Email deliverability is all about establishing trust between your organization and the recipient of your email messages. Without establishing trust, you can expect below-stellar open rates. In the worst-case scenario, your emails will end up blocked or inside spam folders if they’re even remotely spammy.
This is why email marketers exhaust every option to add legitimacy to their emails — sometimes before the user opens the email message. What better way to achieve this than with a “from header” that bears your business logo? To do this, you need to set up your company BIMI record.
BIMI records can both promote your brand’s image in inboxes and entice users to click on your messages. Bearing your logo for these purposes, the BIMI record hits two birds with one stone.
Read on to learn more about what a BIMI record is and how it protects users from email fraud. Also, keep reading until the end to see why you need one and how it trumps other means of email authentication!
What’s a BIMI Record?
BIMI is short for Brand Indicators for Message Identification. It’s one of several ways of email authentication accessible to email clients. BIMI will publish a brand’s logo and make it part of an email for clients to see as soon as they open their inbox.
A BIMI record is a DNS ledger entry or record. As a DNS record, it’s designed for one purpose — to allow business logos to appear as part of emails. A completely set up BIMI record gets your logo published to be part of any email message you send. Your brand logos will appear in place of initials that designate the email message sender.
Unlike digital signature-based protocols like SPF and DKIM, a BIMI record allows easy email identification for recipients. In other words, the record allows whoever receives your email to easily determine that you — and you alone — are sending the email. There’s no need for an everyday user to subject the email to other means of email authentication.
What Does a BIMI Record Do?
The BIMI record allows domain owners to display their brand logos in emails. As a DNS record, a BIMI record associates a logo published on the DNS record to an IP address and domain.
The link between company-owned IP addresses and domains ensures that a receiving mail server registers the brand logo. As a result, the receiving mail server accepts the logo and allows it to appear in a user’s inbox.
Having a BIMI record — though it’s not an absolute must — can do wonders for your email deliverability. For starters, it gives your email clients an alternative for email authentication. After all, once your brand’s logo is on display, how can the IP addresses tasked to send an email be fake?
The other benefit of having BIMI set up is what it can do for brand awareness. With your logo visible to your email client, you’re allowing your brand to already stand out. Besides giving your client a visual to associate your message with, BIMI also speaks of your desire to come off as authentic and transparent to email clients.
In the early days of BIMI, Verizon Media and Gmail were among the first to volunteer for the beta test. As of February 2019, more and more mailbox providers and servers are beginning to support BIMI. With the increasing demand for quick email authentication, it’s only a matter of time until more mailbox providers support BIMI as well.
How Does BIMI Work?
A BIMI record is a DNS TXT record containing your brand’s logo. The DNS TXT file also includes other pieces of data like associated IP addresses and domain names.
BIMI records need to be on email servers. Stored in an email server, a BIMI record allows receiving mail servers to direct emails to customer inboxes. Once the email makes it to customer inboxes, the email server retrieves a BIMI record using the IP address and domain included in it.
Once the server finds the DNS TXT record, it retrieves the record and uses the data to display the stored image in an SVG format. The image in SVG format is the business or brand logo.
As a result, the image at the header won’t be the initials of the sender. Instead, it will be the company logo published in the DNS TXT record.
“Can’t a Hacker Just Copy and Paste My Brand’s Logo and Send Mail?”
If you’re thinking of something along these lines, we understand. After all, beyond the bits and pieces of a DKIM and SPF record, there’s no real way to verify the domain an email is sent from. This problem with email authentication is made more acute due to how easy it is for hackers to copy and paste your logos.
With that said, this is why BIMI builds your brand image and trustworthiness. A BIMI record is a DNS file that contains more than your company logo. To set up a new Bimi record, domain owners need to include the following:
- IP address
- The domains or domain (if they’ve only got one)
- The image in SVG format
All of these will be in the same DNS file. A server will only allow the SVG image of the brand logo to be displayed if the DNS record contains other pieces of information like addresses and domain names.
When a mail server reroutes an email message to a customer inbox, the server retrieves the entire DNS file for email authentication. Without the other pieces of data, the image cannot appear with the right clarity next to the “From” header.
If everything is in order, the DNS file then goes on the return path to the email user. This is what allows users to see the logo next to the subject header.
In short, a mail server will only allow a logo to appear in a user’s inbox after it’s able to verify the source of the image. The source of the image will be authenticated using the other information in the DNS file.
Why Set Up a New BIMI Record?
Here are some of the reasons you’ll need to set up your BIMI record:
Quick Email Authentication
Email authentication doesn’t always need to involve checking whether or not the domain or sending site passes DKIM or DMARC authentication. In fact, not many users are familiar with these methods of email authentication.
Users need a quick way to verify the sender of an email message. BIMI offers a quick means of authentication. With a BIMI record, customers can see the source of the email even before checking the results of DKIM or DMARC authentication.
BIMI records present an opportunity for customers to verify the identity of an email message sender without looking into the other details of an email’s authentication. For this reason, BIMI is quite valuable to marketers who send email messages — as well as the customers who receive them.
Prevents Email Fraud
Set up alongside other email authentication protocols, BIMI ensures the authenticity of an email. As mentioned earlier, a BIMI record allows a logo in SVG to be displayed if it comes from verified IP addresses and domains. Without the other pieces of information, mail servers and inbox providers will not display the image in a client inbox.
As a result, because of publishing the brand logo in a DNS TXT file, a domain owner doesn’t need to worry about a fake account being associated with the logo.
Better Brand Awareness and Recognition
A logo is a business tool that promotes a brand. More specifically, it allows a brand to be recognized. In email marketing, it’s difficult to create brand awareness. This is because customers need to open an email to find a company’s logo and message. Without an identifying marker, a marketer will have to rely on other digital marketing assets like redirects from social networks or web ads to promote a company.
With BIMI, creating brand awareness through email is easier and faster. After all, the logo will be present next to the subject lines of email messages. As a result, there’s a higher chance for customers to recall the brand even without opening the email.
BIMI Builds a Better Brand Image
All of the benefits mentioned come together to create a better sender reputation for a company. With a logo greeting customers, there will be little doubt of an email’s authenticity. This will improve email deliverability, as well as open rates.
Is There Anything Needed to Make BIMI Work?
There are two things you need to have if you wish to implement BIMI into your email messages: DMARC and your logo.
First of all, you’ll need your company logo. As mentioned earlier, you need to have your logo in SVG file format. It’s the only file format that’s accepted by the BIMI standard.
Besides ensuring that your company’s logo is within the BIMI standard, also make sure that it’s the one you want your customers to see.
In addition to complying with the BIMI standard, you should already be implementing DMARC. DMARC is a prerequisite for implementing your BIMI. Without your DMARC, your BIMI will have no data on which the SVG image can be based.
Creating Your BIMI Record Benefits You and Your Customers
When it comes to brand awareness and authentication, nothing’s better than putting your logo on every email you send. BIMI gives your company the online recognition it needs in customer inboxes and let’s your email clients have more peace of mind.
Put you and your customers in a win-win situation by setting up a BIMI record.
Reach out to us for a BIMI record that adds stars to your sender reputation.
