorable is it?

Choose names that’d be easy to remember. Zoom is an excellent example because it creates a visual image in the minds of anyone who hears it.

4. What Tone/Emotion does your Product’s Name Trigger?

How does your product name sound when you say it out loud? What tone does it communicate? Can you say your SaaS product’s name to a crowd of A-Level business owners without feeling silly? Is it offensive in other languages?

5. How Flexible is Your SaaS Product’s Name?

Remember, you’re not just getting a name for the short term; you’re getting a name that’ll last a really long time, so pick one that’ll let you scale easily without having to rebrand every time.

6.  Has a Competition Already Snatched It?

We get it. Names are scarce, but you don’t have to take a name that’s already chosen by another brand or bears a close similarity to it. If your brand is unique, don’t sacrifice its uniqueness.

The exception seems to be survey tools since they usually have the word ‘survey,’ a simple statement of the service they offer, but even they do a great job of adding either a prefix or a suffix to distinguish themselves. E.g. SurveyMonkey and SoGoSurvey

7. Is Its Online Domain Available?

For your business to survive, it must have an online presence, and what good is a SaaS product’s name if it doesn’t have a domain?

8.  Audience Testing

Once you have your product name and are ready to release it to the wild, you may want to consider running a user acceptance test. Just by getting 5 people to feedback on a landing page can provide you invaluable insights to the fitness of your product name.

A simple way to do that is with Usersnap. It takes 10 seconds to install the widget, and your customers can send in feedback with annotated screenshots. If they stick with your product name, then you’re good to go! If they don’t quite understand it, then you just saved yourself from a huge public embarrassment!

Finally, You are Ready for Testing Product Names

With all these tips at your fingertips, you should be confident when selecting a name for your SaaS product.

And for your testing product names as well as website testing, or even product beta testing, you can turn to Usersnap. Understanding what your customers like and need is always important. Try it out for free in the first 15 days.

Grant Polachek is the Head of Branding at Inc 500 company Squadhelp.com, the world’s #1 naming platform, with 25,000+ customers from early-stage startups across the globe to the largest corporations including Nestle, Philips, Hilton, Pepsi, and AutoNation. Get inspired by exploring these winning business name ideas.