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As the global pandemic slowly recedes, marketers continue to focus on better ways to engage their audiences online.
Email remains an important part of the marketing toolbox. According to a 2020 HubSpot study, around 80% of marketers reported an increase in email engagement over the past 12 months.
Email marketing is a powerful way to engage customers, and it’s available to everyone. But like any marketing channel, it can pose risks if badly done.
For email marketers, protecting their company’s reputation is just as important as delivering successful campaign results. Now there are innovative technologies that allow marketers to do both.
Verified Mark Certificates (VMCs) from DigiCert or Entrust, which are part of a Google-powered Brand Indicator Identification (BIMI) initiative, enable marketers to increase their company’s branding and engagement, including open rates, in one way doing that helps protect their customers from costly abuse.
VMC is a new way for businesses and brands to harness the power of their logo to break the clutter in the email inbox and get more branded impressions. Customers can see the sender’s brand in their mobile client’s inbox before they even open the email. The result? Marketers have a powerful way to increase the ROI of email marketing programs – and get results with the minimum of investment.
To take advantage of VMCs, marketers need to work with their IT departments to ensure that domain-based Message Authentication Reporting (DMARC) is enforced, which provides additional email security benefits such as fewer phishing attacks.
Build trust and strengthen email security
With more and more people working remotely, it is more important than ever to keep communications safe and secure. According to a recent Gartner study, remote workers will make up 32% of all employees worldwide by the end of 2021.
VMCs work with the required DMARC email authentication policy and reporting log to increase security and build trust in the inbox. The DMARC standard was developed to help organizations protect their domains from attacks such as spoofing and phishing. Email clients use it to verify that emails are really from the specified domain.
As part of the BIMI standard, VMCs provide a visual confidence indicator when DMARC verified emails reach the inbox. BIMI is intended to help increase the acceptance of DMARC as an important email security mechanism. When marketers use VMCs secured by DMARC, it shows their company’s commitment to email security and protecting customer privacy.
Connect with more people at less cost
Like most companies, digital marketing teams are constantly looking for better ways to get the maximum value for money. Using VMCs gives them the potential to make a big payout with minimal investment.
The foundation of VMCs is email, a channel that companies already access and control, and that they have often maintained and developed for years. Emails are permission-based, so the channel is already fertile ground for engaging customers who are receptive to campaigns.
From a commitment perspective, VMCs could create the conditions for higher open rates because email recipients recognize the sender’s familiar logo in their mobile client’s mailbox when they scan new messages.
Businesses invest heavily in their branding and logo, and VMCs give them an additional opportunity to get great value from the email channel. A verified logo directly in the inbox signals the brand integrity to a customer or prospect and contributes to a more positive customer experience.
For additional flexibility in protecting their reputation, marketers can also set up VMCs to be linked to popular subdomains, such as: Sending email over granular subdomains can help marketers gain deeper insight into issues that could affect their mailing reputation so they can protect their main domains from potential problems.
Multi-brand companies can even get a VMC for each brand in order to strengthen their branded identity with their customers.
Qualify your domains for VMC
Before you can qualify for a VMC, there are a few basic steps you need to take to ensure that your organization is DMARC compliant. It’s best to start early because the process can take a few weeks or even months, depending on the size of your business. The basic process requires that you work with your IT team to assess your compliance.
By setting up DMARC compliance, you can gain visibility into the messages being sent from your domain and increase security for your users. You can also protect yourself against many phishing attacks – and at the same time qualify your company for a VMC certificate.
Start planning today and work with your IT organization or see if your company has already taken the first steps to put VMCs at the front of your digital marketing initiatives by being DMARC-enabled.
More resources on email marketing and domain security
What the reputation of the sender means for your email marketing (tip: a lot!)
Why You Must Take Domain Name Security Seriously
What if your email metrics are wrong: who is really clicking on your email?
