In today’s post we bring you two features to improve the performance of your email marketing campaigns. First we will talk about BIMI and then Google Annotations, in short, these two protocols allow your company to highlight your brand content, such as the logo in the case of BIMI or promotional content in the case of Google Annotations. If you have not implemented them yet, what are you waiting for?
What is BIMI, its benefits and how does it work?
A survey conducted by RedShift has estimated that BIMI can bring 90% more trust with the consumer. At a time when the role of privacy is so important, all those measures that allow us to generate more trust with subscribers will be of vital importance.
BIMI was formally launched in February 2019, the original idea of BIMI was to help companies build trust with their subscribers and prevent third party scams/phishing. In this way, BIMI allows you to display your company logo in subscribers’ inboxes when the particular domain is verified through technical requirements.
What are the benefits of BIMI?
Mainly we highlight 3 objectives:
Increase brand visibility.
Generate trust and recognition.
Increasing deliverability in email marketing.
At this point, you are probably wondering if it is available to all ISPs. Unfortunately, this is not the case, below is an image with the current support as of March 2022 for BIMI.
How does BIMI work?
In much the same way as other email authentications, such as DMARC, SPF or DKIM. The BIMI is a text file with a specific format, which at the time of delivery of the email to the recipient and once verified the other authentications (DMARC, SPF or DKIM) the BIMI file displays the logo in the inbox to the subscriber.
What do I need to set up the BIMI correctly?
Authentication of the emails with SPF, DKIM and DMARC
An SVG file of the logo
An optional but recommended Verified Mark Certificate (VMC) (if you don’t have one, it will only show up on some ISPs).
Configuring the txt in DNS with the specific record for BIMI
BIMI is an emerging standard that is still under constant development, so it is clearly a good time to implement it to differentiate yourself from the competition.
What is Google Annotations and how does it work?
With the aim of improving the user experience, Google at the end of 2018, Google announced Google Annotations, a new feature to help businesses build more trust with their audience and bring more value in the inbox in gmail. Including images, offers, expiry dates and other offers to help promotional email have a greater impact.
Google Annotations allows marketers to customise a total of 6 elements, we detail them below:
Preview Image:
This space was designed to highlight the visual components of your promotional email. To improve performance, try using product or lifestyle images.
Promotion discount percentage
You will be able to highlight any offers such as “20% off” or “Free shipping”.
Logo:
It will be important to use a valid SSL logo.
Coupon code:
It is recommended to use this only if it is highlighted in the newsletter.
Promotion end date:
Using this feature allows an email to have two display opportunities: once when it is first sent and again within 3 days after the expiration of the offer.
Subject line:
We recommend using this feature to avoid duplication of text between the subject line, offer badge and discount code.
The evolution of Google Annotations is designed to include call to actions, product carousels and other functionalities in the future.
Google Annotations, like BIMI, are two opportunities to have a greater impact on your email marketing strategy, are you already taking advantage of them? If not, do not hesitate to contact us and we will help you to get the most out of them.
