Email embed

Embed a finished render in an HTML email as a clickable GIF thumbnail.

The thumbnail is an animated GIF of the recipient's own video, so the personalization is visible in the inbox before anyone clicks. The embed is one <a> around one <img>, with no stylesheet and no external assets beyond the GIF.

The two URLs

On the POST /renders path the terminal webhook carries both. outputUrl is always an Outvo play link, and the thumbnail is that same URL plus /thumb.gif, a durable proxy that re-signs itself on every request so it keeps loading in mail sent weeks ago.

javascript

// render.completed
// { "data": { "renderId": "rnd_abc123", "outputUrl": "https://share.outvo.io/v/abc123" } }

const videoUrl = payload.data.outputUrl;
const gifUrl = videoUrl + '/thumb.gif';

Do not send the thumbnailUrl from GET /renders/:id. That is the raw signed storage URL: it expires, and mail already in an inbox starts showing a broken image. Its one use is a null check, since null means the render produced no thumbnail at all.

The markup

html

<p style="margin: 0 0 12px;">I recorded a video just for you. Check it out:</p>

<a href="VIDEO_URL" target="_blank" rel="noopener" style="display: block; margin: 8px 0 24px; text-decoration: none;">
  <img src="GIF_URL" width="480" alt="Watch your video, Sarah" style="display: block; width: 100%; max-width: 480px; height: auto; margin: 0; border: 0; border-radius: 12px;">
</a>

<p style="margin: 0 0 12px;"><a href="VIDEO_URL">VIDEO_URL</a></p>

What to watch

The play button is painted into every frame of the GIF at render time. Do not overlay your own, or the email shows two buttons.
Keep the width attribute next to the CSS and keep height: auto. Outlook reserves layout from the attribute, and mobile-mode recordings are portrait, so a fixed height distorts them.
Keep the plain link under the image. Outlook desktop shows only the GIF's first frame, and enterprise inboxes still block images by default.
No thumbnail means no <img>. Fall back to the text-only body rather than emitting <img src="">.
The GIF is gated by the same retention window as the video, so it stops resolving when the video does.

On the campaign path the same two values arrive ready-made: as videoLink and videoThumbnail in the preset=sequencer export, and as outputUrl and thumbnailUrl on the recipient.rendered webhook and GET /recipients/:id.