How to get a BIMI and why it will aid your email marketing

Criminals are very good at building fake emails for phishing scams. The more famous your brand and the more ecommerce you do, the more attractive your identity is for criminals to leverage and attempt to scam your customers.

 If you care about the authenticity of your domain and giving your customers confidence that your email is legitimate, then you’ll be interested in the newest form of email authentication

BIMI (Brand Indicator for Message Identification) is new in 2020 and is good news for email marketers who want to protect their customers from illicit activity.

 In order to employ BIMI, your email send domain will need to be configured for DMARC, which in turn will mean it has DKIM and SPF to identify and authenticate you as a sender.

Where BIMI is different from earlier forms of domain protection is its visibility to the customer. With BIMI, the recipient views your logo within the preview pane, in doing so they have a visual cue, providing confidence your email is legitimate, rather than from someone masquerading and using your brand for malicious purposes (read scams and phishing).

Early BIMI adopters are seeing instant results, with the associated trusted and branded email increasing open rates by >10% (Verizon Media).

Despite the bump in performance, the vast majority (83%) of companies with DMARC do not yet have BIMI implemented.

How do I get BIMI?

Good news. Once you have DMARC in play, getting a BIMI operable is relatively straightforward.

 You simply need to create and host an SVG of your chosen trademarked logo then link that by publishing a text record on your DNS. See text record example below.

 “V=BIMI1; I=https://<yourmailer.company.com/logo.svg>”

 A helpful hint; use SVG Tiny 2.0 for your logo upload employing a dark background (reverse version of your logo). Use a a scalable image at 100x100px, not exceeding 32KB and do not include any <script> tags, nor any external link.

 This process will need to be repeated for all subdomains used for mail, since unlike DMARC, BIMI does not “walk the tree” to the parent domain.

 Once you’ve operationalised BIMI, you can check it works by using the MX Toolbox tool. https://mxtoolbox.com/bimi.aspx?referrer=cms_bimi_setup

 Need help implementing SPF, DKIM, DMARC and BIMI to protect your brand and improve customer trust? Chat with Track, we’ll be happy to guide you through the process.