BIMI can be helpful for establishing your brand as trustworthy and increasing your email deliverability. But what exactly is it?
Brand Indicators for Message Identification (BIMI) allow a domain (brand) owner to publish a logo that will be displayed alongside emails from that domain. Simply put, it’s a way for inbox providers to verify information about your brand. It works in close conjunction with:
- Email authentication and Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance (DMARC), requiring that a domain have a DMARC policy of quarantine or reject in place before a logo can be shown.
- A Verified Mark Certificate (VMC), a domain owner is able to assert that the logo displayed is valid, associated with the domain owner, and trademarked.
How does BIMI work
BIMI adds a verified logo that appears next to your message in a recipient’s inbox. To earn this verified status, brands must follow a set of specifications and be approved. The logo must be square and saved as a version of the Scaled Vector Graphic (SVG) format.
Specifically, the SVG logo must follow the restrictions defined by the SVG Tiny Portable/Secure profile, as authored by the BIMI Working Group. The logo cannot include any <script> tags, should not include any external links, and requires a few manual tweaks to meet size and security requirements.
BIMI adoption is growing
As of June 2023, 14,305 of the top ten million domains published a BIMI record. By the end of June 2024, that number had jumped to 21,222. Here’s where BIMI support lands with mailbox providers as of July 2024:
- Supports BIMI: Apple, AU Cloudmark, Fastmail, Google, La Poste, Onet Poczta, Yahoo, Zone, Zoner
- Considering BIMI: Atmail, BT, Comcast, Qualitia, Seznam, GMX, Yahoo Japan
- Does not support BIMI: Microsoft
Why email marketers should consider BIMI
Where BIMI is supported, it can increase brand visibility, brand recognition, and trust. The purpose of it is to combat fraudulent emails, phishing threats, and email scams customers are bombarded with, and prevent bad actors from taking advantage of your customers.
Authentication methods like the ones necessary to be BIMI approved help to improve reliable deliverability and establish a better sender reputation. In fact, email providers, including Yahoo Mail, have seen a 10% increase in engagement when inboxes include verified brand logos next to email messages giving marketers a powerful incentive to authenticate with BIMI.
Our professional services team can help you navigate BIMI, DMARC, VMC specifications and get your brand verified. And as part of building a robust email marketing strategy, explore How to maximize deliverability and steer clear of the spam folder.
