Stand out instead of drowning

Branding through TrustedDialog, BIMI and structured data

As with most facets of email marketing, the presentation in the inbox is similar to a colorful patchwork — Internet service providers (ISPs) have so far relied on different standards to authenticate senders, sort emails and display them.

United Internet, for example (provider of GMX and web.de, among others) has had the TrustedDialog service for newsletter marketers for over five years. With this paid service, after a check of the shipping IP in the recipient's mailbox, the email is certified with the company logo and seal of approval. At the same time, the certification provides better chances of not ending up in the spam folder at GMX and web.de. The logo sets the email apart from other emails in the inbox, while the seal of approval is intended to lower the inhibition to open the promotional email. Marketers hope for better deliverability and greater engagement with GMX and web.de mailbox owners through TrustedDialog. Until now, United Internet has stood alone across the street with this inbox branding service.

Under the abbreviation BIMI (Brand Indicators for Message Identification) have Microsoft, Google, Oath (AOL, Yahoo!) , Comcast, Agari, RP, Valimail, and PayPal recently forged an alliance aimed at free, improved email visibility and trust building. In view of our investigation of the most popular email services in 2019, the participating providers definitely represent serious competition for United Internet. With their idea of BIMI, the established authentication protocols SPF, DKIM and DMARC should offer a similar service to TrustedDialog — but free of charge. Brand owners register with a database that email providers can access. When emails are received, the certificates are checked and the email header from the provider is supplemented with the company logo, which signals the verification in the mailbox. Currently, the process is only available on Yahoo! tested. As the first email service provider known to us, Inxmail announced that it had successfully tested BIMI with selected major customers.

Update 2020: Gmail is now testing BIMI with pilot customers. It is not yet clear when other ISPs and mailbox providers, such as Outlook.com or AOL, will follow suit. On the email service provider side, Inxmail and Emarsys now support BIMI.

Meanwhile, network giant Google is using a different approach to offer more design and structuring options for content in the inbox, in parallel with certification and logo integration by BIMI in the in-house promotion tab of the Gmail inbox. “Structured Data” offers a whole range of new opportunities for email marketing. Using JSON or microdata code, metadata is added to the email header, which is displayed in the recipient's “advertising” inbox next to the sender and subject line. The variety of information ranges from the company logo to voucher codes and terms, to an embedded advertising image — a long-cherished dream of many advertisers.

In our tests, much of the structured data display worked without problems in both the Android and iOS versions of the Gmail app. However, in our test, the discount code was only visible on the iPhone. We had no luck with displaying the offer period, but nonetheless, we were pleasantly surprised by the ease of use and the effect of the additional information in the inbox.

For those interested, here is the code that we used in our test:

<!– Start Gmail Promo Tab annotations code –>
<script type=“application/ld+json“>
[{„@context“: „http://schema.org/“, „@type“: „Organization“, „name“: „Publicare“, „logo“: „https://publicare.de/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/publicare_2016.jpg“ },
{„@context“: „http://schema.org/“, „@type“: „EmailMessage“, „subjectLine“: „Setup-Angebot: Umsteigen auf Permission Manager for Emarsys“ },
{„@context“: „http://schema.org/“, „@type“: „DiscountOffer“, „description“: „30% Setup-Rabatt“, „discountCode“: „publicareEPM2019“ },
{„@context“: „http://schema.org/“, „@type“: „PromotionCard“, „image“: „https://publicare.de/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/Permission_Manager_web.png“ }]
</script>
<!– End Gmail Promo Tab annotations code –>

Google provides a good documentation Ready for that.

A mailbox full of pictures and unopened emails?

There is no doubt that Google's structured data approach offers the most and most distinctive ways to ensure visibility in an email inbox. Image integration in particular strengthens the visual individuality of email and makes it stand out in particular — as long as not many people do so. If more and more marketers or providers start using structured data, this could quickly result in the individual advertising messages being lost in the total mass of images and codes.

Aside from the potential flood of images, the ability to copy discount codes from the inbox could lead to an increasing rate of unopened emails. In order to maintain the informative added value of newsletters, this option should therefore be used with caution. However, the presentation of data in the inbox also offers the opportunity for subscribers who only rarely open newsletters to be encouraged to take action and, for example, to use a discount code. For example, this approach would be an opportunity for e-commerce providers with poor opening rates to approach newsletter marketing differently.

Ultimately, it will also become apparent how Google will deal with increasing numbers on the part of structured data users in the promotion tab in the future. Apart from the previous filtering by expiration date, sooner or later, a way must be found to weight the “best deals” in the tab. The hope for marketers is that this doesn't necessarily have to be done through paid promotions.

Remarkably unobtrusive...

... this is how the first two methods discussed compare to the structured data. Should the use of structured data prevail across providers, this is probably the best way to stand out in your inbox or at least in the promotion tab. Thinking further, in combination with certification via BIMI, high-quality and more secure email marketing could be implemented at no additional cost, which can impress with trust and appearance. At present, hardly any email providers other than Google use the additional information options. However, in view of other possible fields of application and the alleged cost savings, it is reasonable to assume that the train using structured data and BIMI could pick up steam.