There is (still) more to BIMI than BIMI

Andrew Bonar 0:00
I don't even have to ask Jakub just says, Oh, you've got something going on, we want to get involved. That kind of support Jakub is. It's more than money. Thank you so much for everything that you do. And more importantly, thank you so much for this presentation, because I know it's gonna be absolute gold. Without further ado, Jakub.

Jakub Olexa 0:22
Thank you very much, Andrew. Let's hope the slides come up. And the internet works and everything. So thank you for the introduction. For those who don't know me, I'm Jakub, Olexa. From Mailkit. We've been doing a lot of work around beamy. And I want to give you a bit of overview of what B me is, where it came from. And whether it's the magic bullet that marketers are looking for

it seems like we're still using a modem here. It's a dial up connection to the hotel. So be me, it's been all the rage for the past two years, I I've seen be me being mentioned on all different sites. There was a there was a period where, you know, every every other day there would be a BIMI article published letters was litmus, or it was Business Insider, everybody was crazy about being me. So what is being me, it stands for brand indicators for message identification. I call it brand indicators, because to me, be me is way more than just being me. So far, the the ultimate goal is for be me to be the one brand indicator that you will use. But right now, there's way more. Right now, we still have many types of brand indicators. So I broke them down into these five categories as as they came over over the years. And as we progress towards be me as a standard. So we have the non standardized this is where it all started from. The most common is the fav icon. I don't think it has any better name than just fav icon. But it's it's the icon that everybody's using for their website. It has different formats it It started as an IC o file. But GIF, PNG. For Windows, there was a BMP file. It's essentially in the HTML head there of have the message or the webpage and provides an icon. Now there's, there's a downside to that. It is not widely supported. It's not a standard, unlike browsers which show it on the tab and an email message. Your you don't know whether it's going to be displayed or not. Where it will be displayed is when you have display in browser, then the fav icon will show up and it so therefore it's really important that marketers don't forget about the five icon in the header of their HTML message. It's easy to implement for the marketers, it's part of the content. So it has its its advantages, but because of the limited support. It's it's not as not as widely used as it should be. And most importantly, it doesn't show up in the inbox easily. Then came the gravatar. Again, something that was adopted from websites. Not that many people know about Gravatar which is which is a shame because it's free. It was originally intended for WordPress sites and discussion boards, but it found a lot of adoption early on at one point Appelman He was using Gravatar to pull the full the brand, brand icon, Slack, GitHub, all of them still use Gravatars. But it's not a sure bet. So you cannot say, I will, I will set up a gravatar. And I'm covered. And my emails will have have my branding, you can see this is a screenshot from the gravatar UI. I've set up individual icons for every single email address where I want to use use a certain logo or avatar. And you can, you can set up different logos for different email addresses. Very easy to to set up. Sadly, not widely supported.

We know that many systems do source their logos from Gravatar. Then came providers with their profiles. Now, one of the not very well known is Mail ru, probably because not that many Americans care about Russian market. But mail Are you is a massive provider. And they have very nice options. So it's free. It displays on both the message list and in the message detail. It's easy to manage, you can go to the postmaster site, set your set your domain, upload your logo, wait for the logo to be approved, and boom, it starts showing up. So it's super convenient. The another added value of doing this is that the postmaster site of mail ru allows you to see detailed stats about your campaigns. So what actually happens to the messages, how many ended up in inbox, how many ended up in bulk? What's the was the open rate as measured by mail ru? How many people just clicked to delete at cetera. And all of that is available both in the UI as well as through API. So for example, if you're using male kid, we would automatically pull the information from the API of mail ru, and show it in our UI, among other stats. So it's, it's really neat. And of course, they provide feedback loops, as well. So if you're a sender, if you're a brand, and you're not, you're not set up with mail, ru, I highly suggest you do. But that's not the only provider profile there is Gmail. Now. Six months ago, Gmail started supporting beam me we will get back to that later. But there's still profiles that you can link with, with your Google account, so you can see your logo, like the one you see here, it's not because we have beamy, and we got a VMC. No, this is a well known hack. You set up a new account at Google, and you use the email address that is sending as a login for that account. And once you do that, you can set up the user profile for that account to contain your logo. It will show up like this. The problem is, it's very likely to be deprecated. Soon, because Gmail is moving towards me. And of course, looking at a mailbox where where you see a logo, and you don't know where the source is, and the idea behind bmes security. It would be quite confusing if they mix the the this type of profiles with beamy logos, so if you're not using it, please please do the hack. It will help you to to get more brand impressions for the moment, but don't expect too much. It's going to be deprecated soon But, yeah, for coming months, it's likely to show up. Outlook has their provider profiles as well. But they are ridiculously complicated to set up. It's free, but you need to have big business page. Once you have the big business page, you also need something that is called bank or location page, I believe. So you link the two. And that gives you the Oh, it's called Pink places, I remember that. So then you can have not only the brand logo that is pulled from the business page, but the place information as well. Problem with the the Outlook profile is that it's really ridiculously complicated to get it to work.

It's obviously super easy for big brands in the US, for European brands, it will be a lot of a lot of pain, it will it's not immediate, it takes months to free before they start showing your logo. So it's it's a challenge. It's definitely a challenge. But yeah, you can see that this is this is something that is that is definitely worth getting. Then there are providers sourced which is something slightly different these providers sourced logos are information that are collected by the providers by the mailbox providers who go through to great lengths to collect the the Logos, the information about the brands, and present them. Of course, this also means that the brand doesn't have any control over it. It's yah hoo. And you know, in this case, this is a fair male, individual male user agents, putting together the database of the brand logos and presenting them to the clients. So it's unpredictable, you have no control, often it would be outdated. And of course, the big brands are more likely to have an up up to date information and logo. So there are many, many providers that source these information. Then the last category are the monetized one. So there's trusted dialogue, which is in Germany, it covers GSM Macs, web d e. T, mobile free mail, free mail D. or free net Freenet. So it's very popular in Austria, Switzerland, and Germany. It's monetized it's expensive, it's cheaper per mail. The cost per mail is as low puts the, the overall price per month will add up. And it is really expensive. The second thing you can you can notice that it has a very odd shape, which is quite difficult for many brands to fit into. It shows up in the list with this special symbol that symbolizes that it's a trusted dialogue. And it also shows up in the message detail. But as I mentioned, it's really if if Germany is your primary market, and you can you can see the value in it, then it's worth it. We've done a case study with Latino on whether whether there's any impact on open rates, click rates, or anything measurable that would allow them to get the budget for this. And after one year, we were completely inconclusive. It's it's a wash. So if it was cheaper, it would be better interior boost in Poland. Very interesting. Because it's cheap. It's both In the message list, as well as in message detail, it's a square PNG. But displayed in a circle or fraction.

It has some major advantages. If you get the interior boost, you also get content images preloaded, which is fantastic and on itself increases open rate. Of course, this is the imaginary open rate doesn't really help much, because as a matter of fact, you kind of just get the information through the pre loading, that the image was actually loaded. The interesting fact is that we had no tea No, it wasn't only about the opens, there was a significant increase in clicks as well. So it does have the value. The downside is there is no management interface, you have to interact with their with their team, and their account manager. So it's not something that you can easily change, you know, for for holidays, let's say have a Halloween edition of your logo. So, but it has a significant impact on on the revenue stream. So it's definitely worth it. Interior boost is part of their premium services. I don't know if you are aware, but Polish mailbox providers are running a pay to play model. So if you want to deliver, you need to pay them for for the bandwidth. I strongly suggest to avoid trusted sender.pl which is operated by a Polish ESP that is just reselling the service. You should go to ONET to interior and W ppl and get your direct contracts instat do not deal with intermediaries, they're not going to help you if you really need the help. And don't worry, you don't need to speak Polish. They're quite okay with English. So. And that brings us to be me. You've seen that there many, many alternatives. But it all led to be me. As Dennis mentioned, Mark works constantly on improving the email space. And beam he actually came out of Mogh. The goal was to unify all of these solutions, you know, early on, I mentioned Gravatar. And I thought Yeah, Gravatar could be the solution, but it doesn't have the security aspect. So be me brings the unification it's in your DNS so gives you gives you control. It requires a demark enforcement, quarantine or reject policy, which means security and trust in as an extension. It's compatible with multiple multiple mailbox providers. And we are hoping that over over the years, it will the the adoption will will grow. And it's intended as an incentive for those who deployed demark. Because demark helps not only brands to protect their domain, but it helps mailbox providers to filter more efficiently the the inbound mails. So that's why why beamy was created. Now, the important part to remember, since it's tied to security and demark. It's also tied to reputation. So if you're a sender with a bad reputation, it doesn't help that you have demark policy in place and that you have be me record set up. Unless if your if your reputation is bad. Google Yahoo none of them will show your logo. To build up reputation, you need to have a certain volume. So if you're sending 5000 emails a day, Yahoo will not recognize You as a brand. If you sent 15, maybe they will, we don't know the thresholds.

But there must be sufficient volume for the systems to recognize you as a brand. Gmail requires a VMC, which is an extension to be me, it's a verified Mark certificate, which proves that you own the brand. And there are more mailbox providers coming, one of them, that will be starting a pilot is the check Seznam it will be they will not require VMCs. But they will have a monetized model for for be me. But it will be cheap, it will be affordable. It will be manageable. So I mentioned verified marks, certificates. And this is something you know, six months ago, Google announced that they're doing doing beamy, or they're supporting beamy. And it was long anticipated, the pilot was running for a year. And there was a lot of anticipation by the brands, and then kind of went down. And for a very, very simple reason. Many brands did not realize they did not read the right articles on the topic that they will need a VMC and VMC is not something you can get in a day or two. The process for the VMC certificate is based on a trademark because that was the only only known way how to validate that the brand has this logo that it's actually the brand's logo that the brand wants to use. And the trademark must be in a specific form. So while the process of getting the certificate is very similar to getting an SSL certificate, it's essentially Domain validation, organization of validation, etc. It also validates the trademark. And that trademark must be an exact match with your beamy logo. So if you look at our trademark, this is it. This is mail kid and our envelope. But we couldn't get just the envelope into the beamy and get it validated, it has to be an exact match. So many brands have this problem that they have a symbol and a text. And because of that many have failed to get a VMC. And they have to go through the process of registering and separate trademark with just the symbol. Now another thing that brands are forgetting about is getting it correctly. So it must be a visual mark, not a word mark. As this one this one is a word mark. If you use a word mark, then your beamy logo can only say the word you can do that. But then it's not your branding. It's the word it can be in any font in any color combination, but it must be a word. If you want the logo you have to register what is called a figurative trademark or a visual mark. And that is again, often tricky. People are forgetting about colors. So you can see ours has no colors because if you register your trademark and specific colors, you have to stick to those colors. You can make variations you can go black and white grayscale or anything. If you register your trademark in grayscale. You can use any colors you wish. So please if you're going to register a trademark make sure it's grayscale. Currently, the supported options are EU trademarks us trademarks, Canadian Canadian trademarks German trademarks, and I believe South African trademark office.

It's not simple, it takes about a month to get a VMC. We've done quite a few for our customers, we are an interest partner, we are happy to help from getting a trademark down to making sure that your logo is done correctly, because the problem problem with me is also that it requires an SVG and a specific profile. That profile is not something that you can easily export from Adobe Illustrator or anything. So it needs a certain skill. So we're happy to help with that. And then then you can go and put it into your beamy record, which is super simple. There's a selector. There's no no support for selectors at the moment. But the goal is that you can have multiple multiple selectors for multiple variations of your brand logo. So you can have the Christmas version and the Halloween version, and, you know, Valentine's Day version of your logo, if you wish, then there is a record version, the URL to your logo, and a URL to your VM, see, if you have one, if you don't, don't put the a tag, the logo URL, make sure that it's not protected by CloudFlare, or any hosting platform like this, because these platform these platforms are CDNs, they have bought protection. And the mailbox providers are essentially bots that pull it. So they might be unable to, to pull the information. Because there's a lot of trickery, we've built a service called no to me, which allows brand managers to manage their logos in a single place easily. They don't have to worry about the SVG compatibility, at cetera, it essentially simplifies their lives. And that's it. If you do all the steps, your brand should should be showing up at every major mailbox provider, left and right. Of course, there are mailbox providers that have no support for any type of avatars. But since users are going mobile, and the Avatar the brand indicator is a shortcut to the sender, it helps identify people who, who, who's the sender. There's a big push from the customer or user experience perspective to have avatars and brand indicators. Thank you.

Andrew Bonar 28:21
Thank you. Thank you so much Jakub. What protection and how amazing that email geeks and are becoming trademark geeks as well. So yeah, we will get to widen our skill set and we want to really be able to deliver the best in email. BIMI's you as Jakub said, but well established now huge support it