Beyond Open Rates: Why Verified Logos Boost Lifetime Customer Value
- Benjamin Tack
- Nov 27
- 6 min read
For years, marketers have obsessed over one metric: open rate.
Did they open the email? Yes or no?
But in 2025, that question is too small.
With BIMI (Brand Indicators for Message Identification) and Verified Mark Certificates (VMCs), brands are discovering that the real value of putting a verified logo in the inbox goes far beyond a single campaign spike. It sits in something much bigger: lifetime customer value (CLV).
In this article, we’ll look at what the data actually says about BIMI, how verified logos change behaviour, and why that matters for long-term customer value — not just vanity metrics.
1. BIMI in one sentence: visible trust in the inbox
BIMI is an email standard that allows organisations to display their validated brand logo in the avatar slot of DMARC-authenticated emails.
On the surface, it looks like a visual upgrade. In reality, it’s three things at once:
A trust signal (the logo appears because the email is authenticated).
A brand asset (your mark is front-and-centre in the inbox).
A security nudge (helping recipients distinguish legitimate emails from phishing).
That combination is precisely why BIMI matters for CLV: it changes how people feel about your brand every time you land in the inbox.
2. What the data says: BIMI’s impact on behaviour
Let’s start with the hard numbers.
A joint study by Red Sift and Entrust, based on a survey of 1,026 participants in the US and UK, measured how logo visibility (via BIMI) affects consumer interaction with email.
According to their published results, adding a verified logo to emails:
Increased open rates by 21% on average.
Increased purchase likelihood by 34%.
Improved brand recall by 18% after just five seconds of exposure.
In some breakdowns of the same dataset, analysts also highlight even higher relative improvements in recall and opens for specific segments, but the core story is consistent:
When people see a trusted logo next to an email, they are more likely to notice, remember, and buy from that brand.
That’s already powerful at a campaign level. But the real question is: how does this translate into lifetime customer value?
3. From clicks to lifetime value: connecting the dots
There are (so far) no reputable studies claiming “BIMI increases CLV by X%”.
And honestly, that would be suspicious.
Instead, we need to connect BIMI to the drivers of CLV — using solid, adjacent research.
3.1 Email engagement and profitability
A 2022 study published in Manufacturing & Service Operations Management examined the relationship between email engagement and profitability. The authors found that higher subscriber engagement increases profit, once the cost of email operations is factored in.
In other words: when people interact more with your emails, they are worth more over time.
Given that BIMI has been shown to lift opens and purchase likelihood, it sits squarely in this profit-engagement loop.
3.2 Brand trust, emotional connection and CLV
On the brand side, multiple studies point to a strong link between trust, emotional connection and lifetime value:
An aggregation of branding research reported that customers who feel an emotional bond with a brand have a lifetime value up to 306% higher than those who are merely satisfied.
CLV research in services and retail consistently finds that trust, satisfaction and perceived value are core drivers of loyalty and long-term profitability.
Put simply:
Trust and recognition don’t just make people open more emails — they make them stay longer, buy more often, and talk more positively about your brand.
And BIMI is a very efficient way of reinforcing that trust at every single touchpoint in the inbox.
4. How verified logos support the levers of CLV
Let’s break down how a verified logo in the inbox feeds directly into the main components of lifetime value.
CLV is typically driven by:
Acquisition cost vs. margin
Frequency of purchase
Average order value
Customer lifespan / retention
BIMI doesn’t magically change your cost per click or your product margins — but it does influence how efficiently you convert and retain the customers you’ve already acquired.
4.1 Higher engagement across lifecycle emails
The Red Sift / Entrust research found that logo visibility improved open share for both transactional emails (e.g. statements, updates) and promotional emails, in sectors like financial services, energy and food delivery.
Those emails are not just about clicks today; they are critical moments in the customer journey:
Onboarding sequences
Renewal reminders
Cross-sell and upsell campaigns
Reactivation programmes
More people opening and trusting those messages means more people moving forward in the lifecycle.
4.2 Reinforcing brand consistency and recall
Branding research has shown that consistent brand presentation across touchpoints can increase revenue by up to 23%.
BIMI ensures that your logo presentation in the inbox is consistent, official and verified, every single time:
Same logo
Same visual identity
Same trusted indicator (often with a VMC checkmark in Gmail)
That consistency strengthens memory structures in the customer’s mind, which in turn supports repeat purchases and category preference over time.
4.3 Protecting trust from phishing and spoofing
BIMI only works on domains protected by DMARC at “quarantine” or “reject”.
That means a BIMI project implicitly pushes you to:
Clean up your sending infrastructure
Authenticate all legitimate senders
Block domain impersonation attacks
Phishing incidents don’t just generate fraud losses; they destroy trust. Once customers doubt emails “from you”, every future campaign works harder for less impact.
By reducing spoofing and providing a clear “this is really us” visual signal, BIMI helps preserve the trust capital that CLV depends on.
5. Building a CLV-oriented business case for BIMI
Most BIMI business cases today are framed around:
“We’ll get +X% open rate”
“We’ll get +Y% brand recall”
That’s a good start, but here’s how to push it further towards CLV — especially for CMOs, CROs and CFOs.
5.1 Link BIMI to CLV drivers
When preparing your internal ROI argument, tie BIMI to:
Retention: higher trust → fewer unsubscribes and less attrition after incidents.
Cross-sell and upsell: more engagement on lifecycle emails → more opportunities to introduce new products.
Win-back efficiency: a verified logo in reactivation campaigns makes your brand easier to recognise after periods of silence.
Operational efficiency: fewer support tickets of the “is this email really from you?” variety.
You don’t need a perfect model on day one, but you should position BIMI as a trust and CLV accelerator, not just a “nice UX detail”.
5.2 Start with one or two measurable use cases
To make it concrete:
Pick one or two high-value lifecycle journeys (e.g. subscription renewals, post-purchase cross-sell flows).
Roll out BIMI and track differences between pre- and post-implementation:
Open rate
Click-through rate
Conversion rate
Opt-out rate
Revenue per email sent
Over time, you can connect these improvements back to customer segments and estimated CLV uplift using your existing analytics or CRM models.
6. Measuring “beyond open rates”: what to actually track
If you want to treat BIMI as a CLV lever rather than a design tweak, measure:
Email revenue per subscriber over 6–12 months (before vs. after BIMI).
Repeat purchase rate among subscribers exposed to BIMI-enhanced emails.
Time between purchases (shortening means higher frequency).
Segment-level performance: do your top-value segments respond even more strongly to verified logos?
Trust indicators: survey-based measures like “I trust emails from [Brand]”, or NPS specifically for communications.
This mirrors broader research showing that higher engagement and trust in email marketing correlate with higher CLV and profitability.
7. BIMI as a long-term brand asset, not a one-off test
The temptation with any new email feature is to treat it as an A/B experiment and move on.
But BIMI is different: it sits at the intersection of security, brand identity and customer experience.
Security teams care because it’s tied to DMARC and anti-phishing.
Marketing teams care because it boosts recognition, opens and purchase likelihood.
Finance teams should care because it protects and grows lifetime value.
In other words:
BIMI is not just about one more opened email. It’s about building a recognised, trusted presence in the inbox — and letting that trust pay off over years, not weeks.
8. How Bimimi.io can help
At Bimimi.io, we specialise in making this entire journey manageable:
We help you get the fundamentals right (SPF, DKIM, DMARC).
We ensure your logo complies with SVG Tiny P/S requirements.
We handle VMC / CMC issuance via DigiCert, GlobalSign, or SSL.com — whichever best fits your brand and budget.
We help you integrate BIMI into a broader, CLV-aware email strategy, not just a one-off experiment.
Because in the end, BIMI is not about pixels — it’s about trust that compounds.
Ready to move beyond open rates?
If you’re exploring BIMI, VMCs or CMCs and want to connect them to real business value, not just cosmetic change, we’d love to talk.
Comments