With the rise of cybercrimes such as phishing and spoofing, customers often receive suspicious messages in their inboxes. As a result of this, brand email senders often get marked as spam and face several other marketing issues. To avoid such situations, marketers these days rely on Brand Indicators for Message Identification (BIMI). It permits domain owners to coordinate with Mail User Agents (MUAs) to display brand-specific indicators.
BIMI helps organizations gain control overusing their logo in emails to properly authenticate messages with a visual clue that identifies a message’s source and authenticity. This new industry-developed specification leverages DMARC and additional checks to standardize a more secure and authentic way of sending email and gain more trust.
There are two aspects of BIMI coordination: a scalable mechanism for Domain Owners to publish their desired indicators and a mechanism for Mail Transfer Agents (MTAs) to verify the indicator’s authenticity. BIMI adds another layer of email protection and builds brand visibility to take consumer confidence to the next level.
BIMI helps recipients recognize and trust your brand in the inbox, saving your messages from being sent to the spam folder and consumers from unsubscribing from your email list. Thus, implementing BIMI in your marketing system can boost your email deliverability. Email receivers can identify your brand even before opening the email, and therefore, your email gets a higher chance to be opened, even if it lacks a compelling headline.
How does BIMI work?
BIMI is a part of your DNS txt record that gets integrated into your sending servers that allows your email receivers to search your BIMI text file. Once the verification process gets over, it will search the file to find your company’s logo location. You can select the logo you want to be displayed and store it in HTTPS and enter the URL in the DNS TXT record. You can use only square SVG images without text, and as the provider finds your image, it will attach the image to your message in the inbox. But to make the most of BIMI, senders must also pass DMARC and have a good sender reputation.
If a BIMI policy is applied and DMARC is passed, you need to make sure that you take the following measures:
Volume and reputation – For larger senders, mailbox providers will check the senders’ email volume and reputation to help verify the sender’s authenticity.
Manually controlled allow list (whitelists) –As smaller businesses have a more challenging time validating through their volume and reputation alone, there are ‘whitelists’ that help validate these senders’ authenticity.
Verified Mark Certificate – This is a validation process that further authenticates the logo file in the same way that SSL certifications work through a purchased and verified certificate.
Once the logo’s authenticity and the sender get verified by the mailbox provider, the image will show in the recipient’s inbox with the associated email. Though BIMI is a new email practice, marketers are adopting it rapidly to increase their email deliverability rate and ROI. If you are also planning to integrate BIMI, make sure you follow the industry’s best practices to get your BIMI verified.
