Brand Indicators for Message Identification, or BIMI, allows brands to specify images that appear alongside the authenticated email messages they send.
Industry leaders like Google, Mailchimp, SendGrid, Yahoo, and Valimail have piloted the program, and it’s gained official support with the following service providers.
Brands can get on board this bus today by first protecting their domains using DMARC authentication and then starting the BIMI set-up process.
What is BIMI?
Brand Indicators for Message Identification (BIMI) is the secret to email marketing. When you have BIMI enabled, you can attach your company’s logo with your email.
These branded emails become your identity in the email inbox, and BIMI helps you capture your audience’s attention while simultaneously improving your brand identity. The visual of your logo will also increase brand trust.
BIMI utilizes email authentication protocols to ensure email integrity and ownership of the sending domain. When these checks are validated, the email client will retrieve the authenticated logo and display it with the email.
It’s that simple.
If you want to learn more about BIMI, how it works, and how to set it up, download our newest guide:
Benefits of BIMI
Here’s a quick look at some of the key benefits of implementing BIMI:
- Enhanced Brand Visibility: Your brand’s logo is displayed directly in the inbox.
- Boosted Trust and Engagement: Recipients can visually verify the authenticity of your emails, fostering trust and potentially increasing engagement rates.
- Improved Email Deliverability: By adhering to BIMI (which requires DMARC compliance), you enhance your email deliverability by ensuring emails are authenticated.
- Protection Against Phishing: BIMI helps reduce the risk of phishing attacks by providing a visual cue of legitimate emails, making unauthorized uses of your domain more apparent.
- Enhanced Customer Experience: Provide a better and more secure user experience for your email recipients.
- Competitive Edge: Standing out in the inbox with a visible logo gives you a competitive edge, particularly if competitors aren’t taking advantage of BIMI.
- Supports Email Authentication Efforts: BIMI works in tandem with DMARC, SPF, and DKIM, supporting your overall email authentication strategy.
BIMI prerequisites
While BIMI doesn’t protect your domain itself, you need to meet certain standards to implement it. Here are some of the steps.
DMARC enforcement
By itself, BIMI provides no assurances that a message is authenticated, and BIMI is not a security standard.
In order to use BIMI, domains need to implement authentication through DMARC. Specifically, they need a DMARC record at enforcement in DNS. That means a DMARC policy that directs mail receivers to keep all unauthenticated emails out of recipients’ inboxes.
Note that this enforcement policy must apply to the organizational domain and all subdomains, not just the subdomain used to send email.
Even without BIMI, enforcement has brand benefits of its own: DMARC enforcement prevents your brand from being spoofed by unauthorized parties. DMARC enforcement has also been shown to increase email deliverability.
According to Valimail research, there’s been a 5X increase in the number of DMARC records worldwide over the past three years.
However, most of those DMARC records lack an enforcement policy. Less than 17% of the 850,000 domains with DMARC records are currently at enforcement for the organizational domain.
The other 83%? They have DMARC, but they’re not able to use BIMI yet.
A validated logo
The other key component for enabling BIMI is validating your logo by getting a Verified Mark Certificate, or VMC. This is a new type of digital certificate that ties together a company, its domain, and its logo in a verifiable way.
The VMC registration system is designed to prevent bad actors from registering logos that they don’t own. If someone does try to use a VMC to register a logo that they don’t own, the VMC registration contains everything that the rightful trademark owner needs to track down the bad actor and pursue legal action.
Valimail partners with DigiCert to streamline this process and get you BIMI ready.
Automate your BIMI management with Amplify
Valimail’s product, Valimail Amplify, offers completely automated and seamless management of BIMI for domains and subdomains.
We can also simplify the process of getting a VMC certificate through our close relationship with DigiCert. Reap all the rewards of BIMI without the hassle.