Naming conventions for subscription-based businesses generally fall into one of two categories: hierarchical (gold/silver/bronze; 3 star/2 star/1 star; Limo/car/bus) or descriptive (Professional/amateur/beginner; enterprise/business/individual; HR/Manager/Candidate).
When thinking about how to name your tiered offerings, you need to way flexibility and simplicity against specificity and guidance.
The vast majority of companies go with hierarchical solutions. Why? First, because it's easy. More interestingly, hierarchical solutions translate well internationally, is clear about which offering is "better" and gives the company flexibility to change features and adjust offerings as target markets may shift. For example, if you create an offering called "Student" but find that it actually is being bought be a lot of moms–do you change the name of the offering to "Students and moms"? Or add a new offering that's very similar and cal it "moms"–leading potentially to excessive proliferation of offerings?
On the other hand, descriptive naming actually directs customers to what they need. This convention is useful if feature sets are optimized around user archetypes (heavy users, teachers, IT-pros). A risk of multiple offerings is that prospects get confused, don't know which offering to choose and therefore don't choose anything. So making it easy for a user to "find himself" increases the likelihood of converting him.
A few other things to consider in naming:
- limit options to 3 or maximum of 4 options (plus the free one) or less. Otherwise prospects can be overwhelmed
- consider using a tagline in addition to the option names "for people who…". This helps users identify the right offering, but gives you flexibility to adjust as you learn more about the market
- generally, the middle option is most popular. It can be helpful to call out the popular option with graphics and even the words "our most popular offering"
Finally, it is good to remember that in many cases, customers don't even remember the name of the offering they have once they make a buying decision-names are mostly for marketing (and for internal clarity). So don't worry too much about the names. Optimizing the features, pricing and user-experience are more important.
