Congratulations on creating your video! Now let's make sure you make a great impression when you share it by customizing your video thumbnail!

Video thumbnails are what show up in emails. They are extremely useful to cut through the noise and capture your viewer's attention!

Note: Email is the ONLY place your video thumbnails will show up. So, when you edit your thumbnail, you will only see your edits when your video is shared in an email. (The edits do not display on the video page).

We highly recommend customizing video thumbnails because they provide a teaser for your video. You can let your viewer know what this video is about, and why they should click "play!"

Scroll through all of the possibilities below, or skip ahead to learn how to make a specific edit:

There are a couple of places you can launch the video thumbnail editor. You can use either of these options. (The video thumbnail editor will be the same no matter where you launched it from).

You can also get to the thumbnail editor from the video share modal. Simply click on the "Customize" button on the top right of the video preview in the share modal to launch the thumbnail editor.

Start typing right under "text overlay" to add text to your video thumbnail. We recommend keeping this to ~5 words to make it easy for your viewer to see the note in just one glance.

Once you start typing, you'll see the words show up on the video thumbnail preview immediately.

If you don't like the text color or background color, no worries! You'll be able to change that later.

Let's say you are sending one video to multiple people, and you want each video thumbnail to show the viewer's name.

You can automatically personalize videos using dynamic variables.

Simply select "personalize" and insert the variable that you want to use.

When you send your video through your email automation platform of choice, we will map the dynamic variable placeholder in Sendspark to the contact property in your sending platform, so each viewer will see their own name.

(Learn how to share dynamic videos)

If we can't get the contact variable for any reason, we will show a fallback variable. For example, "Hi {{first name}}" would show "Hi there."

To change the fallback variable, simply click on the dynamic variable you've inserted, and write in new fallback text.

Want to add your viewer's logo to the video to make it really pop? Simply search for their company name or domain under Logo Overlay.

Once you see their logo, click on it, and it will appear in the top left of the video thumbnail.

If you don't see the logo you're looking for, you can try to find it on your own through a Google search, or by going to their company's LinkedIn/Twitter/Facebook pages, and then uploading it to Sendspark via the "upload logo" button.

Making a weird face? No worries, you can use our slider to select a new frame for your video thumbnail.

You'll see the thumbnail preview change, so you can make sure things look right. 👍

Sometimes your might want to have an animated GIF thumbnail, and other times you might want to have a static image thumbnail. It's easy to switch between these options.

The right color theme is important to make sure you're delivering a polished, professional video. Click into the 3rd tab of the video thumbnail editor to modify your color theme.

Here, you can edit colors for...

For any of these, just click on the color wheel, and either use the color selector or type the hex code into the input field.

For some fields, like the video play button and video duration, you are able to modify the opacity as well. Spend some time clicking around on this page to see all that is possible!

Note, editing these colors is different from editing your global styles. When you edit your global styles, they affect all videos in the workspace. However, when you edit your video thumbnail styles, they only affect this specific video.

To save you some time, we will automatically use the same color theme for your next video, but you never have to worry about affecting other videos in your workspace by modifying your thumbnail colors!

Want to show viewers the duration of a video, so they know how long it is?

Sometimes the video play button can cover important parts of the thumbnail (like your face). In this case, you might want to toggle the play button on or off, change the shape, or modify the opacity.

Let us know if there's anything else you would like to modify about your video thumbnail!