Brand Indicators for Message Identification (BIMI) is a cool protocol that allows senders to publish a logo to be displayed along with their email messages in supported email clients, webmail platforms and mobile applications. I believe it helps boost engagement, and I feel that it also helps to drive trust, given that BIMI requires that a domain be properly secured with DMARC, helping show off that your domain is properly protected against phishing and spoofing. I think of it as a nexus where email security meets email marketing engagement and deliverability. I'm a fan.
One of the biggest challenges for those wanting to implement a BIMI logo for their domain is the requirement that certain mailbox providers have requiring that a Verified Mark Certificate (VMC) must be purchased and implemented before they'll support displaying a domain's BIMI logo. For small companies who don't have a trademarked logo, that constitutes quite a barrier to entry.
But now, hopefully things start to get a bit easier. Today, Google announced support for Common Mark Certificates (CMCs), as an alternative to Verified Mark Certificates (VMCs). This new process allows certification for a BIMI logo without requiring that the logo be trademarked -- only that it be verifiably in use on a company's website for more than twelve months. This opens up the opportunity for BIMI benefits for folks who would not have qualified in the past, and that's a good thing to see.
There are caveats; specifically, CMC is only supported by Gmail today. If you have a BIMI with CMC (and not a VMC), your logo won't display in Apple Mail or on Apple's iCloud Mail. They still require VMC. But if you implement BIMI with CMC, you'll at least cover Gmail subscribers, and that's often a rather large chunk of a B2C email marketer's subscriber base. That, plus the logo is likely to display in Yahoo Mail as well, giving you further coverage (as they don't have a mark requirement today, so they'd show the logo, regardless of whether or not you have a CMC, a VMC, or neither -- instead, they look for senders with a positive reputation, sending "enough" volume of email).
There's more to come on this topic, and I still have much to learn. I suspect everybody involved still has much to learn. As this is a very new process, I have questions around how the verification process will work when one purchases a CMC, and I wonder exactly how close a matching graphic or mark has to be to pass muster as matching its existing use. And that's just for starters.
Below, find a Valimail "Ask Al" video I put together just after Google released their announcement.
And if you'd like to learn more about this, here's a link to the announcement from Google, and a blog post from Valimail with more first thoughts and details about all of this.
For more information on BIMI adoption rates and example BIMI logos, check out my BIMI mini-site over on Wombatmail.
September 26 Update: Here's the Authindicators Working Group, the folks behind the BIMI spec, announcing the introduction of Common Mark Certificates (CMCs).
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