Depending on the figures, email open rates can be a digital marketer’s dream - or nightmare. There are many ways a business can increase these numbers, but if something as theoretically simple as attaching a verified logo can make a positive impact, surely this should be every marketer’s top priority to implement? In our research we looked at the impact of logo visibility, enabled by BIMI, on both transactional and promotional email open rates in the US and UK.

Transactional email is the backbone medium of most customer communication strategies. In the US, we looked at how the open rates of transactional emails from two investment firms were impacted by displaying logos using BIMI. We found that when displaying a logo, a leading financial investment organization saw a 6% increase in its share of opens, while a competitor’s decreased by 10%.

In the UK there were similar findings. We conducted the same experiment using a leading energy provider and a competitor. This time, it was the competitor brand that displayed logos next to its emails in the inbox. Although the leader’s email was at the top of the inbox, it lost out to its competitor who raised its presence in the inbox (against itself with no logo) by 38%.

Transactional emails are vital for communicating with existing customers, but do we see the same results when businesses are trying to sell products and services? To test this, we measured how visible logos impacted the email open rates of some of the most popular food delivery services brands in the US and UK against their competitors.

When no brand displayed a logo:

By including a completely unknown brand as a “control”, the impact of displaying a logo alongside a promotional email could be truly evaluated. For this, we used a business with no market share or pre-existing brand reputation, and perhaps what was most surprising about this outcome was the interaction this “control” brand received. When its logo was displayed it gained 21% share of promotional email opens in the US and 62% in the UK (when compared to itself without a logo).

Looking at the data alone, we can be confident that the inclusion of logos on both transactional and promotional emails does positively impact open rates. We found that overall, when a brand’s emails had a logo but a competitor’s did not, opens increased by 21% in the US and 39% in the UK. What’s perhaps most interesting is that these findings appear to be irrespective of market share or brand size.