Apple Business Connect helps businesses establish a strong, consistent visual and identity-based presence across the Apple ecosystem, which can be extended to emails and other platforms. The branding (logo, photos, promotions) that companies upload to Apple Maps or use for Showcases can create a consistent experience when integrated into emails, websites, and other digital channels, ensuring a cohesive brand identity across touchpoints
In this article, I would like to focus on the brand’s logo shown in the email inbox. Although both Apple Business Connect and Brand Indicators for Message Identification (BIMI) display the company’s logo in the recipient’s inbox, the information currently available suggests that Apple Business Connect and BIMI is not one and the same thing. Below you can find the pros and cons of implementing Apple Business Connect also compared to BIMI.
Pros of Apple Business Connect:
- It’s free of charge
- It helps to show the company logo in Apple mailboxes that BIMI may not cover
Cons of Apple Business Connect:
- It likely covers only users who access their mailbox via Apple Mail. For now, it is still uncertain whether the logo will be shown when using an email app other than Apple Mail.
- It requires a different logo format than BIMI which may lead to some extra work to create a logo that matches Apple’s requirements
The Apple Business Connect website that takes you through the registration process is available here.
If you want to set up BIMI to cover more than just Apple mailboxes, there is a BIMI guide available including links to participating mailbox providers that helps you with the implementation.
All in all, implementing Apple Business Connect can help companies to build trust among their recipients using Apple Mail and to increase the engagement with their emails. However, for now, the exact coverage and impact of Apple Business Connect is unknown.