Summary
What is BIMI?
BIMI stands for Brand Indicators for Message Identification.
BIMI allows email senders from any company to authenticate their brand in the inbox. It is an authentication protocol that allows displaying an image next to the sender name on supported email clients inbox. (Yahoo only right now, Gmail is in a testing phase).
Why you should use BIMI?
Displaying an image next to your sender name has some pros:
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Deliverability BIMI can really help you improve the deliverability of your mailings. By requiring stronger authentication, users and provider security systems have more trust in the email source. -
Marketing From a marketing angle, the users who receive the authenticated emails will recognize the brand and the company at first glance. It will improve the user experience of the clients and strengthening the brand-customer relationship. - Control It also allows companies to control which image should be displayed: they can change the logo depending on the different events or on the season, for example.
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Protection BIMI protects the brands and the companies’ reputations by preventing fraudulent IP use.
BIMI requirements
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DMARC policy You need to have a DMARC enabled on your domain, with a
quarantine (p=quarantine) or
reject (p=reject) policy. -
SVG logo You need an SVG of your logo.
Be careful, for BIMI you need a real SVG with vectors, not only a png converted to SVG
Did you miss our last article about DMARC on our blog?
Do you wish to read more about the DMARC protocol and how to implement it, check out our DMARC Explained article right here!
How to get a correct SVG for BIMI?
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Open your SVG logo on Adobe Illustrator
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Put your logo in a square file in Illustrator (128×128 pixels for example)
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Export your logo with the svg profile « SVG Tiny 1.2 »
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Clean your code
Open your final SVG with Sublime Text, or another code editor of your choice and make the following changes:
- Delete line (line 2)
- Delete x=« 0px » y=« 0px »
- Delete the line overflow=« visible »
- Find the property baseProfile=« tiny » and change it by baseProfile=« tiny-ps »
- Put the line « Your title here » in a line below
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Host your svg file on your website server
Requirement for your logo or image:
- Like your logo will be in the inbox, it might be hosted in a circles, or in a squares, for this reason, your logo or image should be centered in the square
- Use a solid background color to be sure to be not impacted by image display environments
- Your SVG final file should be compact and not exceed 32KB
After making all the changes above, our image’s XML code will normally look like that :
How to display your logo?
The final step is the easiest : you just need to add a TXT record in the DNS of your domain.
Here is the structure:
default._bimi.[domain] IN TXT “v=BIMI1; l=[SVG URL]; a=[PEM URL]“. (a tag is optional) Normally, that’s all for BIMI.
If everything was configured properly, you should see the first effects within a few days.
How MailSoar can help you with BIMI?
Even if you have configured BIMI properly, it does not, unfortunately, guarantee that a recipient’s mailbox provider will display your brand logo or the image you have set up. Some providers may use other criteria like your brand reputation, anti-abuse checks, or user process to determine whether to display your logo.
If you want to be sure to always get the best deliverability and never landing in spam, Mailsoar’s team can help you now.
Contact us now and we will help you set up your email infrastructure to get the better Return On Investment from your emailing campaign.
