Chances are, you’ve seen table tents at most of the restaurants you’ve dined at. Displaying these familiar, colorful pop-up cards is one of the easiest ways to advertise and boost profits within your restaurant. 

Whether you’re promoting a special, announcing an event, or simply hoping to upsell some of your inventory, a well-designed table tent (like these options from MustHaveMenus) can always help. Read further for some creative ways to use these classic tools! 

1. Showcase Your Drinks

Soft drinks and alcoholic beverages are some of the most profitable items a restaurant can sell. As such, restauranteurs are always looking for savvy ways to boost bar sales. Displaying an eye-catching table tent that displays your most impressive, enticing drinks is a wonderfully easy way to do just that. 

While a table tent might work to entice customers to order drinks that they weren’t originally planning to order, it can also work to persuade customers to keep ordering drinks. Typically, servers remove menus from customers’ tables after they order. Leaving a drink menu right on the table reminds customers that they’re free to keep ordering drinks as they please, and eliminates the possibility of anyone not ordering drinks simply because they don’t know what’s on the menu.

3. Entice With Desserts

The whole taking-away-menus-after-ordering practice can also have a negative impact on how frequently customers order desserts. Even if you have a separate dessert menu, you still leave customers with the power to decline to view it at the end of their meal. The solution? A table tent that displays your dessert menu!

Choose the most tantalizing photos of your most mouthwatering dessert options and display them brightly on a table tent. This way, customers know right from the start what their dessert options are. Rather than letting them fill up on food and shake their heads at the thought of dessert, this method often tempts customers to order dessert way before they’ve even touched their main meal, boosting sales and leaving everything off on a sweet note!

4. Announce Promotions, Specials, or Events

You can display big, bright posters or pay for targeted online ads, but there’s no better way to promote your sales or special events than by advertising them to the people who are most likely to buy — the customers inside your restaurant. Use table tents to remind the customers who already love to eat at your spot about fun upcoming events or limited-time deals.

If you’re running an in-house dinner, drink, or lunch special, a table tent is a way to promote it. Customers who are already dining with you will be delightfully surprised by these specials, and there’ll be no pressure on servers to have to advertise them verbally. 

5. Promote Loyalty 

The best way to build relationships with customers is to help them identify with your brand. Use your table tents to share your brand story or as a sort of “about us” pamphlet. This can help customers feel a more personal connection to your restaurant, which fosters loyalty.

Another way to cultivate a loyal customer base with table tents is to share customer reviews. A few impressive quotes from Yelp or Google can easily be included on your table tent design, reminding customers at your spot just how desirable of a restaurant they’re eating at. Likewise, this is an excellent place to promote loyalty programs. If someone is reading a table tent, they’re already ordering from your restaurant, which makes them the target audience for your loyalty program.

6. Share QR Codes

Though QR codes weren’t invented during the pandemic, the restaurant industry began to rely on them heavily over the last few years. These scannable codes can link to virtually anything — food menus, drink menus, specials, ordering forms, social media pages, websites, and more. 

You can use a table tent solely to display a QR code, or you can simply insert one as an add-on to your other advertisements. Include one near the bottom of the table tent’s design to link to your dinner or dessert menus so that guests can still browse through options even after servers have taken menus from their tables. You could also link to catering menus, your social media pages to encourage guests to follow you or share their pictures of your food, or to feedback forms to get a better feel for what your customers like about your spot.

Table Tents are Your Restaurant’s Best Friend

There are countless forms of advertising available to us today, but the trusty ol’ table tent is always a foolproof option. Whether you’re trying to boost bar sales, attract more people to your events, or receive more reviews, a well-designed table tent can increase profits and help your restaurant overall. With MustHaveMenus, it’ll be easy to design your table tent, leaving the increase in profits to you.