Branding in the inbox

Make your newsletter stand out in the inbox

Reaching the inbox is only the first hurdle for e-mail newsletter marketers. The number of advertising mails competing for attention in private mailboxes is high. Apart from quick-witted and emoji-picked subject lines, there was hardly any scope to optimize the visibility of one’s own newsletters. With BIMI and “Structured Data”, two new initiatives are now on the agenda to expand the field of possibilities. We have taken a close look at the newcomers.

Branding through trustedDialog, BIMI and structured data

As with most facets of e-mail marketing, the inbox display is like a colorful patchwork – Internet Service Providers (ISPs) have used different standards to authenticate senders, sort e-mails and display them.

United Internet, for example (provider of GMX and web.de, among others), has been providing newsletter marketers with the trustedDialog service for over five years. With this chargeable service the e-mail is certified by company logo and test seal after a check of the dispatch IP in the receiver mailbox. At the same time the certification provides a better chance not to end up in the spam folder at GMX and web.de. The logo distinguishes the e-mail from other mails in the inbox, while the test seal is intended to lower the level of inhibition to open the promotional e-mail. Marketers are hoping that trustedDialog will improve deliverability and increase engagement with GMX and web.de mailbox owners. So far United Internet has been the only ISP to provide this Inbox Branding service.

BIMI (Brand Indicators for Message Identification) is the acronym under which Microsoft, Google, Oath (AOL, Yahoo!), Comcast, Agari, RP, Valimail and PayPal recently forged an alliance aimed at free, improved e-mail visibility and trust building. The vendors involved are definitely serious competition for United Internet according to our 2019 survey of the most popular e-mail services. Their idea of BIMI is to offer a service similar to trustedDialog with the established authentication protocols SPF, DKIM and DMARC – but free of charge. Trademark owners register with a database that can be accessed by e-mail providers. When the e-mail is received, the certificates are checked and the provider adds the company logo to the e-mail header, which signals verification in the mailbox. Currently, the procedure is only tested on Yahoo! As the first e-mail service provider known to us, Inxmail has announced that it has successfully tested BIMI with selected key accounts.

Meanwhile, net giant Google uses a different approach to offer more design and structuring options for content in the inbox parallel to certification and logo integration by BIMI in the in-house promotion tab of the Gmail inbox. Behind “Structured Data” lies a whole series of new possibilities for e-mail marketing. Using JSON or Microdata code, metadata is added to the e-mail header and 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 durations, to an embedded advertising image – a long-cherished dream of many advertisers.

In our tests, a large part of the information display worked smoothly thanks to structured data in both the Android and iOS versions of the Gmail app. However, in our test the discount code was only visible on the iPhone. Although we were not lucky with the display of the offer period, we were nevertheless positively surprised by the simple handling and the effect of the additional information in the inbox.

For those interested, here’s the code we used in our test:

A mailbox full of pictures and unopened emails?

There’s no doubt that Google’s structured data approach offers a great number of ways – many of them quite remarkable – to make your inbox visible. Especially the image integration strengthens the optical individuality of the e-mail and emphasizes it especially – as long as not many people do that. If more and more marketers or providers begin to use structured data, this could quickly lead to the individual advertising messages being lost in the total mass of images and codes.

Apart from the potential flood of images, the possibility of copying discount codes out of the inbox could lead to an increasing rate of unopened e-mails. In order to maintain the informative added value of newsletters, this option should therefore be used with caution. However, the data presentation in the inbox also offers the chance that subscribers who rarely open newsletters are encouraged to act and, for example, use a discount code. This approach could be a solution for e-commerce providers with poor opening rates to approach newsletter marketing differently.

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

Conspicuously inconspicuous …

… are the first two methods discussed in comparison to the structured data. If the use of structured data becomes established across providers, it is probably the best way to attract attention in the mailbox or at least in the promotion tab. Thinking further, in combination with certification via BIMI, a high-quality and more secure e-mail marketing could be realized without additional costs, which can convince with trust and appearance. At present, hardly any e-mail providers apart from Google are making use of the additional information options. Looking at further possible fields of application and the supposed cost savings, however, it can be assumed that the trend to use structured data and BIMI could gather speed.

Bildnachweis: mikeinlondon