What Is BIMI (And Why Should Email Marketers Care?)

Email marketers are on a constant search for a trick that gives better visibility in the inbox, and gets their message opened. No such solution exists—but Brand Indicators for Message Identification (BIMI for short) is an emerging email standard that can help. Let’s dig in and see how it works.

What is BIMI?
How BIMI works
BIMI support by mailbox provider
Benefits of BIMI
How to get BIMI set up

What is BIMI?

Ever noticed how some brands have their logo displayed next to their message in the inbox? The logo that appears is known as a verified sender logo.

Source: Litmus’ Getting Started with BIMI Guide

In short, BIMI allows you to display a sender logo alongside your messages in the inbox, when verified under a set of BIMI specifications.

“BIMI is an emerging email specification that enables the use of brand-controlled logos within supporting email clients.” — BIMI Group

BIMI can help boost your brand’s visibility, build brand recognition, and reinforce trust. It was created to help prevent fraudulent emails, and in a world where phishing and email scams are on the rise, it’s imperative to establish trust with subscribers.

BIMI is a way to verify information about your brand. Like DMARC, DKIM, and SPF—three methods for verifying sender information—BIMI is a text record that lives on your servers. In fact, it works right alongside SPF, DMARC, and DKIM to signal to email clients that you are you. As such, BIMI aids in deliverability, too.

Source: Litmus’ Getting Started with BIMI Guide

While a number of email clients already try to pull your logo into the inbox, you don’t currently have a lot of control over which logo or imagery they collect. With BIMI, however, you have direct control over what logo is displayed—allowing you to keep control over your brand and subscriber’s experience, creating trust in the process.

Different methods of verifying senders and using logos have been around for years, but the first formalized spec for BIMI was published in February 2019. The original creators have since formed the AuthIndicators Working Group to formalize and promote BIMI throughout the industry. Over the last couple of years, the working group has been joined by the likes of Fastmail, Google, Mailchimp, Proofpoint, Twilio SendGrid, Validity, Valimail, and Verizon Media (which owns Yahoo Mail).

What mailbox providers support BIMI?

BIMI support includes several major inboxes like Gmail and Apple (for iOS 16, iPadOS 16, and macOS Ventura 13 or later, and iCloud.com).

Here’s a list of BIMI support by mailbox provider, as of June 2023:

BIMI is currently supported on:

Apple (iOS 16, iPadOS 16, and macOS Ventura 13 or later, and iCloud.com)
Cloudmark
Fastmail
Google
La Poste
Onet Poczta
Yahoo (excluding Yahoo Japan)
Zone

Providers considering BIMI include:

Atmail
BT Mail
Comcast
Qualitia
Seznam
Web.de
GMX
Yahoo Japan

For the latest BIMI requirements and news, head over to the BIMI working group site.

Gmail BIMI update: Blue checkmark icons

On May 3, 2023, Gmail announced it would take BIMI support a step further by displaying a blue checkmark icon for senders who have adopted it, providing users of this inbox service provider (ISP) with enhanced visual verification.

example of BIMI with a blue check mark in Gmail — Source: Google

How does BIMI work?

Like other email authentication standards, BIMI is essentially a text file. That text file follows a specific format and lives on your sending servers.

When a message is delivered, the recipient’s email service looks up the BIMI text file—and where it’s hosted—to ensure that the message can be verified. Once verified, the BIMI file tells the email service where to find the sender’s logo, and the email service pulls that logo into the inbox.

Although the underlying concept of BIMI sounds simple, there are a few key things you’ll need to get BIMI set up:

Authentication of your emails with SPF, DKIM, and DMARC
Access to your domain name servers to set up a new BIMI DNS entry
An SVG file of your logo
A Verified Mark Certificate (VMC) optional but recommended

Although not all mailbox providers support BIMI currently, others will likely add BIMI support in the future, especially as privacy measures increase in email. It’s an emerging standard that is still in development, but setting it up now will help you privacy-proof your email program.

Like everything in email, BIMI support is likely to change over time. But, with major names like Google, Verizon Media, and Fastmail involved, it’s likely we’ll see more service providers joining the working group and pilot program over the coming years.

How BIMI benefits email marketers

Helps builds brand trust

In a world where phishing and email scams are on the rise, it’s imperative that email marketers take measures to continually reinforce trust with their subscribers.

The underlying goal of BIMI is to make it easy for subscribers to identify trustworthy email senders so they can have confidence in the content in their inbox. When subscribers see your logo next to your messages in supported inboxes, they can immediately trust that it’s an actual email from you (and not a dangerous phishing attempt). Sure, the brand awareness of constantly seeing logos is nice, but the trust that comes along with those logos is where the magic happens.

While it’s still on you to build a relationship with your subscribers by providing value in your email campaigns, BIMI helps you build the foundational trust needed to hit the inbox.

Email deliverability

BIMI can also be beneficial to your email deliverability. Since so much of modern-day deliverability is based on authentication and reputation—rather than email content itself—BIMI will provide yet another mechanism to improve your odds of making it to the inbox.

As we saw earlier, BIMI requires other authentication protocols to be properly set up. For brands not using SPF, DKIM, and DMARC, the desire to use BIMI for getting their logos in front of subscribers will force them to follow authentication best practices. Combined, all of these authentication methods will make for more reliable deliverability and a better sender reputation overall.