You’ve probably seen a company logo or personal photo next to some of the emails you receive. This stood out to you, right?

Notice the difference?

What is a sending avatar?

There are many benefits to adding a sending avatar to Gmail. Avatars can help you personalize your account and make it more recognizable to your readers. They can also help you build trust and credibility with others by providing a visual representation of who you are.

Your user’s inbox is a sacred and crowded place. Anything that you can do to stand out is a win.

In fact, a recent study has shown that adding an avatar to your emails can actually increase your open rates by up to 21% while increasing brand recall by 18%.

How can I add a sending avatar on my emails?

Fortunately, when sending your email from Gmail, they make it easy to add an avatar to your account. Here’s how:

1. Log into your Gmail account and click on the Google logo in the top right-hand corner. This will also include a circle with the first letter of your name or business if you haven’t added an image yet.

2. Click the camera icon in the dropdown.

3. Click on “Add profile picture”. Then “From computer”. Then “Upload from computer”.

4. Save as a profile picture.

5. Voila! It’s that easy.

Adding a sending avatar on a secondary domain

Maybe you want to send all of your email from a distinguishable secondary domain (ex. mail.loops.so instead of loops.so). Sending email from this secondary domain will not automatically pull in your sending avatar that was setup above.

Luckily, it's an easy process.

1. Log into your Google Admin console (note: You will need to sign in with an administrator account for this to work.)

2. Head over to "Manage domains" the dropdown menu

3. Click "Add a domain" and enter the domain name

4. Select "secondary domain" as the domain type (note: This process will also work for sending from a completely different domain that you may also own. Simply select "User alias domain" here instead."

5. Add and start verification

Once the domain is verified it will begin pulling the same sending avatar that you had set up on the primary domain.

ryan@loops.so will now have the same sending avatar as ryan@mail.loops.so

Unfortunately, avatars or photos like this can only be seen within the same email client.

That means that by setting up your avatar in Gmail like this, your customers receiving your emails in Gmail will see it as intended but your customers reading your emails in Yahoo, Outlook, etc. will not.

In order for your avatar to show up as intended for each individual client, you will need to create a separate account with each and upload your avatar within their settings and parameters.

If you don’t have the time or bandwidth to manage your brand’s logo across multiple clients, there may be another way.

Enter BIMI

BIMI aka Brand Indicators for Message Identification is a relatively new email standard that allows you to add your brand’s logo to your authenticated emails. This is not free and may take some legal work to fully adopt but it may just accomplish your goals of displaying your brand’s logo with an added layer of trust.