Today Validity, the leading provider of data quality and email marketing success solutions, announced new BIMI certificates to make it easier for marketers to adopt Brand Indicators for Message Identification (BIMI). This new offering comes immediately following Google’s announcement of general release support of BIMI across all Gmail inboxes. BIMI is an industry standard email specification that enables the use of brand-controlled logos within supporting email clients. Google joins Yahoo and Fastmail in BIMI support, making BIMI available at roughly 2 billion inboxes (Source: https://financesonline.com/number-of-email-users/). The new certificates reaffirm Validity’s dedication to the promotion of ethical marketing and a more secure email experience for today’s consumers.

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Today’s inboxes are more crowded than ever, with a 94% increase in global email volume year-over-year (Source: State of Email Live). This phenomenon has made it increasingly difficult to attract the attention and confidence of potential customers. BIMI requires Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance (DMARC), and a Verified Mark Certificate (VMC) of a sender’s trademarked logo to display sender-designated logos directly within a recipient’s inbox. DMARC combined with BIMI ensure the organization’s domain hasn’t been impersonated, ultimately strengthening the trustworthiness of marketers’ email marketing for the recipients and increasing email engagement for today’s digital marketers.

Validity has a multitude of resources to help marketers take advantage of the significantly increased adoption by mailbox providers of BIMI, including the tools marketers need to manage both DMARC and BIMI within its Everest email success platform:

• Verified Mark Certificates: Validity has partnered with digital security and secure identity leader Entrust, a Certification Authority (CA), to help its customers obtain Verified Mark Certificates (VMCs) that meet BIMI standards. Some mailbox providers, including Gmail, require senders to have a Verified Mark Certificate that is issued by a Certificate Authority (CA) in order to accept BIMI–Entrust is a leading CA and collaborated in the development of the VMC for BIMI. Together with Entrust, Validity will help interested and eligible clients obtain an authorized VMC, enabling them to implement BIMI across all supported mailbox providers, now including Gmail.
• DMARC monitoring: Everest gives marketers the tools they need to manage and monitor their DMARC policy, ensuring marketers receive the benefits of properly authenticated mail while safeguarding their domains against bad actors looking to phish.
• BIMI Wizard: Everest provides marketers with a place to host their BIMI Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) image, a way to generate their BIMI DNS code, as well as preview their message in a BIMI-enabled inbox prior to hitting send.

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Marketers can also keep a close eye on email engagement within Everest to track clicks and conversions before and after DMARC and BIMI implementation to see the benefits of their investment in real time.

“As advocates of ethical marketing and members of the AuthIndicators working group, Validity jumped at the chance to support the broader adoption of BIMI across the email ecosystem,” said Validity Chairman and CEO Mark Briggs. “With the shift to digital marketing greater than ever before, it’s harder than ever to stand out in inboxes cluttered with spam and irrelevant ads. We’re thrilled to see high-caliber email providers like Google enabling marketers to do their jobs to differentiate themselves from spammers and bad actors. Validity customers should now be more confident than ever in their ability to stand out as trustworthy and responsible marketers, and with DMARC and BIMI the end-customer receiving these communications will rest assured knowing they’re not victims of spam or cyber crime.”

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