Boxing Day: Complete Guide to the Perfect SMS

It’s December 17. You are most probably absorbed in thinking about your Christmas sales, and for a good reason – this is the most profitable period of the year for eCommerce.

But try not to get too preoccupied with the Christmas jingles and forget what happens right after: Boxing Day and the January sales!

That’s why we are here – to talk Boxing Day. December 26 is just as monumental a day as Christmas itself, some people even refer to it as the second Black Friday.

Nowadays, Boxing day has become a synonym for post-Christmas laziness, watching sports on TV, cold turkey… and bed-based online shopping. Oh, and rich marketing puns about boxing – the sport.

Being primarily an online holiday, Boxing Day is the perfect chance for eCommerce merchants to reach their customers via SMS. Let’s not forget that SMS has the stunning 98% open rates and response time of 30 seconds. (

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Do you know how to set up SMS campaigns that will keep conversion rates high even after the Christmas craze? We do. And we are about to give you the keys you need to fuel up your tank and boost turnover. 

Since this is a text message, not email or any other form of messaging, you don’t have a subject line to grab your recipients’ attention with.

But with SMS you have something even more powerful – visuals.

Since Boxing Day is a rather “lazy” retail holiday, your visuals should also be easy on the eyes. Make them simplistic, but with bold colors, big letters and be straightforward with what you are offering.

Make your Boxing Day SMS as quick to read as an Ali punch. (we just had to have a boxing match metaphor).

Like we already said – this is the day when people are unwinding from all the holiday cheer and the last thing they need is some long and complicated text message, that involves more than 1 tap of a button.

160 symbols, with a strong call-to-action and a juicy discount is not only light on your budget, but will help customers recover from the gifting fatigue and will bring them back into shopping mood. See more

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For awhile now, this day has been claimed to be the time for people to indulge in some “Me” shopping. After all, they spent all month trying to find the perfect gift for their loved ones and now need to pamper themselves a bit.

Boxing Day is an excellent occasion for stores to dust off their top-shelf items and promote them. Even if you decide not to be too generous with your discounts, careful wording, emphasizing the exclusivity of the item, how “luxurious”, “deluxe”, “rich” it is, and how much your customer deserves to “spoiled” themselves, to be “special-treated”, “catered for” etc., will still win you big. 

Time for a Trivia break: the shortest boxing match in history lasted 20 seconds.

Now, that’s way too short but we do advise you to advertise your Boxing Day sales as Flash sales that will only last 24 hours and cover only a very limited number of items. You’ve already heard about the power of urgency but on days like Boxing Day, when people are looking to score one last great purchase before the end of the year, its strength is undeniable.

Running a flash sale is a great chance to generate major sales momentum, particularly when combined with social media and other forms of marketing.

Use words like “hurry up”, “act fast”, “grab now”, “snag them”, “last chance”, “today only”, “you’ve got one hour” etc. 

Another fun fact for you: the official name of boxing is not really boxing, it’s pugilism.

While you might not win your customers over with “fun” facts like this Wikipedia-extracted one, you will definitely get a smile (and a sale) from using humor and common sense.

Why common sense? Because Boxing Day in the UK is also known as the gift-returning day and that is an easy icebreaker. “Didn’t get what you wanted for Christmas” – don’t worry, we have it, and you can get it today at an awesome price.

Boxing Day has the privilege to be a couple of days before New Year’s Eve – the time for self-retrospect and grand promises.

Being so, there is no better time to nudge your customer’s desire to enter 2021 in the best style… or armed up with the newest gadgets… or equipped with the most awesome kitchen utensils.

Make sure that FOMO (fear of missing out) is what you emphasize in your text message.  They only have a couple of days to make a complete makeover of themselves (with the help of your products)… and they should know it.

Use expressions like “while stocks last”, “merchandise is running low”, “ends in…”, “beat the clock”, “don’t miss out”, “limited number of items” etc. 

It’s a lazy day. Give your customers some time to make up their mind and allow them to go back to their order if they didn’t check out right away.

Set up an abandoned cart flow that will remind them they have items left behind behind and will prompt them to take advantage of your offers. 

Your first abandoned cart you should fire up 1 hour after a checkout was abandoned. This can be a simple reminder – just to make sure your customers aren’t paying more attention to the movie on TV than your offers. Upgrade it with a free shipping treat to increase chances of conversion – after all, shipping costs are one of the most common reasons for cart abandonment.