Gmail Starts BIMI Pilot

In a previous blog post, we highlighted BIMI (Brand Indicators for Message Identification) and its benefits as the new standard to display your brand logo in consumers’ inbox.

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

While Verizon already implemented BIMI a few months ago, Gmail has now announced they are starting their BIMI pilot on 21st of July 2020. This is how BIMI looks like in Gmail:

For the time being, the pilot phase is limited to a closed test group, but everybody else should already be preparing to benefit from the launch of BIMI for Gmail.

The official announcement from Gmail can be found here.

What does it take to get a logo displayed in Gmail

The main difference between the requirements for BIMI in Gmail vs Verizon is that Google is requiring companies to have a Trust Certificate in place. Currently, Google is partnering with two Certification Authorities for this, “Entrust Datacard” and “DigiCert”. Secondly, the requirement is to have an enforced DMARC policy in place (“quarantine” or “reject”) – policy “none” on main or subdomain is not considered sufficient anymore.

This article was first published by MAPP. Permission to use has been granted by the publisher.