Email marketers are always on the lookout for the ‘holy grail’, the one tip that will increase their exposure among potential subscribers and increase the number of times their message is opened. While there is no single solution (despite what many providers claim), there is a new standard that can help your company stand out in a recipient’s inbox.

BIMI stands for Brand Indicators for Message Identification, and it's a new standard that makes it easier for your brand logo to appear next to your email in an inbox. Not only will this increase your exposure, but BIMI is also meant to reduce spam and improve email deliverability. It's another important tool for building trust and providing a better subscriber experience, which we should all strive for at every level of our email program.

BIMI

BIMI is a tool that allows you to double-check facts about your company. BIMI is a text record that resides on your servers, similar to DMARC, DKIM, and SPF—three techniques for validating sender information. In fact, it works in tandem with SPF, DMARC, and DKIM to let email clients know you're the real deal.

BIMI is unique in that it lets you show your company logo in supported inboxes, placing your brand on display for your subscribers. While many email clients already attempt to draw your logo into the inbox, you don't have much control over the logos or graphics they collect. With BIMI, on the other hand, you have complete control over which logo is displayed, allowing you to maintain control over your brand and subscriber experience while also building trust.

You must take steps to safeguard your emailing domain in order to be eligible for BIMI. The steps are as follows:

For BIMI to operate, you'll need to put up extra authentication records like SPF, DKIM, and DMARC.
To create a new BIMI DNS record, you must have access to your domain name servers.
You must use an SVG file for your logo.
Obtain a Verified Mark Certificate (VMC) proving that the logo is yours.

BIMI for Email Marketing

The first benefit of BIMI for email marketers should be self-evident: your brand appears next to your messages in supported inboxes. But the real advantage is that it develops trust among your clientele with your emails.

With BIMI in place, your clients and prospects will know they can trust any emails sent from your company. Simply increasing the credibility of your emails will improve engagement twofold. However, there is always an opportunity for advancement.

Currently, the logo variants you want to use must be trademarked in order to receive a Verified Mark Certificate (VMC) and utilize it for BIMI. However, as BIMI develops, the process of authenticating versions of your already-trademarked logos may become easier.

As previously established, BIMI necessitates the appropriate configuration of other authentication methods. The desire to utilize BIMI to get their logos in front of subscribers will push businesses that are not utilizing SPF, DKIM, or DMARC to adopt authentication best practices. These verification techniques, when combined, will result in more dependable deliverability and a higher overall sender reputation.

To learn more about BIMI and other authentication protocols, head to EmailAuth, the one-stop solution for all your email authentication needs.

About Infosec Ventures: Infosec Ventures incubates and scales cyber security innovators that solve for inefficiencies in cyber security, solve big problems and deliver exceptionally high return on investment for customers. IV is on a mission to make the world cyber safe, by protecting systems and the ‘human operating system’. Some notable current ventures include humanfirewall.io, emailauth.io, bugsbounty.com, securityrating.com among others.

Original source: https://telegra.ph/How-is-BIMI-pivotal-to-Email-Marketers-11-17