BIMI for Gmail: Verified Mark Certificate (VMC)

Email is not a safe medium – marketers know that, and consumers know that. What if you could put your brand on every email, and users could trust it’s you? An initiative called BIMI, or “Brand Indicators for Message Identification”, tries to fill this need. According to Brand Indicators, “BIMI is an industry-wide standards effort that will use brand logos as indicators to help people avoid fraudulent email while giving marketers a huge new opportunity to put their brands in front of consumers for free.”

First of all, what is BIMI?

BIMI (Brand Indicators for Message Identification) brings customer logos for authenticated brands to consumers’ inboxes, showcasing the logos next to the email subject line. Other platforms, such as Twitter or Instagram, have long used this type of verification as a trust seal. Now BIMI is applying this to email!

BIMI not only helps to establish trust but also increases brand visibility. : While Yahoo started supporting BIMI from the beginning, Gmail supports it since June 2021, and Apple joined the party with iOS16 in 2022.

As opposed to Yahoo, Gmail demands a certificate as a requirement to display the logo in the consumer’s inbox. Until October 2024, “Verified Mark Certificate” (a so-called “VMC”) was the only available certificate type. The news is, that a second type of certificates is allowed from October 2024: Common Mark Certificates (“CMC”) should allow a broader mass of senders to participate in BIMI. Gmail will likely be a driver for establishing BIMI as a standard that many other providers may follow in the future.

Mapp was an early adopter and able to help our customer Josef Witt GmbH to become the first German company to implement BIMI successfully with Gmail using VMC certificates. Gmail is the second largest provider supporting BIMI. Along with the support of Apple, Yahoo and some smaller providers, the ISP Share covered by BIMI is usually between 50 and 60%. This makes it an attractive investment for most marketers.

Requirements

• Senders must authenticate their emails and maintain an enforced DMARC policy.
• The logo also requires similar measures, and a VMC (“verified mark certificate”) or CMC (“Common Mark Certificate”) of authenticity is required. There are choices of certificate providers for the image and companies, such as DigiCert and Entrust. Mapp is offering a package for that as well and will help you to chose the right certificate for your need.
• The sender’s reputation must be rated highly in Gmail’s and Yahoo’s estimation, as they will not apply the logo to mail considered spam or fraud.

Certificate considerations

Note: Yahoo doesn’t require a certificate to display BIMI at all.

While the most interesting part for marketers may be the logo itself, the blue tick indicating a “trusted source” may be interesting for some companies as well. They are reserved for the VMC version:

CMC allows a quick start for senders who want to test the whole topic first of all and collect some experiences and results. It may also be a good fit for clients being in the (long) process of registering the logo: CMC can help to bridge the time until the logo registration is completed and start with a CMC in the first year.

Mapp’s First BIMI Case

Mapp recently received our first client’s “Verified Mark Certificate” (VMC) for “Josef Witt GmbH”. The Witt-Gruppe is combining ten fashion brands for best agers under its roof. The group has successfully shifted its focus from catalogue sales to eCommerce activities, with 18 online stores and more than 15 million customers a year.

The process is still very new to digital marketers in the email hemisphere, and several steps are needed to receive the certificate. The process may seem familiar to you, as it bears a resemblance to requesting an SSL certificate:

The technical verification for your domains is done via DNS entries. These must be added by the client’s responsible IT team. The logo and domain verification will be performed by the certiifcation authority.

Clients must be aware that the overall process requires some time and regular feedback on the required steps. Please contact your CSM for further information and an offer for your VMC or CMC certificate!

Status Quo

How Mapp can help you

With BIMI, you can ensure that your emails stand out in the recipient’s inbox and reassure recipients that you have genuinely sent the message rather than somebody pretending to be you. Overall, you benefit from better brand exposure and more customer engagement.

Please reach out to your Mapp CSM with questions or discuss your individual needs to leverage this emerging technology. Preliminary studies show that it’s beneficial for improving recipient confidence in the mail sent and open rate.

Feel free to get in touch for the latest updates regarding email deliverability. We are happy to assist you with implementing BIMI and DMARC correctly – in a profitable way!

(Updated: November 2024)

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