Email marketers are always on the lookout for ways to improve their email visibility and open rates. While there's no one-size-fits-all solution, an emerging email standard called Brand Indicators for Message Identification (BIMI for short) can be useful. BIMI can help increase brand recognition and reduce email fraud. In this article, we'll take a closer look at what BIMI is all about! Developed by the Authindicators Working Group, BIMI is a standard that attaches your brand’s logo to your authenticated email messages. With this simple, visual verification, recipients can recognize and trust the messages you send. You’ve likely seen it in action, in your own inbox. Take a look at the examples below: The logo that appears next to the brand’s message is known as a verified sender logo. Example of email with no sender logo vs example of an email with BIMI sender logo How can BIMI benefit marketers? BIMI helps build brand trust and increases security BIMI can help boost your brand’s visibility, build brand recognition, and reinforce trust. It was created to help prevent fraudulent emails, and in a world where phishing and email scams are on the rise, it’s imperative to establish trust with subscribers. When subscribers see your logo next to your messages in supported inboxes, they can immediately trust that it’s an actual email from you (and not a dangerous phishing attempt). BIMI can be beneficial to your email deliverability Implementing the BIMI standard will not guarantee every one of your emails will reach the inbox, however, BIMI could persuade more subscribers to open and engage with your messages. That’s a sign to mailbox providers that people want what you’re sending. So, they’ll be more likely to let you land in the inbox. What mailbox providers support BIMI? BIMI support includes several major inboxes like Gmail and Apple. Here’s a list of BIMI support by mailbox provider, as of June 2023. Gmail BIMI update: Blue checkmark icons On May 3, 2023, Gmail announced it would take BIMI support a step further by displaying a blue checkmark icon for senders who have adopted it, providing users of this inbox service provider (ISP) with enhanced visual verification. This provides a level of verification for your brand that can help increase customer trust and improve your email open rates. In addition, it can also help prevent phishing attacks by making it easier for recipients to distinguish legitimate emails from fraudulent ones. If interested, for more information, please review the Google Workspace Blog post . How can BIMI be set up? If you want to display your logo in your recipients' inboxes, you can configure BIMI for your organization by following the steps outlined below. It's important to keep in mind that BIMI is still a new standard, and not all email clients support it yet. However, as more clients adopt BIMI, it's likely to become an important part of email authentication. For those just getting started, or anyone who wants a refresher, this is a step-by-step guide to setting up BIMI for your domain. Step 1: Authenticate Your Email Domain with DMARC Before you can configure BIMI, you need to authenticate your email domain. This involves setting up Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance (DMARC) record for your domain. DMARC is a policy that allows domain owners to specify how their emails should be handled if they fail authentication checks. DMARC works by using SPF and DKIM to check if an email is legitimate. If the email fails these checks, the domain owner can specify how the email should be handled by a the recipient’s inbox provider. For example, the email can be rejected, quarantined, or marked as spam. To set up DMARC, you need to create a DMARC record for your domain. This record should be in the following format: _dmarc.example.com. IN TXT "v=DMARC1; p=quarantine; rua=mailto:dmarc@example.com; ruf=mailto:dmarc@example.com; fo=1" In this example, example.com is the domain of the organization. The p parameter specifies the policy for handling failed emails. The possible values for p are none (no action taken) , quarantine (put the email in the spam folder), and reject (reject the email outright). The rua and ruf parameters specify the email addresses where DMARC reports should be sent. The fo parameter specifies how DMARC should handle malformed emails. In order to configure BIMI, your DMARC policy must implement either reject or quarantine in the p/sp tag fields. Here is a link to our documentation on DMARC Policies: https://www.customer.io/docs/journeys/authentication/#dmarc-policies Step 2: Provide logo in a secure format with specific parameters BIMI requires that a logo be in Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) format to provide the highest quality image in the inbox for all devices. Overall, logos must be centered, have a solid background, a square aspect ratio, and be under 32 kilobytes. The logo must also be hosted on a publicly accessible server. This is how the BIMI record will “call in” and render the logo into the recipient’s inbox. Here is a detailed list of the BIMI logo specifications. Step 3: Create a BIMI Record After authenticating your email domain, you can create a BIMI record. The record is a DNS TXT record that specifies your organization's logo location, in the following format: default._bimi.example.com. IN TXT "v=BIMI1; l=https://example.com/logo.svg" In this example, example.com i s the domain of the organization, and logo.svg is the name of the logo file. The l parameter specifies the URL of the logo file. There’s also a BIMI record generator that spits out all of this information for you. Just give it your domain, SVG image, and optional VMC file. Step 4: Test Your BIMI Setup Once you have configured BIMI, you should test your setup to ensure that it is working correctly. You can use the BIMI Validator tool to test your BIMI record and logo. This tool will check if your BIMI record is valid and if your logo can be accessed. Expect it to take a few weeks to show up in all inboxes. To stay up-to-date with the latest BIMI requirements and news, I recommend visiting the BIMI working group site . By doing so, you can ensure that you are well informed and equipped to set up your BIMI effectively.

In campaigns triggered by a segment change, the "At Fixed Intervals" frequency setting prompts, "How much time should pass between entry and re-entry?” How you answer this prompt depends on your specific use case; let’s dive into the details. Single Journey Rule For Segment Triggered Campaigns To answer the question, first we need to understand a very important concept: Profiles in a segment-triggered campaign can only have one active journey in the profile at a time. If profile John Doe enters a 10-day workflow, he must exit the workflow before he is eligible to re-enter. (Sidenote: This Single Journey Rule also applies to date triggered campaigns. But for event-triggered campaigns and form triggered campaigns, one profile can have multiple concurrent journeys because the journeys are created each time an event is fired or a form is submitted). Now we can discuss how the “At Fixed intervals” setting works and how the important concept above plays into this. Selecting the Fixed Intervals Choosing the "At Fixed Intervals" frequency setting involves selecting the time between entry and re-entry, with a minimum of 1 day. For example, with a 1-week interval, if a profile enters the workflow on Jan 5, 12pm EST, they can re-enter on Jan 12, 12pm EST (exactly 1 week later), but only if not already in the workflow. Fixed Time Slots For Re-Entry This setting creates specific & fixed time window opportunities for re-entry, applicable only if the profile isn't currently in the workflow. If missed, the next opportunity is X days from the previous, where X is the set interval. The time window opportunities are calculated based on the entry date and the time interval (X) you set: take the date and time the profile entered the campaign and add X days/weeks to that to get the first time window opportunity, then add X days/weeks to the first time window opportunity to get the second time window opportunity, and so on. Using the same example above, this means John Doe’s fixed time slots for re-entry are at 12pm EST on Jan 12, Jan 19, Jan 26, Feb 2, Feb 9, and so on. Use Case Examples So, how can we use this understanding to achieve our desired effect? Let’s go through two use cases to answer that question: Use Case #1: Imagine you have a campaign workflow that takes a profile 9 days to finish from start to end. After the profile finishes the campaign, you want 1 week to pass by before they re-enter again from the start. To accomplish this, you’d want to set the frequency to “At fixed intervals with 16 days between entry and re-entry” Why 16 days? Because it takes 9 days to finish the workflow and 7 days for a week to pass, so 9+7 = 16 days. So if a profile enters the campaign on Jan 1, then they will exit the campaign 9 days later on Jan 10, and then their next window of opportunity to re-enter would be Jan 17, which is 16 days from when they first entered and 1 week from when they finished the campaign. Use Case #2: Imagine you have a campaign workflow that takes 28 days to finish from start to end. You want people to re-enter 3 days after they exit. In this case, you’d want to set the frequency to “At fixed intervals with 31 days between entry and re-entry” because 28 days will have passed by after they entered and exited, and you want an additional 3 days to pass by before they re-enter. So if a profile enters the campaign on Jan 1, then they will exit the campaign 28 days later on Jan 29, and they will re-enter on Feb 1st. Bonus Tip: When You Make A Mistake And Need To Restart A Campaign Imagine starting a campaign on Dec. 11, 2023, with a frequency setting of 1 week. As a result, 2000 people enter your workflow. But you realize you made a mistake in the campaign, so you stop the campaign and force everyone out. You then restart the campaign on Dec. 21, and select “Current People and future additions should enter the campaign”, but then you find out that none of those original 2000 people entered the campaign on Dec. 21. Why? It’s because those 2000 people were supposed to re-enter on Dec. 18, 1 week after Dec. 11, but the campaign was stopped then, so the next time they will re-enter is Dec 25th, 7 days after Dec. 18. But if you actually wanted those 2000 people to re-enter the campaign immediately when you restarted the campaign on Dec 21, you have to follow these specific steps for restarting a campaign: Stop the campaign, force everyone out. Change frequency setting to “every time” and 1 minute Start campaign with all current/future matches (this will make all the 2000 people enter the campaign immediately upon starting the campaign) Change frequency back to "fixed intervals every 7 days” while the campaign is live