What is BIMI and Why You Need It for Successful Email Marketing

Email marketers work hard in devising ways and methodologies to become effective and gain more subscribers organically. As visibility is crucial and every organization wants to have their emails opened, BIMI technology is a big step for every brand to get into the inbox and get noticed. BIMI email authentication also makes it easier to recognize a legitimate email. How? You will find out from this article.

Today cybercrime is a massive threat to businesses, so it is essential to know how you can alleviate and combat phishing attempts as well as email spoofing.

These kinds of intrusion can literally cost businesses millions of dollars per year. That is why you would want to have a security revamp that will ensure business stability and growth with lesser business compromise.

So what is BIMI and why is it essential for email marketing and brand in general? In this article, we want to discuss what BIMI does for your organization and IP reputation, what the connection between BIMI and DMARC is, and learn how they work hand in hand to provide total protection to email domains.

What is BIMI?

BIMI stands for Brand Indicators for Message Identification. In simple terms, it is a way for the organization to showcase its logos in the client’s inbox. Originally, we can see this as the initials or avatars of the sender.

Unlike other known email security, BIMI is a more straightforward form of brand identification yet hard to imitate by fraudsters and target your audience and customers.

It is also shown to be a great help for an organization’s deliverability rate, an efficient tool to gain the trust of the consumers and achieve a better experience for your subscribers that we should strive to maintain.

In technical terms, BIMI is a DNS record that is liable for the logo that will be used to represent the company’s brand in an email inbox after being authenticated with SPF, DKIM, and DMARC policy. These 3 systems verify the sender’s information and work alongside BIMI to notify email clients that you are a legitimate email domain.

BIMI strengthens email security because of the DMARC authentication process and policies needed to implement BIMI. In order to use BIMI, you must have an existing DMARC record with the policy set to ‘quarantine’ or ‘reject’.

Read also: What is DMARC: Email Security with DMARC, SPF, and DKIM

Developed by the leaders of email marketing and piloted back in March 2018, BIMI email authentication is growing the possibilities. Today BIMI is supported by Verizon media, Google, and Fastmail.

Benefits of BIMI

Having a logo displayed in your recipient’s email is not enough, so it is a good idea to have it adequately authenticated using the policies mentioned. Although it may be costly to implement BIMI, in terms of setting it up and hiring a professional to design a logo, see the underlying benefits that you will get with this added protection for your email processes. Here are some of them:

• It amplifies the ID process from end-users, which are your customers or your subscribers. Also, it is a perfect device for brand awareness. Using BIMI ensures a greater response percentage and an extra layer of protection from fraudsters that can ruin your deliverability.
• It allows to experience a better engagement with your subscribers and targeted audience with trust. Implementing this technology could also lead to more leads and more sales in the future.
• It affects the receiver’s trust and will also determine if they open an email from you in the future. Without BIMI, it is hard for your customers to identify your brand unless they see the brand name.

How to Implement BIMI?

BIMI is a text record published in DNS of your domain. This record points to your company’s logo (SVG file) publicly hosted on a web server. Once you send out the message, email services read the BIMI SVG file and successfully validate the sent email.

If the verification passed, the email should be routed to the recipient’s inbox. The process itself seems to be simple; however, you still have to consider many things to ensure flawless implementation:

Read the full story on GlockApps blog.