BIMI is a standard that provides an easy and uniform method for companies to display their logos next to the email messages they send to their subscribers.
How does BIMI help?
More Brand Awareness
If you implement BIMI, your logo will now be broadcast to your subscribers every time your messages arrive in their inboxes. This will help you create deeper connections with your recipients, improve brand awareness, and keep your company top-of-mind.
More Trust
BIMI displays your brand’s logo through your domain’s DNS settings. This ensures that only your company’s sending domain can display your logo. Furthermore, only senders who pass DMARC authentication and have a good email reputation will have their BIMI logo displayed. Put simply, this means that BIMI helps distinguish trusted brands with legitimate emails from phishing, spoofing, or fraudulent emails.
More Email Engagement
Additional brand recognition and increased trust in your company’s email reputation will naturally boost open, click-through, and conversion rates around your outbound marketing efforts. Early studies show that BIMI implementation has increased open rates by 10% (Learn more).
How Does BIMI Work?
Recipient email servers review the DNS records of sending entities' domains to see if they have a BIMI DNS entry. If they do, that entry will provide the recipient email servers with a URL link to the sender’s logo to display next to the message in the inbox. For the BIMI logo to appear, however, the sender must pass DMARC authentication and have a “good sender” reputation with the recipient ISP.
Who Supports BIMI?
Google, Yahoo, and Apple are notable supporters of BIMI. The list continues to grow but is supported by many major email providers.
The full list can be accessed here: Current list from BIMI Group
Implement BIMI with Act-On
What You Need to Deploy BIMI
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Approved Company Logo
- Your logo must be in SVG format. Make sure it’s in Tiny 1.2 specification.
- The logo must be an exact square
- The logo should be centered and legible without any tagline text
- The logo SVG file must be hosted on an SSL-secured site and will be used in the BIMI DNS record
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BIMI DNS Record
- TXT record type
- BIMI record must be set up for each “From” email domain you want to display your logo
- The BIMI record must have the following syntax value for the TXT record
v=BIMI 1; l=https://images.example.com/image/logo.svg; a=cert
- v = Version: The value must always be BIMI 1 (required)
- l = Location: The URL of your logo using HTTPS only (required)
- a = Trust Authorities: Trust certificate to validate domain ownership (currently optional)
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Domain Must Be Authenticated (required)
- Sender must have a DMARC policy that passes with DMARC at p=quarantine or p=reject
- Please Note: Implementing DMARC incorrectly will cause messages to bounce. Please evaluate these decisions carefully before proceeding.
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Good Sending Reputation
- This BIMI requirement is not clearly defined, but it appears to mean that you must have a good email reputation with the recipient provider you’re trying to deliver to. For example, if your emails are being delivered to Spam, your logo likely will not display even if you have BIMI deployed.
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Verified Mark Certificate (required for Gmail & Apple)
- Certificate to verify that your logo is owned by the domain publishing record. You are who you say you are.
- There are currently two vendors who sell VMCs:
- These vendors will provide you with a value for the “a=<certificate>” component of the BIMI record.
- While this is currently not a requirement to implement BIMI and “a=” can remain blank, it will likely be a future requirement to ensure copycat logos are not created to fool end users.
Should You Implement BIMI?
You and your company should seriously consider implementing BMI for several reasons.
- Studies show that brand recognition, which is increased by BIMI implementation, is the primary reason that end-users open an email. Bimi is shown to increase open rates by 10%.
- BIMI has the backing of the largest players in the field, which means it is likely to become a widely used standard in the next few years.
- DMARC authentication with a quarantine or reject policy (a BIMI prerequisite) is a process that requires work and testing to implement properly. So if you are considering BIMI deployment, you’ll want to begin by ensuring you have a DMARC record with either of those policies in place.