12 Boxing Day marketing contest ideas you can use that punch above their weight
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Boxing Day is the break you take after the unadulterated chaos of Christmas. Highly focused family time along with food and drink in abundance… Boxing Day can be much the same, except it’s a little less intense, nobody is chained to the kitchen because everyone’s eating leftovers, the shops are open, and live sports are on.
As you’d be right to suspect, the name has nothing to do with throwing hands in a squared circle, and actually originated in England as a day for giving boxes of food or gifts to those in need. Fast forward to the 21st century and it’s a day of real commercial significance, with Boxing Day sales offering amazing opportunities for businesses despite coming just a day after Christmas.
Especially in the United Kingdom and other Commonwealth nations, Boxing Day is an opportunity for businesses that’s not to be missed, and as Boxing Day sales account for the day many businesses reopen, right through to New Year’s and the advent of January sales proper, it almost acts as an isolated mini-season in and of itself.
Here are our top Boxing Day contest and marketing game ideas you can use to renew customer focus, and close the show on Q4 in style.
1. The Boxing Day mall dash (Pacman)
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Pacman is unassumingly trying to scoop up savings in the mall on Boxing Day, but it’s never that simple! Our hero is being chased by other shoppers determined to keep all the bargains for themselves. This is where your audience steps in. Help Pacman power up to turn the tide on his pursuers!
Some people love to go to the shops on Boxing Day to see what bargains they can find, and some people hate it, but everyone loves to play Pacman. Merge the two ideas for a Boxing Day-themed marketing game of the arcade classic. Use it as a vehicle to collect customer data, and distribute in store only discount codes to encourage footfall in the gap between Christmas and New Year.
2. Best Boxing Day sandwich recipe contest (Media Contest)
Turkey, stuffing, roasties, bread sauce, pigs in blankets – is there any meal more joyous than Christmas dinner? Unless you’re utterly depraved, the answer is a firm, “No,” but Christmas leftovers going into a Boxing Day sandwich are a close second. It’s not quite as ceremonious, but for pure comfort food you can look forward to all year, they’re a tradition in their own right.
Invite your audience to share their unique takes on the Christmas leftovers sandwich by creating a Photo Contest around it. Invite them to share their recipes in the caption alongside FOMO-inducing pictures of their indulgent creations. Everyone thinks their Christmas leftovers sandwich (or the one their mum makes) is the bee’s knees, because you generally only get to eat your own, so who isn’t going to be amped up to share their creation?
Let the people decide: Make a shortlist of the 10-best entries that have excellent photos and well-written recipes and connect your Photo Contest to a Voting Gallery. Then you can promote the Gallery across social media – remember, it’s beautiful indulgent food that everyone will have an opinion on, so it’s likely to get real traction.
When the votes are counted you can reward the winner, not only with a prize, but by certifying their long held belief: they really do make the best Christmas leftovers sandwich!
3. The big bad quiz of the year (Quiz)
Has your audience been paying attention for the past 12 months? Let’s find out…
Challenge their knowledge retention with a Quiz based around all the major events of the year, and if you’re in a specialist niche, tailor it to your specific industry. If you run a sporting goods store, base it on sports, if you’re a cinema, base it on the movies, or tie it to any theme you see fit. Think of it like an isolated round of a pub quiz…
4. Ideal Boxing Day bargain matchmaker (Product Recommendation Quiz)
With every business and their dog trying to bring the thunder for their Boxing Day sales, use a Product Recommendation Quiz to bring the right offer to the right customer.
Line up your top 5 Boxing Day bargains as possible results, then formulate a series of multiple choice questions, assigning each answer to a different result. Then invite your customers online and instore to play the matchmaker game and save themselves some time fighting through the holiday queues.
5. The big Boxing Day fixture (Football game)
English football takes Boxing Day back to its roots of gratitude and charity by slashing ticket prices and putting on a number of big clashes.
Whether you’re marketing for a football club, or a lot of your demographic are avid fans, customising a Football Game to your own branding and inviting your audience to perform under the lights and test their nerve in a penalty shootout is an ideal way to engage them.
Use it as a vehicle to distribute discount codes and grow your mailing list, or even have a leaderboard and put the top 50 participants into a prize draw. If your audience are fans of the beautiful game, it’ll be on their brains this Boxing Day, so capitalise on the occasion.
6. Boxing Day spin to win (Spin the Wheel)
Encourage footfall in your stores before New Year’s by distributing in store promotional codes through a game of Boxing Day spin to win.
Have a grand one-of-a-kind prize to hang the competition off of and lure in mass participation, then offer all players a 10% discount code to redeem at your bricks and mortar stores – an extra little incentive to get them through the door to get a better feel for all your seasonal offers.
7. The great Boxing Day bargain hunt (Dynamic Path™)
Take the concept of a treasure hunt, but instead of treasure, your audience is hunting for savings.
Invite users to explore your various strategic pages for clues to unlock different levels of mini-games, Quizzes, and instant win contests.
The games keep them entertained and engaged, while they engage with your branded content and copy for longer to find or figure out the passcodes to work through the game.
And what do they receive upon completion of certain levels, or plays of instant win games, or when they finally complete the great Boxing Day bargain hunt? Prizes? A promotional code? Vouchers? An experience? The choice is yours.
Pro tip: Shopping centres can make it phygital so everyone wins. While it’s great to use the strategic pages of your website as the gamified treasure map of your bargain hunt, you could also gamify the physical location of a shopping complex or mall, to encourage users to play through the game at a whole series of shops.
Users could scan a QR code to start the game as they enter a shopping mall, then be guided from store to store, exposing them to highlighted promotions and encouraging them to interact with products and brands.
8. Just the hits: are you still with it? (Music Quiz)
Why not see how on top of the charts your audience is with a branded Music Quiz?
Let them listen to excerpts of the biggest jams from the past 12 months and see if they can name artists, songs, or other trivia questions they could only answer by identifying the music.
9. Best Boxing Day family tradition (Video Contest)
Does dad make you all pull on your hiking boots, drive to the nearest big hill and force you to march to the top to burn off the day before’s excesses? Is there a family kickabout about, or a football game with established teams, rivalries, and an actual trophy exchanged? Do you all put on fancy dress and jump into the freezing sea for a laugh? Or are you sane and just have a group pyjama day?
Whatever people’s family traditions are, every family has one, and they nearly all get live streamed and documented across social media, so why not invite them to share their kookiest, coolest, or most wholesome Boxing Day family traditions with a Video Contest for a shot at winning a prize?
10. Countdown to New Year’s (Advent Calendar)
Put a real spotlight across the whole trading period from Boxing Day to New Year’s Eve with a digital calendar.
Take the Advent Calendar format to create a multi-level experience with a new step unlocking every morning. Engage your audience with a haymaker of a game, experience, or contest, each and every day from December 26 to December 31, giving you multiple opportunities to engage them in your branded experiences and your offerings.
11. Boxing Day Bash-o-rama: Only Accept the Best (Whack a Mole)
Put (virtual) mallets in your target audience’s hands and invite them to start smashing!
The moles become inferior versions of your products, and for each one they smash, they get extra time on the clock to earn more points and climb the leaderboard!
But there’s a twist! Isn’t there always?
Some of your actual product icons will pop-up on the Whack a Mole, and if they accidentally hit them, they’ll lose time on the clock, and lose chances to climb the leaderboard.
How can this work for my brand? This is an ideal online contest if you’re looking to really promote your product as the superior one of its type. The Hoover of vacuums, or the Coke or Pepsi of colas.
Or, maybe you’re a cleaning brand, and the moles are actually germs or dirt, and need to be eradicated by your product? The only limit is imagination.
12. Leftover Feast Frenzy (Match 3)
Turkey, bacon, candies, gingerbread men, green bean casseroles, etc. etc. There’s a heck of a lot leftover on Boxing Day, and still a heck of a lot of feasting to do.
In that tradition, invite your audience to clear their virtual plates by matching 3 or more of the same food items to smash and clear the game grid – just like Candy Crush, but leftovers-themed…
What brands would this work for? Healthy meal-prep brands? Health food brands? Gyms? Vitamin brands? The first day after Christmas is the first day of the “new me” attitude that gets into full force for New Year’s, but this Boxing Day variant can get you ahead of your competitors and tap into that impulse early.
After seeing where they stack in the leaderboard, you can move to an intermediate screen that educates participants on your offering, and then redirect them to your strategic webpage through a CTA button.
Expert advice
Boxing Day is Christmas without the pressure. People are more relaxed, and are actually more likely to engage with businesses, as while it’s not universally business as usual, it signifies a brief return to semi-normality until things kick off on New year’s Eve.
For that final week of the year, there’s an energy and a potency in the air that’s ripe for businesses to capitalise on – significant portions of the population enjoy free time or reduced hours, and as it coincides with a lot of sales, and is a hyper competitive marketplace, gamification is the ideal digital strategy to help your business stand out.
