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Today is the day. Google has just announced general support of Brand Indicators for Message Identification (BIMI) in Gmail. We’ve been anxiously awaiting this day for almost a year when Google first announced their pilot program for BIMI.
A lot has changed in the email marketing world since we first learned of Google’s BIMI pilot in July 2020 (too much to cover in this blog post, so check out our monthly State of Email webinar series to stay up to date on the latest developments) but one thing hasn’t changed – our support and excitement of BIMI and the value it brings to everyone in the email ecosystem.
As one of the initial members of the AuthIndicators Working Group – a committee of companies helping to develop the BIMI standard – Validity has been deeply involved in Google’s BIMI pilot. With their general availability announcement, Google joins Yahoo and Fastmail in BIMI support, making BIMI available at roughly 2 billion inboxes. With 43% of the email service market share, Google’s announcement is a huge leap forward in the adoption of BIMI and presents a significant opportunity for senders to stand out in the inbox and attract the attention of their recipients.
Let’s take a step back to learn more about BIMI and what this announcement means for marketers.
BIMI is an email specification that enables the use of brand-controlled logos within supporting email clients. BIMI provides a secure, global framework in which inboxes display sender-designated logos for authenticated messages. BIMI rewards marketers who strongly authenticate their messages via DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance) by placing an approved logo next to their official emails in their recipients’ inboxes. The below image is an example of how an organization’s logo could display.
BIMI provides many benefits for marketers. In today’s complex landscape, where inboxes are more congested and recipients are more selective in the messages they engage with, the benefits of BIMI can have a significant impact on your email performance. Here are a few key benefits for marketers:
Now that you’ve seen the value of BIMI, I’m sure you’re dying to get started. To implement BIMI, follow these steps:
This might seem like a complicated and tedious process, especially for those who have yet to adopt DMARC. However, the benefits received are worth your investment.
As strong proponents of BIMI (have we mentioned that yet?), Validity is here to help. We have lots of resources to help you through the implementation process. We provide the tools you need to manage both DMARC and BIMI within our Everest platform. With Everest, you’re able to generate your BIMI record, host your BIMI SVG image, and preview your message at BIMI-enabled inboxes. You can also keep a close eye on email engagement within Everest to track key metrics pre- and post-BIMI implementation to see the benefits of your investment in DMARC and BIMI.
We hope you’re as excited as we are about Google’s BIMI announcement. We can’t wait to see how this impacts the email marketing landscape going forward. While this is yet another development for email marketers to consider, this one is advantageous for everyone involved!
We’ve just scratched the surface of BIMI with this blog post. We encourage you to download our eBook, Breaking Down BIMI, for more detail into the topics above.