After a long-year pilot of Brand Indicators for Message Identification, Gmail announced that it would be rolling out general support of BIMI to help drive the adoption of stronger sender authentication.

BIMI is the industry standards strategy to increase email authentication’s widespread adoption and allow senders to provide a more engaging experience for their customers. Senders must make available DKIM, SPF, and DMARC reap the benefits of BIMI as well as the new experience in their inbox.

What does BIMI stand for?

Brands that properly authenticate their emails with BIMI will have better visibility and engagement. It makes the email ecosystem safer and provides a richer experience. Gmail can flag brands that don’t follow certain standards with question marks and other iconography.

BIMI can help your brand:

  • Increase brand impressions by having a trademarked logo in your inbox
  • You have complete control over the way your brand logo appears worldwide
  • To increase engagement across devices, visual differentiation is needed in the inbox

To learn more about BIMI and how it works, read our article, What is BIMI?

Getting ready to BIMI

You will need to create a BIMI Record to take advantage of the new BIMI standards and display your logo along with your messages in the mail. These steps can be tedious and confusing, but we will show you how to automate most of them.

 

Step 1: Create your DKIM, SFP, and DMARC records

What is SPF?

Sender Policy Framework (SPF) is an open standard for authenticating email. It verifies that the IP address used to send a message is on an approved domain list. SPF authentication will not be passed if a mail server using an IP address on the approved list attempts to send an email from this domain.

What is DKIM?

DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) is a validation method that improves SPF’s protocols by using public-key cryptography to authenticate individual email messages. Because email does not have an authentication mechanism built-in, it was created to assist Internet Service Providers in detecting and preventing malicious email delivery. It can be spoof to obtain information from the recipient of a message.

What is DMARC?

DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance) is a widely accepted email authentication policy and reporting protocol that ensures–when fully implemented–that only authorized senders can send email using the domain in the “From” field of their email messages.

Step 2: Ensure that your DMARC policy has been implemented.

To enforce your DMARC policy, it used to take the tedious task of scanning a long list of IP addresses to identify all services sending emails to your domain.

Step 3: Publish a BIMI Record for your domain in DNS

BIMI allows you to select the logo that you would like to display. Create a square SVG image, store it in HTTPS, and enter the URL in your DNS TXT record. To make your logo appear in the inbox, there are a few additional steps.

Your business will need a Verified Mark Certificate (VMC) certifying that you are legally authorized to use your logo. VMCs enable companies to place their logo in the “sender” field of email clients. It allows them to be visible even before the message has been opened. It is the email equivalent to the verified badge on Instagram or the blue checkmark on Twitter.

 

Get started with BIMI.

Gmail’s adoption of BIMI by its users demonstrates the value of email in engaging customers. It also shows that email is still evolving. The user experience is getting better, and senders are being incentivized to make the channel safer. With Gmail and Verizon Media now supporting BIMI, email senders have a clear path to success: authenticate and create new experiences that your recipients will love.