When Nobody Opens Your Emails

Circlepix agents and photographers were missing the onboarding steps and feature updates buried in emails they never opened. A motion-graphics email system gave every campaign a reason to be opened before a word of subject line was read. Open rates climbed from the 20–40% range to 40–80%.

At A Glance

Two audiences, one broken channel, one designer to fix it

Two Audiences

Agents marketing listings. Photographers finding work. One inbox serving both.

The Problem

Text-heavy, transactional emails indistinguishable from a system notification. Open rates: 20–40%.

The Insight

If something moves in the preview pane, people stop and look — before the email is even opened.

Solo Production

Concept, storyboards, illustration, and animation — one designer, start to finish.

Built For Every Inbox

Animated for capable clients, static fallback for the rest. Coded and tested by hand.

The Result

Open rates climbed from 20–40% to 40–80%, and the support queue started to ease.

The Challenge

By Andy Lewis | Lead Designer | Circlepix

Two audiences, two jobs to be done: agents needed to adopt new marketing tools without a learning curve; photographers needed a reliable lead channel. Email was the only channel serving both — so a broken inbox experience broke onboarding for the entire platform. Both groups depended on email to onboard, learn new features, and receive research invitations.

The human cost of a 20–40% open rate was visible in the support queue. When onboarding emails went unread, new users would get confused and call in. Customer service reps were always on the phones, always logging tickets, fielding questions that the first week of email sequences should have already answered. The emails themselves were the root cause: text-heavy, transactional in tone, and visually indistinguishable from automated system notifications. In a crowded inbox, they disappeared.

How We Did It

From inbox insight to a template shipped in every client

Strategy & Insight

The insight came from watching how people move through a busy inbox: if something moves in the preview pane, they stop and look. Most email clients render the first frame of an animated GIF before playing it, which means a well-designed first frame functions as a visual hook before the email is even opened. The old emails were being ignored out of habit — they looked like every other automated notification. The fix wasn't "try harder," it was interrupting that pattern: a first frame that moves in the preview pane doesn't ask for attention, it takes it. The goal was to design motion graphics that worked at two levels: as a static first frame that earned the open, and as a full animation for readers on a capable client. The hard constraint was file size. Any GIF heavy enough to stall on a mobile connection would defeat the purpose entirely.

Storyboard & Concept

Paper storyboards mapped the animation logic for each email type: the Circlepix logo expanding from a point, an envelope opening to reveal content, a social connection sequence for the reconnect campaign — worked out before a single frame was animated.

Motion & Production

Animation moved into After Effects, then frame-by-frame optimization in Photoshop — compressing every GIF to load cleanly on a mobile connection without losing the quality that made the motion worth having.

Build & Ship

HTML email templates were coded from scratch and tested across clients, built to handle both animated and static fallback states. Four templates shipped: Thank You, Reminder, Reconnect, and a Usability research invitation.

The Results

What a 2x lift in open rate was actually worth

40–80%

Open Rate, Up From 20–40%

Live Templates
Reconnect · Reminder · Thank You · Usability

Designer, Concept Through Production

The motion graphics gave the emails a recognizable identity in a crowded inbox — and the customer service queue that had first made the problem visible began to ease as onboarding sequences finally landed the way they were intended.

One project doesn't tell the whole story.

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