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Jennifer Cannon, Marc Sirkin, Jakub Olexa, Chris Bailey, Rahul Powar

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Speakers:

Jennifer Cannon, Director of Corporate Partnership, emailexpert
Marc Sirkin, SVP Marketing & Technology, Third Door Media
Jakub Olexa, Founder, Mailkit
Chris Bailey, VP of Strategy and Business Development, Entrust
Rahul Powar, Founder & CEO, Red Sift

Video URL

https://vimeo.com/532438962

Transcript

Jennifer Cannon 0:31
Hi everybody welcome today's panel. We have a very exciting topic for everybody today called got email get be me. My name is Jennifer Cannon, the Director of Corporate partnerships for Emailexpert. today have an outstanding panel of speakers and thought leaders here to talk about the me and what it takes to get your brand's logo and your customers inboxes. This exciting conversations coming up, so let's just start off by meeting our panellists. Rahul, while we start off with you.

Rahul Powar 1:02
Hi everyone. I'm Rahul Powar, CEO and founder of Red Sift were a cybersecurity company that helps organisations deploy and implement DMARC and in the process, get ready for BIMI

Jennifer Cannon 1:17
Next step, we have Chris Bailey.

Chris Bailey 1:20
Hello, everyone. My name is Chris Bailey. I'm the Vice President of trust services for interest data cart and one of the creators of the verified DMARC certificate for me.

Jennifer Cannon 1:33
Next, I'm Jakub Olexa.

Jakub Olexa 1:36
Hi, my name is Jakub Olexa, and I'm the CEO and founder of Mailkit and ESP out of Czech Republic. And we are big on the me. We run a mini validator and generator and write a tonne of articles. We have participated in a lot of talks.

Jennifer Cannon 1:58
Thank you. And lastly, we have somebody named Marc Sirkin here to join us today, Marc, Marc and I used to work together at third Germania, but I will let you take it from here, Marc.

Marc Sirkin 2:09
Thanks, Jennifer. Yeah, hi, everybody. My name is Marc Sirkin. I am senior vice president Marceting technology at third door media may have not heard of that brand. Company, our brands are martec today, Mar tech conference search Marceting Expo SM max. And obviously we are thrilled to be here. Thanks.

Jennifer Cannon 2:29
So today we'll be talking about the BIMI and how to actually get this implemented. So I thought that we was repetitive this conversation by starting at the very beginning. So let's start off with what exactly is a baby record? And how is it different from DMARC?

Jakub Olexa 2:47
Okay, I'll take this one. So BB record is a DNS record that is fairly similar to a DMARC record. Except unlike DMARC, which sets your policies and reporting dresses beamy extends on your existing DMARC and requires DMARC to be in place and defines where your logo resides for your brand. And where your optional VMC verified Marc's certificate resides.

Jennifer Cannon 3:26
So does that guarantee that emails are going to be delivered? Having they may

Jakub Olexa 3:32
not really be me is really only about the logo, it does not have any positive or negative impact on deliverability.

Jennifer Cannon 3:43
Is there any cost to having be me?

Jakub Olexa 3:46
Well, there's certainly costs to set up the beaming record itself because you need to get the right logo, so probably some costs with the designer. And there's definitely a cost to get the underlying DMARC enforcement deployed. But other than that there's no cost to publishing a BIMI record. Although some mailbox providers have indicated that while they will support the me itself, it might be a paid paid service. So their way to monetize, right because they currently have other other means of displaying logos. They don't want to cannibalise your business.

Jennifer Cannon 4:43
So you mentioned DMARC Records and how that's a requirement. So Rahul, I just want to go through specifically what needs to be done on the DMARC end for beamy to be implemented.

Rahul Powar 4:57
Sure, so the BIMI spec does have specific requirements. For DMARC enforcement before bimi logos can really be deployed displayed. And so what that means is an organisation that wants to opt in to bimi. In addition to setting up the BMI records and getting their logos verified and tradeMarced as yaka, but illustrated also needs to get their domain into an acceptable level of DMARC compliance. So to remind everyone DMARC is ready to sort of ensure that your domain cannot be trivially spoofed and impersonated by services that are not authorised to send on behalf of domains that do that you need your domain to have a DMARC policy of quarantine 100% or higher, which is a pretty high level of compliance for your domain. And this has to be done for your organisational domain, in addition to your Marceting domain as per the current spec.

Jennifer Cannon 5:48
So are there any risks or benefits that you think to deploying DMARC? Besides the requirement for B, me?

Rahul Powar 5:56
Yeah, I mean, DMARC is usually a reasonably complex undertaking for organisations because you don't want to get it wrong. So if you think about what, what opting into DMARC means is, you're basically opting into email authentication. So normally, you can, you know, supply email authentication, or you cannot supply any authentication and mailbox recipients will do with it, what they may, with, with a publish DMARC policy, what you're really telling the world is that DMARC now, all my email is is authenticated in some way or form. So you now essentially have to make sure that all your sources of email are appropriately authenticated for them to be delivered in a reasonable way. So that is one of the risks associated with DMARC. And that's why usually it's a it's a it's it's not a trivial project for most organisations of any scale. On the other hand, though, once you've done that, you get a couple of benefits. One is you may sort of start to experience some deliverability benefits, once everything's been bedded down, depending on what your current authentication status worth was. So if you're authenticating a lot more email a lot more correctly now than you were before, you can see some benefits from that. And then there are also security benefits, because essentially, you can't be trivially spoofed anymore, which is one of the reasons why a lot of our customers actually stopped this entire journey to begin with.

Jennifer Cannon 7:15
So Marc, I know that you and your brand have been on this demand journey journey. Is there anything that you want to add? And in addition to what Rahul and Jacob have already told us? From the Marceting perspective? Yeah, sure.

Marc Sirkin 7:28
From the Marceting perspective, I mean, it's it took us It took us far too long, frankly, to sort of wrap our heads around the import of this, it seems so foreign at first. But we sort of stepped our way into it, it took it took a while not because it's very hard to do, but we're sort of trying to be measured about it. And and you know, moving from nothing to a quarantine state to most recently reject state for basically all of our domains. It just was it just was a long journey. And we we took our time trying to understand what are the impacts at each domain level for this stuff, the spoofing, which truthfully, we were sort of ignorant to, if I can say that, like, we're like, oh, wow, this is happening, and it's happening a lot is now completely stopped, which is great. So I think there's instantaneous benefit there. But now I think his role is saying we're starting to see as these things get bedded in, like improvements and engagement, we think, although it's hard to measure that more emails getting into the inbox, not just to the, to the server. So it's been it's been an interesting, it's been an interesting journey. It's been good.

Jennifer Cannon 8:33
So we're a whole, how long does it typically take to get started with me? I know Marc had mentioned that it's been quite the journey, and I'm sure for a lot of Marceters, it really is. But say everything is laid out in the perfect state perfect world, how long would it take to get ready?

Rahul Powar 8:49
I don't think we've ever seen that perfect world. It does vary. And honestly, this is a difficult question to answer because it is very much one of those, how long is a piece of string questions, but I can certainly tell you from from our experience and you know, obviously we work with we work with some smaller businesses, sure, but we also work some very large businesses and the complexity of that journey. And as a result, the time it takes can vary quite a bit depending on a the organisational energy I think behind the project, right, it's hard to put a quantity on that but that's that's obviously that has a big impact on it. To some extent, it depends on the kind of vendors the kind of mail services that you're actually using across your organisation. And then of course, it does depend on your inherent organisation complexity. So typically, if you're a large organisation, you can expect it to take longer because there's a lot more shadow it you're going to discover a lot of things that you didn't know about you need to find you know, the appropriate person to to essentially make those changes. But to give you some examples, you know, we did a deployment not that long ago with you know, a very large multinational government agency, and they had to get it done for a number of reasons. And so there was a lot of organisational impetus behind that. And I think that that was around sort of six to eight weeks. And this is where a reasonably complex organisation. So I would say if you really want to get it done at pace, you could probably budget about eight weeks of zooming in line everything else up, you could do it faster, and we have seen it done faster. Certainly, conversely, we have seen it done slower when, you know, people want it to be a lot more cautious and measured about how they want to roll it out. But I think eight weeks is a reasonable spot for many organisations who want to get this done.

Jennifer Cannon 10:32
So one thing that we've talked about and was mentioned earlier, is the verified Marc certificate. And Chris, I was hoping that maybe you could speak a little bit to what the VMC really is and why it's necessary.

Chris Bailey 10:44
Sure, well, the VMC stands for verify Marc a certificate. And that is a certificate type that is really acts as a container. And that container actually contains a logo, which is relating to a registered tradeMarc for an organisation. So it is a one for one match an addition, that container also contains the organisation information. And that information is confirmed by an independent third party, which validates that and that that container is cryptographically signed by that organisation that validates the information. And so when a mailbox provider or another entity pulls that information, they know that that information has been indeed verified. And that's one of the reasons why it's called verified Marcs certificates. So that in itself is is you can think of it as a version of bimi that provides that verification mechanism for for that logo.

Jennifer Cannon 11:51
Is there a difference between word Marc and figurative or visual tradeMarcs?

Chris Bailey 11:56
Yeah, so when we're talking about tradeMarcs, there's, it's a new world for for many of the people in this audience because they're not, you know, they're not lawyers. So but in the simplest way I can explain this is a figurative Marc is basically exactly what sound says that figure or diagram or image that actually shows that, you know, what you usually think of as a as a tradeMarc. It's literally like a bottle, or it could be you know, something else that represents the organisation. A word Marc is is exactly what it sounds like. And that is a word that you can use in multiple combinations. So if you actually have the word Marc for use my own company, entrust, I can choose to use any font, I want to and basically show it in a stylized way, as long as it's legible. I spelled out the word and trust, but I can't do is is make it illegible and try to make a totally new logo. So it's a reasonability test. So once the image of that figurative Marc and once a word Marc allows you more flexibility for that that word. And then of course, there's a combination, which is usually called a combination Marc. These terms vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, but they're pretty straightforward. You know, generally, your legal department is the one who generally deals with these types of issues. But for the BMC, the Marceting organisation can choose from one of these registration Marcs to to be inserted into their verified Marcs certificate.

Jennifer Cannon 13:38
And where can we file for those tradeMarcs Chris? Well,

Chris Bailey 13:41
many countries have their own way of filing for tradeMarcs. But for the verified Marc stuff gets at least in the pilot that we're working with Google on their seven official tradeMarcs that we're working with tradeMarc jurisdictions. those jurisdictions are the US, Canada, UK, Germany, Australia and the European Union as well as Japan. We also are looking at adding other jurisdictions like Spain, but you should remember if I didn't list one of the countries that your organisation might be in many times organisations fall in one of these other jurisdictions to have a broader control over where they want to do business. So especially for organisations to do business outside their own country that might apply for the into the US or for the EU, for example that gives them a broad protection for for their tradeMarc.

Jennifer Cannon 14:44
There's one last burning question that I have for you particular Chris. Has Google announced when bimi will be available in their inboxes.

Chris Bailey 14:55
So right now Google is running a pilot and it's thought at the end of the month. But they'll move into GA. So once we have a successful pilot, then that date though, has not been announced. But I can tell you right now we are, we're about nine months in to the pilot. So that's the only thing I can really reveal. It's up to Google to ultimately decide when that pilot is over, and they move into GA.

Jennifer Cannon 15:28
Marc, I have a couple questions for you, since you've been on the Marceting and the IT side of this but working with vendors to implement and deploy bimi, how would you recommend that Marceters and it talk to each other when it comes to bimi and DMARC? and discuss the subdomains and the top level domain securities that they need?

Marc Sirkin 15:50
Yeah, I mean it organisation you know, we're not we're not a huge organisation. So Marceting and it are kind of collapsed into what we call Marceting, Marceting operations. And so there's a close relationship, because frankly, I own both of those functions, which is convenient for me, but not true for everybody. But you know, what's been interesting, in my experience, is getting educated myself and my team so that we can explain it to the other stakeholders. And that's been really tricky because it's, it's not clear. It's, it's a little fuzzy around the edges of like, you can't really promise that deliverability is going to get better right away, you're sort of hoping it's going to get better than me is not a thing. That's, as Chris just said, it's not sort of in availability, there's not a lot of evidence of it in the Marcetplace today. There's obviously some information out there, but there's not a lot. And spoofing isn't something that people see on a day to day basis. So I found myself developing talking points across the organisation to sort of explain why is this important? It's been an interesting journey, though, because some of it is subtle. And you know, we've started to pull now that we've started with certain domains in reject, we've started now pull before and after, and start monitoring those results pretty closely in order to convince other stakeholders like look, the waters safe, this is a good thing. And we're going to see benefit over time for it. It turns out the technology side while confusing at first, and I do have red, see if we are a redshift customer to thank for some of this, but we went through our own learning journey in terms of testing all the various tools out there. And it's really confusing it but it turns out to be pretty simple, right? It's effectively a text file that changes the policy. So there isn't that much that really needs to get done. But feeling comfortable and making that change and making sure everybody's on the same page. There's there were a lot of talking points developed and a lot of conversation that happened organisation wide, both at the executive level and then at the functional level to explain all that stuff.

Jennifer Cannon 17:40
What were some of the conversations that you had around the Marceting benefits in terms of, you know, weighing the value of adding them in this entire journey that you've been on? What are some of the metrics that you would look forward to kind of, you know, bolster back to those stakeholders?

Marc Sirkin 17:56
Yeah, I mean, like, like any Marceter, we're in every search of how do we get? How do we get into the inbox? How do we get higher engagement, open, click, click to open, you know, reduce unsubscribes, all the standard email, Marceting metrics that we all that we all care about, you know, bimi promises, you know, for us, we have known brands in our communities, Search Engine Land is a known brand if your search Marceter, for example, and so the idea that we can have the Search Engine Land logo show up in an inbox, we think will have benefit people go that's a trusted email from a trusted person, you know, from a trusted brand visually, so that should result in better engagement. That's what we're betting on. And that's what this comes down to it for us is, you know, can we drive our newsletter subscription engagement higher? Can we get more event revenue? Can we drive more leads for our customers? So it just comes down to the, to the core levers that we're trying to pull for our for our business?

Jennifer Cannon 18:53
Where were some of the resources that you, you and your team had to? Or where did you go to to find some of those resources and information?

Marc Sirkin 19:02
You know, it's,

I would,

I would say that it was different a year, year and a half ago, we first started this journey, the tools that we use, were really it focus tools, I won't mention any of the names, but you just go to Google and sort of like, how do I manage this? there weren't that many articles and bimi still is kind of a shady thing. Like, what is it? How do I understand it? Obviously, conferences like this help significantly, we read a lot. And we tried to understand I mean, I reached out to contacts at different email vendors to try to understand what's the what's the infrastructure here look like? What's happening? What are these? I mean, the truth is, I've been doing email Marceting for years and years and years. And it's only in the last two years that I ever thought about any of this decam DMARC SPF, like all the alignment, all this stuff, like I never gave it one second thought and now all of a sudden, it's a core component to making sure that our infrastructure is set up properly. So it was a lot of reading a lot of talking to experts. I think it's changed in the last six months. I think it's been demystified by by vendors who are trying to explain this better, not just to them. It people, but to the Marceting people in terms of what are the benefits here and doing this?

Jennifer Cannon 20:05
Thank you. That's very, very helpful and insightful, because I'm sure many of our viewers today are looking for some of that information themselves. And one question that we have is regarding varizen Media groups and Google's implementations of bimi. Can one of you speak to the difference? The differences between those two deployments?

Jakub Olexa 20:31
So I'm not not representative BMG, or Google. So I cannot say exactly their internal differences. But from the outside. Verizon, and Yahoo was the first one on the Marcet with their implementation. And their implementation is primarily based on brand recognition and reputation. So even if you set up your BB record, according to the standard and have DMARC enforcement and everything in place, as be sure, it doesn't guarantee that are all local display. It's based on Yahoo recognising we know this brand, there's sufficient reputation now we will show the logo, right? Google's decision is, or Google's implementation is still based on reputation, definitely. But they want to be 100% or 110% sure, that there's no room for impersonation of a brand. So they chose to implement using 45 Marc certificate. So that is a requirement while Yahoo doesn't require certificates.

Jennifer Cannon 22:06
Marc is is one of the challenges that you've run into with with any of your processes

Marc Sirkin 22:12
on with all of them, right? I mean, the lack of consistency and standards here, you know, with no guaranteed upside. It's all theory. Sure. The promises there, but a lot of work. And it's and it's confusing. And so you know, getting getting this stuff demystified is kind of step one. And then again, communicating to stakeholders, like this is the journey we're on. We're committed to this because we think we're gonna get this result. But when you hear stuff like Google's gonna make a different decision than Yahoo, you just sort of shake your head and go, it's just more of the same, right? Like, I get it. But it's frustrating.

Jennifer Cannon 22:45
Right? Jakub, I

Jakub Olexa 22:47
love that there's you have to keep in mind that BBs still just a draft standard. So it's not set in stone. And many of these decisions are Google's are with Yahoo, as part Spark, are driven by, you know, making sure that this is as good as it can be as safe as it can be. And that, in the end, it's all for their customers. It's, it's not something necessarily for techies, it shouldn't be for techies. It shouldn't be something that only serves the Marceter, first and foremost that it serves the client or the recipient.

Jennifer Cannon 23:40
Right, I want to know that I'm really opening an email from Marceting land before I actually open that email. What are some of the common challenges that you've seen in authenticating non Marceting emails? So thinking of like transactional emails through some of the other big vendors, where those transactional emails might be automated? Rahul, I think this might be a good one for you thinking of tools like Salesforce Marceto, Zendesk, you know, what are some of those challenges that they have with the non Marceting emails? Sure.

Rahul Powar 24:15
Well, I mean, I think most of those services that you mentioned, have a pretty good handle on authentication technologies, and actually sending DMARC compliant emails assuming you know you've got the right tooling and support to walk you through that process. Because you know, it's not it doesn't necessarily just work out of the box, you've got to do some stuff, basically. But it's not rocket science, right? This there, there are millions of domains out there who are doing DMARC today, so you're not alone. So with the right tooling, and with the right know how you can make progress where we found actually, you know, without naming names, where we found a lot of the challenges with getting organisations to fully deploy DMARC on their organisational domain, we found them in typically more of the niche ecosystems. So you know, typically if you're looking at, I don't know, legal automation tools, for example, tools that most people in the organisation probably don't even know the organisation uses. Those are the sorts of things where especially in larger olds, you find vendors who, you know, really aren't as up to date with the current standards for email authentication, and the like. So you might have challenges, you know, signing, you're signing your messages with decom correctly, you're setting the return path alignments or other sort of like little technical things that you have to do. Your your major vendors, specially the ones that are used by Marceting folks are usually pretty good, because email authentication is a pretty important part of getting the whole Marceting stack, right. So they usually pretty good, a lot of the other services, once you start to get into the long tail, you usually have a bit more of a lag, like you know, sometimes you can't make those changes yourself, you need to, you know, send someone an email, or ironically, to do to make those changes on your behalf. So those are the sorts of friction points you can sometimes find.

Jennifer Cannon 26:06
Marc, I see you smiling and nodding along there. Are there some challenges or anything from your story and your personal journey that you've been on, that you want to share with our audience and maybe some tips that they can take away from this?

Marc Sirkin 26:21
Yeah, I mean, there's, there's so many already talked about just understanding its fundamental level being will explain it, not just to others, but to yourself, like, Okay, this is why we're doing this is important, but like, we have, you know, like, for us, our infrastructure stack is primarily Marceto for outbound Marceting emails. But like Rahul said, we have a gajillion other systems, from customer support systems to our event registration systems, webinar platforms that all do a variety of emails, and this process has made us sort of taken inventory of that, which is a good thing, and then make decisions on you know, how are we going to manage this stuff? And what does it What does it mean, to each of these systems? I want to say that this is a marchetto issue, and it has to do with us not Marceto. But the way that our Marceto setup is, is that we're using multiple domains to send emails out of and so we can set our policies for those, but Rahul just mentioned return path, I only have one return path. So like, I'm not totally in alignment, but it's okay. Because I am passing on decamped. Like, it gets really complicated and frustrating as a Marceter, because I just want this to be simple, like, Okay, I have permission to email you Why can I just email you? And why aren't you getting it? Right? Like, because the vendors are making different decisions, but the multi brand thing, and the way we've implemented marchetto kind of them, that's what it was, this was making me smile, because I remember thinking, Okay, so I, I know that I should achieve alignment, but I literally can't with the current stack that I have put it, okay, because I can do these other things. So understanding and balancing that is just become you know, it's it's, it's, it's just a set of things like anything else that you just make decisions on and then move forward. And so I think we're doing the right things, we hope we're doing the right things, we're getting the support we needed from the vendors. But that's that's why I'm smiling, because it just like it just never ends.

Rahul Powar 28:05
Well, I do want to add one thing to that because, you know, I think sometimes it's easy to kind of lose track about why things are the way they are. And I having worked in the space for some time. Now I think it's important to note that a lot of these decisions aren't arbitrary. They're they're there for a reason, like, why we're doing botlane? Why is that even a thing, right? It's there to essentially make sure that the Marcet is not vulnerable to certain types of attacks that happen in the real world. So as a sort of email authentication, security standard to begin with, some of these things are hard, because you know, security is hard. So I think Jacob made the point earlier, the entire ecosystem is trying to come together and do all of this in a way that's safe and effective, and doesn't create new problems when they weren't problems before. So so to do all of this correctly, I think that's where some of this complexity comes from. And I appreciate that it is, it is harder than I think we'd all want it to be. But it's mostly there for a reason.

Jennifer Cannon 29:02
Right? And when you talk about security, too, I think one important thing for folks to take away. I know a lot of folks look they think cybersecurity, why would anybody be targeting me and my brand in particular, but what we really need to think of is they're not targeting you specifically or your brand in particular, you really have to think of it like burglars driving up and down the street casing houses and just looking to see who leaves a window open or a door open. They're not targeting somebody very specifically. And typically when there has been some kind of cybersecurity hack there in that system for roughly six months before. folks on the IT side or the brand side even realise that there has been some kind of security compromise. I'm wondering if we have any questions from the audience that are coming in yet. I'm just going to pull up that window and check but I would like to open this up for some q&a if anybody in the audience has any questions that they'd like to ask the experts right now. But while we wait for those to come in? I guess Chris, why don't we start with you? I think I just want one key takeaway that you want to share with email Marceters related to VNC. And you know, what, what do they need to know? What do you want them to walk away and say that they can go back to their organisation with that knowledge to get this going?

Chris Bailey 30:27
Sure, well, I, I was in a presentation yesterday. And one of the key takeaways that we wanted to give in that presentation is that the verify Marcs certificate and the being used in the Google pilot, if it goes into GA, hopefully that will be soon, but the amount of time it takes to just look up and see what your your posture is for your tradeMarc itself, you might want to go ahead and look at that. Because if you haven't filed for a tradeMarc, or you don't have a tradeMarc that is usable. from other words, Marceting might be using a logo that has not tradeMarced yet. Because you know, they've kind of fallen behind, there's sometimes a disconnect and organisation, you want to get in front of that. And because that could take literally months to file that tradeMarc. And then simultaneously, you might want to start looking at your DMARC posture as well, if you don't have that working, you know, to a policy of in this case, what we're doing for for Gmail is we're there's a requirement that the DMARC policy is set to a quarantine 100% or, or reject. So that as Marc alluded to, can take a little bit of time to wrap your head around. And so both of those things need to be on a simultaneous path. So that would be my main takeaway. You check out your tradeMarc and look at your DMARC

Jennifer Cannon 32:02
tradeMarcs, even though you might think that it might be tradeMarced. Oftentimes, they might not be clear, I think that's something that happens more often than not in many organisations. Um, Jacob, is there one key takeaway that you would like to share with the audience? Before we get any questions?

Jakub Olexa 32:22
Definitely all you have to look at the meat as something you're doing for the recipient. I often hear the question like, how will it improve my open rates and so on. So in my opinion, the improvements of open rates that have been observed by many who deployed beamy, were not really caused by the beaming itself, but because they did the DMARC. They did the DMARC enforcement and the baby was a cherry on top. So we've run a we run a study two years ago with an unnamed mailbox provider and several big brands from all over the world, our where the provider did the AP test, to see what's the impact, and we couldn't measure any real impact. But the important part to remember is, this is for the receipt of all the studies that that you can look at, will show you that the first thing the recipient is looking at is not the subject, it is the actual sender problem. That's the first thing you look at when you get an email. Then if you know the sender, you look at the subject. The beanie logo is the shortcut. Instead of having to having to read the standard you look at the picture is the same with with your phone, you know, you look at the fifth, you know who's playing without reading it. And it's it's the same, it simply makes the better user experience. So, brand managers, Marceters should look at it as not only an opportunity to get more branded persons, but most importantly, to make recipient happy. improve the user experience.

Jennifer Cannon 34:43
Thank you. So we do have a couple of audience questions that are coming through. I'm Chris Bailey, I'm going to pump this over to you. I'm beyond email. Where do you see the applications of Vinny

Chris Bailey 35:01
That's a really good question. So let me just, you know, quickly review what bimi is. And, you know, in in reference to at least, the BMC, the one that I'm working very closely with. So the the BMI record is associated with the DNS. So there's a literally, in case you're not familiar with, when we're talking about a TXT record, we're literally just talking about a location of where the SVG file is located the image file and where the the certificate is located. So once that information is available, it could be used for other functions. And so although we're talking about mailbox providers, here that can pull that information and use it in their environment, you could actually use it for other reasons with the VMC itself, it's actually a cryptographic container, although it doesn't really rely on the private key, there could be a use for the private key in the future. So you could see it expanding potentially in use, that is not the objective of bimi, but the vehicle is available. So a kind of split that up into two parts. One is the image could be pulled into other environments, potentially, besides mailboxes and to the the the VMC itself, the the the container might be able to be leveraged in a way that can be used for other potentially cryptographic functions. Neither of these are basically I would say, immediate concerns. But the capability is there.

Jakub Olexa 36:57
I already know quite quite a few possible use cases for beaming outside of email ecosystem, it could be used for, for company presentations. So like, back in the day where Yahoo had a catalogue, where you had all the companies so these company listings can be extended with the logo that is pulled from be me. And because it is tied to a domain, it's very simple. I know, at least about one, one portal that is looking into this, but the use cases are quite quite far reaching, you know, you can you can think about the apps from mobile phones to rely on the baby, instead of having the logo embedded in the future. You know, the browser, if you if you keep in mind that it's squared, you know, and right now you have to manage five icons, you have to manage your company, company logo on your LinkedIn, on your Facebook, on your Twitter, you know, left and right everywhere you go, you you have to manage it in so many places, you know, be me You can easily be the centralised source of the right logo, right indicator for different use cases. And combined with a VMC it can be the trusted source of Brian logo.

Jennifer Cannon 38:37
And that's for Marceters and for their customers as well. Right. So we have another question here about one inbox provider that we haven't mentioned yet. And I'm not sure who wants to take this one. So I'm just going to ask the question, do you think Microsoft will adopt this or are they going to stick to the brand cards

Jakub Olexa 39:01
long before they realise

Chris Bailey 39:04
Yeah, I hope I hope Microsoft does look at this eight just to let everyone know I'm gonna give it a little bit history. This this topic was actually brought up almost five years ago. And Microsoft was looking to solve this problem and I was working. I'm gonna give a shout out to Terry sync over Facebook. But he's, I was working with him on this on this project. And this was a this is something that they were seriously considering. So you know, that there is a there is a history there with Microsoft. The the, you can imagine that once the verify Marcs to get a specially a text off in that it would be easy for someone to hook into the infrastructure and Could be, you know what Microsoft decides to do, obviously, I can't speak for Microsoft. And Microsoft, as far as I know, has not made a public commitment to this. But the infrastructure would just be there to tap into.

Jennifer Cannon 40:18
Thank you, Chris. I'm gonna get back to our takeaways. So Rahul, before we have about nine minutes left in our session here, is there any key takeaway that you want to make sure that our audience learns from you before we are done for today?

Rahul Powar 40:35
Sure, um, maybe I'll try a different tact over here. Because I know that one of the things that's come up a bit is the fact that, you know, when, when Marceters look at, let's say, DMARC, and bimi, it can look a little bit daunting given that they're now have to start talking to their folks in legal their folks in it. If they're not, you know, as conveniently correlate co located as in Marcs case. And, and I think there might be, there might be some reluctance to actually get this going. But what we've seen is, is actually the the opposite, because we know, you know, especially when we talk to a lot of the it, folks inside organisations, they see bimi as a great opportunity to get all the stuff done around email that they've never got around to doing, because now there's a real benefit that they can speak to people about. So we've seen it teams actually pull in Marceting, and educate them about, you know, the potential benefits of Vimeo and why they should be doing all of this together and actually work quite collaboratively in getting the project the priority and the airtime that it needs inside the organisation. So similarly, I would encourage the Marceters to actually try and reach out to their it colleagues and look at that, you know, organisational DMARC status and figure out how they can move these things forward. Because there are a lot of benefits, like one of the things we didn't talk about, but does happen is that you know, quite quite a quite a, quite often we see organisations actually discover a lot of services that they can consolidate, you know, we had one customer who had, I don't know, four different Marceting comms platforms when they really only wanted one. So it was a great way for it to actually find out what's going on the organisation and reduce cost and reduce complexity, because they can see stuff that otherwise you'd never be able to see. So there lots of reasons for for doing this, you know, beyond brand beyond bimi, beyond deliverability, beyond all the other potential side benefits. So, you know, framed correctly, I think it teams in our experience are actually pretty open to these conversations. So I'd encourage Marceters to go out there and have that conversation with their colleagues.

Jennifer Cannon 42:49
Marc, why don't you put on your it hat for a moment? I'm thinking of the email Marceters who are listening and watching us now, how, how would you say that they should approach and have that open up the conversation as well as rumble just recommended?

Marc Sirkin 43:08
Yeah, I mean, I guess, you know, I'm reflecting on on our journey. And we didn't start with bimi in mind, probably we started with what's happening with our email programmes. And if I go back and think about where we were two years ago, we were seeing a change in behaviour that we didn't understand why, why were our open rates and engagement rates dropping, when we've changed nothing, like we haven't changed anything, but things are worse. And what we found was that engagement and delivery to consumer quote unquote, your email services, like Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, were just really bad. And they had been bad for a long time and getting increasingly worse. And so we started having that conversation with the it with our Marceting operations, people like what's happening here did let's take an audit of the things that are generating, you know, the Marceto platform in this case, or some of our other secondary email platforms. And it was sort of a collaborative, you know, why is this happening? And what is what is really going on here, it led to an enormous amount of testing on the Marceting side subject lines, and the rest of the stuff that we all do as Marceters, but it quickly led to the discovery and understanding of DMARC generally speaking, which obviously then lead to and Jen, when we work together, this was some of the things we talked about, like, Oh, what's this bimi thing. So it was just the sort of the roadmap was laid out in front of us, like, Oh, this is what modern email Marceting looks like, there's a much more heavy it component to it that we need to understand. It's not just about writing sexy subject lines, right. And I could we could go on and on about all the testing that we did, which is like unbelievable amount of stuff that we learned to goose the engagement, but at the end of the day, you know, there's this other side of it. And so collaborating with the tech teams, in our case, meant not just our internal teams, but the vendors as well. Like hey, what, you know, Marceto is reporting a deliverability number of Acts. We know In fact, that's not The same thing as deliverability to the inbox, and just being able to have those conversations with both the technology side on the vendors and internally, you know, with all the services of the business for us,

Jennifer Cannon 45:10
right, and if we look back about a year and a half ago, and we revealed the periodic table of email optimization and deliverability in Boston, fun little side fact everybody, the computer during that presentation crashed, the moment that I revealed it and Marc was smart enough to think on his feet and grabs the physical posters ran up to the stage so that I could start talking through that periodic table. But I think as we went through that exercise, Marc, we, I mean, that deliverability, an email periodic table started as list in my head. And I think we all discovered that email was much more technical and it than it was Marceting, and really need those fundamentals. And that groundwork to be laid out properly, in order to have your email programme be successful.

Marc Sirkin 46:02
I completely agree. And I think that was a moment as a Marceter, with my Marceting hat on it's like, oh, wait, it's not just about copywriting, and frontlines it there's, there's a there's a there's, that's the tip of the iceberg. There's an ocean, and the rest of the iceberg underneath of it that has to be set up properly. And again, that was the beginning of our, in my personal journey in terms like, What is all this stuff. And so it's really important to understand both sides of it.

Jennifer Cannon 46:26
Thank you, is there anything that any of you guys would like to say, before we go, we have about two minutes left here, and I just want to make sure that everybody gets their points out to the audience so that they can go back to their organisations tonight, and start talking about how they wanted to play to me.

Jakub Olexa 46:44
Yeah, I like to add to to Marc's, you know, chasing the the the extra engagement and subject lines and everything. So with DMARC, and B, me and everything else, it's pretty much the same on the technology side, no DMARC will give you a certain certain amount of increase in open rates. So we'll so will be me in the right, it may not be right away when you switch it on. And you know, you shouldn't expect miracles, you know, happening the day you deploy DMARC and deployment, it will take a while, but the results will be there. And it's it's long gone. But when you can expect, you know, a 10 to 20% boost, you know, from day to day, just by changing the subject line. Right? It's still a long term thing. And the the extra 2% may meet a lot in terms of revenue.

Jennifer Cannon 47:42
Absolutely, thank you. Anybody else? We have our countdown timer at a minute and 35 seconds. Um,

Marc Sirkin 47:52
yeah, I would I just turned my camera off back then I was tempted to unmute myself, I would say that if you're on the Marceting side, this is a worthy exercise to get educated on, it's an important thing, it's not going away, you may not ever get to be me. And that might be okay. But I think understanding the mechanics of why email works and how it works in this modern age is really important. And if you're on the tech side, this is value. Right? The technology teams that understand how to bring value to the business are successful technology teams. And so you know, it's not just about keeping the lights on or keeping email flowing. It's about improving business outcomes. So this is a I think this is a really worthy topic. And frankly, I'm surprised I'm saying that because a year ago, I didn't I wasn't sure but now I'm now I'm convinced.

Jennifer Cannon 48:35
I agree about a year and a half ago, I wasn't so sure myself. And I do remember when we were putting together that periodic table, then he wasn't on it. Originally it wasn't. And when we had added it, it seems so like, you know, there was no tangible. 1010 Jun galletti. But I'm really glad to see that everything has evolved. And I'm glad Marc that your journey has gotten you to this point where you are. And I'd also like to say thank you to each and every single one of you for being here today. I think that we just had a really great conversation. I hope that Marceters and email Marceters have some great takeaways from this. So thank you all so much.

Chris Bailey 49:21
Thank you. Bye, everybody.

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