Boxing Day Coupon Code + Marketing Ideas: Boost Seasonal Sales

Looking for Boxing Day marketing ideas for your small business? We can help with that!

We’ve run plenty of seasonal promotions here at WPForms, and I’ve also run sales during my time as a small business owner. I learned a lot about capitalizing on seasonal events, which is especially important during the holiday season.

This post covers quick ways to market your business and capitalize on Boxing Day sales.

What Is Boxing Day?

Boxing Day is an important part of the Christmas season in the UK and some parts of Ireland, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.

In the UK, retailers traditionally run their best deals of the year on Boxing Day and take the opportunity to clear out old stock to get ready for spring. Many shoppers are in the mood to pick up a bargain.

The most important first step is to ensure that your Boxing Day sale is going to make an impact, which is dependent on where your customers are.

1. Consider Your Audience Location

If you’re thinking about Boxing Day marketing tactics, location needs to be front and center. It’s a good idea to plan your marketing calendar according to the location of your customers.

• On Boxing Day in 2023, Reuters reports that UK shoppers would spend as much as £3.7 billion ($4.7 billion) in a single day.
• According to Gitnux, 20% of Australians say they’ll shop for Boxing Day deals.
• Boxing Day is the biggest retail day of the year in Canada.

If Boxing Day won’t resonate with your customers, important marketing metrics — like click-through rates and conversions — will likely be low. There may be a more suitable holiday for your audience, like Black Friday or New Year.

If your customers will resonate with the idea of a Boxing Day sale, let’s look at some coupon marketing strategy ideas.

2. Use Boxing Day Promo Codes

Online shopping is popular over the holidays, and people much prefer to bag a bargain from home rather than queue outside retailers in the early hours of the morning.

Many of the strategies I’m going to talk about center on promo codes or coupons.

Coupon codes provide a fast, effective way to roll out a discount. You can set up coupons in advance and schedule them to run on specific days. No need to spend Christmas Day setting up your sale when you’d rather be relaxing!

For small businesses without a complex eCommerce platform, the WPForms Coupons addon is a good solution. It lets you create coupons in advance and control who can use them and which payment forms they apply to.

In the backend, you can define the name, the code, and the type of discount to apply. And right underneath that, you can set the dates you want that coupon to be active.

Now you can add that coupon to any payment forms you’ve created.

To prevent misuse, you can also add a coupon code disclaimer so customers understand your terms and conditions. For example, you might want to mention that the code is only valid on Boxing Day.

And that’s it! Now you have a fully automated coupon code campaign so you can run Black Friday sales while you finish tucking in to the turkey.

The Coupons addon is available with WPForms Pro, which includes a ton of helpful tools to help you grow your business.

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Need some more inspiration?

Boxing Day Coupon Code Ideas

If you use WPForms to create coupons, you have the freedom to create randomly generated codes or entirely bespoke ones. Bespoke codes are really fun when you’re running a seasonal sale:

ENDOFSEASON

Boxing Day is associated with the end-of-season sales that allow retailers to make space for new stock. End-of-season sales also carry a reputation for being more exciting because the discounts are larger.

TURKEYSANDWICH

A traditional Christmas dinner in the UK includes turkey, much like the US Thanksgiving dinner. That means Boxing Day is when the leftovers need to be eaten up!

BARGAINBUY

Everyone loves to save money, and right after Christmas, saving money is more important. Emphasize that this sale includes the biggest bargains of the year with a bespoke coupon code to match. 

LEFTOVERS

Got stuffing and parsnips left over? (Same.) This code will resonate with anyone who’s still clearing their plate from the day before.

EXTRAPRESENT

As a kid, did you ever find a gift under the tree that your parents had forgotten about? Everyone loves the idea of getting one more treat before the festive season ends.

This campaign from a takeaway delivery company is centered on the ideas of treats and might give you some more inspiration:

This part of the holiday season is about fun and family, so you have the perfect opportunity to get creative with coupon codes and marketing ideas.

3. Encourage FOMO After Christmas

It’s normal for retailers to experience huge crowds on Boxing Day. Some shoppers save up all year to bag the biggest discounts.

Why? The Fear of Missing Out!

FOMO is a technique that generates excitement around a sale. By limiting your deal, you can get customers invested in taking part while prices are low. As you can see in these digital marketing statistics, FOMO can be a powerful motivator!

The Oodie used FOMO to great effect for its Black Friday 2023 sale. It advertised a limited number of products for just £1. All 2,500 items sold out within two minutes, and the deal even made headlines.

While your sale might not go viral, FOMO is an incredibly powerful strategy, and it’s easy for any business to try by limiting the number of times a coupon can be used.

Here’s another example:

In WPForms, you can edit any coupon and set the Max uses. This will limit the discount to a certain number of orders.

Once your coupon is ready, get the FOMO going by distributing it via email, social media, or in a popup.

OptinMonster is perfect for creating a quick popup with a coupon code inside it:

A one-day holiday is a perfect opportunity to add countdown timers to campaigns, too. This is a really great way to make it clear that your sale is time-limited:

Remember: the deeper your discount, the more likely you’ll create a sense of urgency. Customers know that great deals sell out quickly, so using FOMO is perfect for Boxing Day marketing campaigns.

Check out this guide to the best FOMO plugins from our friends at IsItWP.

4. Run a Giveaway

Boxing Day can be a tough time to run a sale. How do you encourage people to spend right after they’ve purchased a ton of expensive gifts?

Sometimes viral sharing can promote your sale beyond its usual audience.

At WPForms, we ran a giveaway in 2023 to promote our Black Friday sale and it was a huge success. We broke the record for the highest number of entries (and entrants) compared to any previous giveaway!

Pick something in high demand over Christmas and run a giveaway that extends until Boxing Day. This gives people a chance to get the must-have item and gives your brand a chance to get some viral traffic while your sale is running.

We use RafflePress for our giveaways, and we love it because it’s easy to add different ‘actions’, so you can reward people with entries based on what you want them to do.

RafflePress also picks a random winner for you, so you don’t have to worry about choosing who gets the prize.

We’ve written a review of RafflePress so you can see how it can support your marketing campaigns.

5. Use Personalized Discounts

You’ll have more success with your marketing campaigns if you tailor them to what people as individuals. Personalized discounts and coupons make this easy.

Personalized coupon codes allow you to target specific customers with big discounts that will encourage repeat purchases.

This also makes it easy to give existing customers a reason to spend again. You can even send them a thank you email with their code to thank them for their loyalty.

WPForms makes it easy to run a Boxing Day coupon offer for loyal customers and a separate one for brand-new shoppers. This can let you tailor the discount amount according to the audience that is most valuable to your business.

Don’t forget: this is the time of year when people are willing to treat themselves.

Personalized codes can make people feel special… and you might tempt buyers to purchase what they really wanted for Christmas, but didn’t get:

6. Try Email Marketing Campaigns

Email campaigns typically work well when you can tie them into a holiday or event.

Giving your campaign a theme provides many opportunities to get creative with your subject lines, include images, and create email copy that resonates with your audience.

Here’s another tasteful example from Grind Coffee:

And one from La Redoute, which leans into the idea of shopping from your sofa:

On any busy sale day, subject lines are crucial. You can use seasonal puns and emojis to stand out from the crowd.

ChatGPT is great for generating subject line ideas that stand out. You can use the free version to conjure up some quick subject line ideas. Try this prompt:

Act like an expert marketer. Create 5 subject lines for a Boxing Day sale email for my boutique clothing store. Include seasonal words in your subject line. Also, include an emoji with each one.

Here’s what ChatGPT said in response:

The boxing glove 🥊 might be a little too literal, but there are a few we could work with there!

Pro Tip: You can get ahead by scheduling Boxing Day emails in advance so you don’t have to work over the festive week. If you do this, pay attention to your email marketing provider’s timezone and compare it with the timezone on your server. Ensure your sale is live and your coupons are working when your emails are going to be sent out.

7. Extend Black Friday Sales into Boxing Day

Some retailers struggle with running a Boxing Day marketing campaign so close to Black Friday. However, there are ways you can merge them into one.

Here are some ideas to get you started:

Option A: Market Boxing Day as an extension of Black Friday.

This can work well by giving people a ‘second chance to buy’. Ruggable used this to continue its Black Friday and Cyber Monday discounts through to December:

Option B: Extend your sale forward to New Year.

This approach allows you to capitalize on the week between Christmas and New Year. Some retailers even refer to this as ‘Boxing Week’.

8. Retarget Customers With Social Media Ads

Some customers may have browsed your site before Boxing Day looking for coupon codes or special deals. This is an ideal opportunity to try retargeting.

Retargeting means that you run ads to customers who already visited your site. Since they showed an interest in what you sell, you’re more likely to be able to bring them back for a second look.

If you have a Boxing Day coupon code deal running, that could be all the incentive they need to make a purchase on the second visit.

Retargeted ads like this are easy to run, but they can be expensive. Small businesses don’t always have the money to run ads that won’t convert. Check out these retargeting best practices to boost conversations and ensure you don’t overspend on social media ads.

9. Use Push Notifications With Coupons

Push notifications are a great alternative to email marketing campaigns. They’re easy to set up and send, and the big benefit is that they get your offers right in front of customers when they’re using their phones — perfect for the holiday season.

The notifications I shared below came from specific apps, but you can send the same type of notifications via a customer’s web browser.

One thing you will need is preparation time. Push notifications require an audience that has opted in, like email. So you’ll need to plan ahead and get some push notification subscribers before your sale starts.

That means you’ll need to integrate a service like PushEngage and start to collect subscriptions over the summer months in preparation for the sale season.

• PushEngage is great because it lets you send push notifications from your WordPress site. We’ve got a PushEngage review that explains more about how this works.
• Check out this article to see how MyDeals Australia used push notifications to increase revenue by 20%.

10. Compare Black Friday vs Boxing Day Results

It’s crucial to keep an eye on your sale metrics. After each sale, there will be lessons to be learned from next year. And over the holidays, you have an ideal holiday to directly compare the 2 biggest sales of the year: Black Friday vs Boxing Day.

If you sell toys, technology, and seasonal decorations, you may find that Black Friday was the most successful time to run a promotion. If you sell home furnishings and clothing, a Boxing Day sale might yield better results for you.

According to Salesforce, small businesses should aim to spend around 15% of their on promotion and marketing each year, so you’ll want to make sure you’re getting a return on your investment.

WPForms makes it easy to track sales and even see which coupons were most successful:

Comment and let us know how your sale went — and how you’ll prepare for Boxing Day in 2024.

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FAQs on Boxing Day Marketing

Boxing Day isn’t common everywhere, so you may have more questions. Here are some answers!

🎄 Where Does the Name Boxing Day Come From?

Boxing Day was traditionally the day wealthy homeowners would give their housekeepers or servants gifts. Over time, the holiday was exported from the UK to other countries, mainly those in the Commonwealth.

The phrase ‘Christmas box’ still exists in some parts of the UK, but is now considered old-fashioned. It’s used to refer to a box of Christmas presents given to family members.

🎅 Which Countries Recognize Boxing Day?

Boxing Day is also recognized in Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong, Ireland, Canada, some European countries, and countries that are (or were) members of the Commonwealth.

Not all of these countries recognize Boxing Day as a day for retailers to run sales. In some countries, it’s simply an extra public holiday.

Boxing Day is also not typically celebrated in the US. This chart from Google Trends shows the searches for Boxing Day, with the blue line representing the UK and the red line representing the US:

Despite the lack of recognition in the US, retailers sometimes run sales after Christmas under a different name.

It’s a good idea to understand where your audience is before developing a marketing plan so you can target seasonal offers accordingly.

🦃 Is Boxing Day Bigger Than Black Friday?

No. Boxing Day is not celebrated in the US, so Black Friday is a bigger event globally.

In some countries, these sales have started to feed into each other. Sometimes, you’ll see a sale start with Black Friday and end on Boxing Day, or a Boxing Day sale that is linked to discounts that were offered in November.

According to figures reported by Reuters, Boxing Day sales in the UK declined after the Covid pandemic. The rise in Black Friday sales in the UK is likely to have played a part in suppressing Boxing Day sales, but there’s still good reason for small businesses to run offers in the week after Christmas.

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Next, Get More Payment Form Conversions

Now you’ve mastered Boxing Day marketing and you have ideas for seasonal sales, it’s time to boost conversions on your payment forms all year round:

• Learn how to track form conversions so you know which payment forms are making money for your business.
• Get recurring payments as an additional revenue stream.

Ready to build your form? Get started today with the easiest WordPress form builder plugin. WPForms Pro includes lots of free templates and offers a 14-day money-back guarantee.

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