With the recent news that Google and Yahoo are mandating a new set of security requirements for email delivery from February 2024, it’s more important than ever that you understand exactly how your email campaigns will be impacted.
Luckily, for once it’s nice and clear, for senders mailing out more than 5,000 emails a day to Gmail addresses, Google will require a set of authentication measures to be met to ensure they get delivered to its inboxes. It’s expected Yahoo will follow suit.
Put simply, failure to comply means emails sent to Gmail and Yahoo inboxes might not be delivered as expected or might be marked as spam. That’s a whole lot of Marketing campaigns, product update emails, and invoices that are not going to be received.
Every cloud…
It might seem that these new security standards are here just to make our lives harder, or at least in the short term, give us more work to do as we set about configuring our email security accordingly. However, there is a reward at the end of it!
Obviously having your domains correctly configured and protected against impersonation is a reward in and of itself; not losing data, money or reputation damage, that’s all priceless.
| If you want an easy way to make sure your email-sending domains are ready come February 1, 2024, Red Sift makes it easy. Our free Investigate tool checks how you stack up with Google and Yahoo’s requirements and provides a visual breakdown of exactly what you need to action. It will take you less than a minute to check each of your email-sending services. |
But the carrot at the end of the Google/Yahoo stick is that a fully DMARC secured email domain can also get a Verified Mark Certificate. This would allow you to display your trademarked logo in recipients’ inboxes alongside all the email you send.
Email open rates are a challenge at the best of times. This is made worse during peak seasons like Black Friday and Christmas when businesses everywhere bombard consumer inboxes with the latest discounts and deals.
But BIMI could be the next big thing for unlocking email open rates for good. In research carried out with our partner Entrust, we found that showing a registered logo in the avatar slot of an email increased opens by a whopping 38%. Good news for marketers everywhere.
What’s coming up in 2024?
We know we’re kicking off the year with the Google and Yahoo changes but there may well be more changes to come to the world of BIMI.
Gmail was one of the first mailbox providers to support BIMI in 2021. Now, two years later, they are building upon that foundation and have announced that they’ve added a verified checkmark and an informative tooltip for senders who have BIMI deployed with a VMC.
This verification will allow users to easily distinguish between a certified BIMI logo, and a fake Google Account profile icon, which can be easily abused by an attacker.
We’ll be hosting a webinar with our good friends over at Entrust to dive into this topic a little deeper so join us on the 17th of January to learn more.
