What if we told you that there’s a way to brand your emails to your students? It’s a closer achievement than you might realize.
That’s all thanks to BIMI.
Brand Indicators for Message Identification (BIMI) is a game-changer in the email world, and it can enhance your college’s identity.
While this might be a new concept and sound technical, it is easy for your school to implement. Once it’s implemented, you can make sure your college has its logo associated with it on every email you send to students.
What is BIMI?
Imagine that you have a sticker with your school’s logo on it. With Brand Indicators for Message Identification (BIMI), you’ll get that logo on every email that you send. When a student, professor, or administrator gets email from your school, they’ll immediately recognize the logo.
BIMI acts as a visual, digital signature for people to know what account the email came from. Because of all the safety protocols a domain needs to meet to have BIMI, users can more easily trust emails in their inbox if there is an official logo associated with them.
Here are the email providers that support BIMI:
Benefits of BIMI for higher education
If there’s no logo associated with a domain, the email client may just put in the initials of the company name or a gray circle.
However, if BIMI is active for your college domain, you can revive your brand and bring your personality and logo into the inbox alongside your email.
Your college logo will be familiar to your students, professors, and faculty, and it will more easily stand out in the inbox. You may even get more clicks and opened messages if people recognize the logo.
On top of that, your emails will look more official and professional. If you sent a physical letter in the mail, you’d attach your college’s logo on the letterhead of the email. BIMI can do the same thing for your email.
This might seem like a small change, but it could make a big difference in how you communicate with your students and faculty.
Implement BIMI at your college
Implementing BIMI at your college will enable your logo to be in the users’ inboxes. While the process might seem overwhelming and technical, we’ll break it down into four easy steps for you.
[BIMI] is something you can do for the good of email at a relatively low cost and low effort. I believe that if email were invented today, BIMI would be required before a sender could send the first email message.
Daniel Deneweth, Head of Deliverability Services at Oracle
Verify your identity
Your IT department will need to set up something called Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance (DMARC). To make it even easier for them, they can use our automated DMARC service, Enforce.
When DMARC is set up, it says that every email sent from your domain is actually you, and not a scammer or bad actor.
Since you need to take this extra step before setting up BIMI, users can more readily trust that an email with your logo actually came from an authorized domain.
Get your logo
While IT is setting up DMARC enforcement, you’ll need to get a logo that you want to use with your sending domain. You may need to get a trademark for your logo before you can start using it for BIMI.
However, once you meet all those requirements, create an SVG Tiny PS of your logo.
Publish your logo
Once your logo is ready to go, upload it to a public place where the email servers can pull it from. Next, you’ll have to tell the mail services where to find your logo, so they can associate it with all of your email.
Send emails with your logo
Now that you’ve set everything up and met all of the requirements, you can send your college’s email with your logo attached. Now, your email will look more official, and recipients can trust it more.
These steps could take a while, especially if you have to get a trademark for your logo. However, our service, Valimail Amplify, can help you with all of these steps. Amplify is the only fully automated BIMI solution on the market, and it can help your college easily get BIMI ready.
Learn more about BIMI
Ready to revolutionize your college’s email marketing strategy? Implementing BIMI will create a stronger sense of brand identity and trust in the email inbox.
However, we know that BIMI might still be a brand-new concept to many people. That’s why we created a comprehensive eBook, The Complete Guide to BIMI.
It covers everything you need to know to enhance your college’s online presence and communication, including:
- What BIMI is
- How BIMI and DMARC work together for enhanced security
- Step-by-step instructions on how to set it up
- Strategies and best practices for BIMI