Your customers’ inboxes constantly face a barrage of emails, making it difficult to weed out the difference between junk and messages with actual value. If you don’t immediately snatch your customer’s attention, your emails will be lost in the crowd.
To ensure that your emails stand out, use a BIMI. This industry-standard emailing feature helps customers recognize your branding and doubles as a verified symbol to prove your company is safe and worth your customer’s time.
Branded Indicators for Messaging Identification (BIMI) is an approved logo that will be attached to all your sent emails. The icon will appear next to your message in your customer’s inbox.
BIMIs are becoming an impactful part of your email outreach, as having the certified logo can lead to improved results and a safer marketing environment.
Brand awareness is a critical part of any marketing strategy. The more customers see your logo paired with your name, the more embedded your company will be in their minds.
Having your logo prominently displayed next to your emails is a great way to increase brand awareness and stand out in your customer’s inbox. Customers will also see the BIMI certification and be more inclined to take your email seriously.
Strong brand awareness is also a prominent part of improving your marketing maturity, as utilizing your BIMI consistently leads to long-term customer relationships. The longer your emails contain BIMI logos, the more ingrained your business will be in your customer
One of the preferred strategies of hackers is to try to impersonate domains to trick customers into forking over personal information.
By adding a BIMI, customers can have confidence that your email is legitimate and safe, while BIMI-less emails are an unknown risk they may want to avoid.
BIMI also makes it extremely difficult for hackers to impersonate you, as they cannot correctly duplicate your logo in a BIMI format.
Without a BIMI, hackers have a much easier path to successfully phishing your company. If a hack is allowed, it only hurts the victims of the phishing but can also destroy your relationship with your customers and fracture their trust in you.
While getting a BIMI is a worthy investment of your time, the process can be long and tedious. To best be prepared, review each of the following steps to getting a BIMI.
Before you should even start worrying about your BIMI, you must confirm that your desired logo is trademarked since BIMIs require a Vertifed Mark Certificate (VMC). VMCs are digital certificates that verify online logo ownership. These certifications are used to prevent spammers from using logos they don’t own and make it incredibly difficult to phish with your logo.
You cannot gain a VMC without a trademarked logo since there isn’t enough legal precedent for the brand logo to grant you certification. While there’s a push for VMCs to start accepting untrademarked logos, BIMIs haven’t quite reached that point.
If you’re unsure if your logo is an active trademark, you can visit the World Intellectual Property Organization’s website to confirm.
Obtaining trademarks can be a long process, so don’t even bother starting with the BIMI process until you know your logo is officially trademarked.
Before obtaining a BIMI, your domain must be armed to the teeth against phishing. To gain safety approval for your BIMI, you must possess three email safety certifications:
If you’re unsure who your domain provider is, click here for additional guidance.
Your logo must be uploaded in a Scalable Vector Graphic (SVG) file. This formatting is required so your logo can be certified and pass security checks, as well as ensures that your brand logo works for your customers’ emails regardless of your customers’ resolution setting
Before your logo is ready to be uploaded, there may have to be some adjustments needed to your logo in the SVG file. Adobe Illustrator is an excellent program for turning your logo into an SVG file. Each BIMI program has its own SVG requirements, but Gmail lays out its SVG recommendations.
Remember those pesky trademarks? Now it’s time to put it to good use.
Reach out to either DigiCert or Entrust to submit your trademark for a VMC. Upon approval, you will be sent an entity certificate Privacy Enhanced Mail (PEM) file to confirm your VMC.
The grand finale for creating your BIMI is to upload the results of the previous steps into your domain as BIMI records.
BIMI records are lines of text that include all the necessary URLs to access your SVG, PEM, and VMC files. To add these URLs, you will copy each respective URL and replace it with the current URLs already in your domain.
To turn on your BIMI, you must add DNS TXT records for your BIMI in your domain. Sign into your management console for your domain and then enter these values into your DNS records. Once the BIMI record is added to your domain, it may take up to 48 hours for your BIMI to activate.
We don't blame you if reading all those steps made your head spin. While the BIMI process is straightforward, it is best to have true IT professionals handle its many intricacies so you can have confidence that your BIMI is set up properly and can take full advantage of its perks.
Gorilla Marketing can lead you through each step of the BIMI process, lending a hand with your logo creation, trademarks, security certifications, and domain integration. With our top-notch team, we’ll have your BIMI working smoothly so you can reel in more customers.
For more information, pick a time to discuss how Gorilla can help you.