Use the power of your logos in email marketing, too. Hardly anyone in the world doesn’t know the three stripes of Adidas or the shiny silver Mercedes star. This familiarity also creates trust. Using trustedDialog and/or BIMI (Brand Indicator for Message Identification) or VMCs (Verified Mark Certificates), you can display your logos already in the recipients’ inbox. We explain the principle to you.

Brand logos lead to higher open rates

Almost everyone receives a variety of promotional emails these days, especially newsletters and transactional emails. While recipients have difficulties keeping track of them, senders are looking for ways to attract the recipient’s attention. Brand logos next to the subject line in the inbox can help recipients get an easier overview at first glance and filter emails by relevance.

But there are other benefits to including your logo. It also gives you an additional technical way to verify your brand (or you as the sender) and thus reduce the risk of being caught by SPAM filters. After all, before an email actually lands in your recipient’s inbox and is read, it has a long journey ahead of it. This starts with you as the sender and leads via your email service provider (ESP) and your recipient’s mailbox provider (MBP).

With trustedDialog and BIMI, we present two possible ways to attract recipients’ attention and improve your open rates by including your logo in the subject line.

trustedDialog

Various email providers such as GMX, Web.de, freenet and T-Online have joined forces for trustedDialog, so that this procedure is now used by over 40 million customers in the D/A/CH region. trustedDialog offers senders the opportunity to have their brand logo displayed in the inbox, which generates more attention and is perceived as more trustworthy.

Through an elaborate certification process that includes sender authentication and content integrity checks, this process also provides reliable virus and SPAM protection. For this purpose, emails are provided with an email seal that signals trustworthiness to the recipient.

Quelle: United Internet

BIMI (Brand Indicator for Message Identification)

The big difference of the BIMI process compared to trustedDialog is that it is not an isolated solution of individual German companies, but a cooperation of leading international email providers. For this purpose, the world’s largest email providers (which include Google, Microsoft and Verizon) have joined forces to create a cross-industry and open standard that can be implemented and used by all stakeholders. While mailbox providers must also support the standard, this is the case with an increasing number of providers.

Technically, BIMI is based on the DMARC authentication protocol, which basically means that the same sender is written on the envelope, the letterhead and the signature, giving the recipient the certainty that the sender of the email is really the sender he claims to be. Since BIMI is based on the widely used DMARC and DKIM standards, its implementation is relatively straightforward and requires only a few steps.

VMCs (Verified Mark Certificates)

Since 2021, US-based DigiCert, Inc, the world’s leading provider of TLS/SSL and PKI solutions, has been authorized to issue Verified Mark Certificates (VMCs), which offer the following benefits:

  • Companies can place a verified company logo next to the sender field.
  • Customers can see the sender’s brand in their mobile client inbox before opening an email.
  • Marketers can strengthen brand presence in a cost-effective manner.

These certificates serve as visual proof of the authenticity of emails verified using DMARC in the inbox.

The benefits of using BIMI and VMCs, then, are that the standard is easy to implement, you increase your brand’s visibility in the inbox, and it also further protects your reputation, an important currency in online spheres. In addition, the clear assignment of mails to a sender minimizes the risk of phishing attacks.

Conclusion

It is a long way that an e-mail has to travel to reach a recipient’s inbox. Once there, it fights with other messages for the recipient’s attention. The trustedDialog process and the BIMI standard or VMCs help you ensure that your mails are delivered and additionally allow you to attract more attention and trust by including your logos, which leads to higher open rates.