What BIMI is, why you need it, and how to set it up

BIMI (Brand Indicators for Message Identification) is a standard that displays validated trademarked logos inside DMARC authenticated emails. With BIMI your email recipients will see your logo in the small circle on the left-hand side of their inbox. In this example what would have been a circle with an R inside is replaced by the Red Helix logo.

Email continues to be the most popular way retail companies communicate with their customers and using a logo when your email hits their inbox adds valuable brand impressions, improved deliverability, and increased customer confidence.

It’s a simple way for your email recipients to recognise an email from you and know they can trust that it really is from you. Because of this improved trust it will radically transform your email ROI.

This is why you need BIMI

Research into the effect of adding BIMI to email found that:

• Brands that apply a logo can increase their recall by up to 44%*.
• Regardless of brand strength or market share, including a logo increases open rates by up to 39%*.
• The email open uplift carries over to purchasing decisions with an average buying increase of up to 32%*.

This is how Domino’s Pizza increased revenue by £1M after implementing BIMI.

How to set up BIMI

First, you’ll need to implement DMARC.

DMARC stands for Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance and it is an email security measure that protects your domain against hacker attacks. Likely you will already have DMARC set up. If not, it should be a very high priority.

DMARC enables email senders to specify how to handle emails authenticated using SPF (Sender Policy Framework) or DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail). It helps to reduce the risk of a phishing attack and reduce spoofing attacks.

Second, you’ll need to secure your trademarked logo.

This is what will appear in your recipients’ emails. Again, you have likely already done this. You will have already decided on what you want to trademark and will have worked with a solicitor to file the application trademarking your logo.

Third, a verification will take place.

This is more technical, and your IT team might need to work with a provider such as Red Helix to arrange this. You will need to obtain a Verified Mark Certificate (VMC) which allows others to verify that our organisation can be trusted when sending out emails. In combination with DMARC it provides assurance to the systems receiving your emails regarding the origin and validity of your email

Google is leading the way with the current BIMI standard

As the largest provider of business-to-consumer (B2C) email, Google announced their support for the BIMI standard back in 2021. If you check your Gmail, particularly on a mobile device, you can see at a glance who has implemented BIMI and what an impact this has.

Other popular email clients supporting BIMI include: Yahoo Mail, AOL, FastMail and Apple Mail who have all now started supporting BIMI.

As more and more B2C brands adopt this technology, it is becoming a must have, rather than a nice to have if you want to ensure your emails appear legitimate and to benefit from the increased brand exposure.

Interested in a free domain health check?

We can carry out an assessment of your domain health, where over a 2-week period we allow your team to have visibility into your domains, their legitimate sending services and gain an idea of how much work will be required to move to reject.

*Data from research commissioned by UK/US Red Sift/Entrust study: Consumer Interaction with Brand Indicators in Email – April 2021