A restaurant promo banner is the strip at the top of your store page that says "Diwali Thali ₹349, order by 6 pm" before the customer has scrolled to a single menu item. It is the online version of the standee outside your door, and like the standee it needs no designer: a phone photo of the dish, four words of text, and a date to take it down. This post is about using that banner for festival specials, from what to put on it to how it pairs with a coupon and a campaign.
The walkthrough assumes you already have a store page where customers order. If you do not, the storefront itself is covered in your Tezzu storefront and web menu.
What a banner does that a WhatsApp message cannot
A campaign message reaches the customers you send it to, once, at the time you send it. A banner reaches every customer who opens your store page, including the ones who found you on Instagram today and have never been messaged, and it stays there until you take it down. The two work together: the message brings people to the page, and the banner reminds them why they came.
The banner also sits where the decision is made. A customer reading "Navratri fasting thali ₹199" at the top of the menu and then seeing it as the first item is far more likely to order it than one who saw the offer in a group chat two days ago. It is the cheapest piece of marketing you have, because you control it completely, and it is the first thing a new customer sees.
Five banners worth running through the year
Most restaurants need no more than one banner at a time and five or six changes a year. A sample calendar for a North Indian family restaurant:
| Occasion | Banner text | Offer behind it | Run dates |
|---|---|---|---|
| Diwali | Diwali Special Thali ₹349, pre-order for the 20th | Scheduled orders, paid online | Ten days before, to the day |
| Navratri | Vrat Thali ₹199, all nine days | Fasting menu category, scheduled by day | Nine days |
| IPL evenings | Match Night Combo ₹499 for two | Combo item, 7 pm to 11 pm only | Season |
| Monsoon | Pakora and Chai Box ₹149 | Bundle, free delivery above ₹399 | July to August |
| New customers | ₹60 off your first order, no code needed | Auto-apply first-order coupon | Whenever no festival is on |
The text column is the whole design brief. Dish, price, and one condition if there is one. If a banner needs a second line to explain itself, the offer is too complicated. The full year of occasions, with campaign ideas for each, is in the 52-week restaurant marketing calendar.
Making the banner without a designer
A banner is a wide image with a few words on it. Three rules get you a good one in ten minutes on a phone.
Photograph the dish in daylight. Near a window, on a plain plate, from slightly above. A real photo of your thali beats a stock image of someone else's, and customers can tell the difference.
Put the text where the food is not. Use any free phone design app to add the dish name and price in large plain type on the emptier side of the photo. White or yellow text on a darker area reads on every screen. Skip decorative fonts; they are unreadable at phone width.
Keep it wide and keep it short. A landscape image, around three times as wide as it is tall, fits a banner slot without cropping. Four to eight words, one price. If you have a second message, make a second banner later rather than crowding this one.
Save it, and you have a festival banner that cost nothing and looks like yours. Festival-specific ideas for sweets, gift boxes and restaurant specials are in Diwali marketing ideas for restaurants and sweet shops.
What this looks like on Tezzu
On Tezzu, promo banners are managed from the dashboard and appear at the top of your store page at tezzu.in/store/your-name, which is the page customers reach from your Instagram bio, your Google listing, a printed QR code or the web menu link in a WhatsApp chat. You upload the image, give the banner a name for your own reference, and switch it on. It is live on the store page straight away, and it comes down with the same switch.
Here is the Diwali example end to end. On the 10th you add a "Diwali Special Thali" item at ₹349 to the menu, available as a scheduled order for the festival day. You upload the banner with the same words and price. You create a coupon, ₹50 off orders above ₹599, set to auto-apply so nobody types a code, valid until the festival. Then you send a WhatsApp campaign to last year's Diwali customers with the store link; the steps for that are in sending your first WhatsApp campaign from Tezzu.
A customer taps the link, sees the banner, scrolls to the thali, adds two, sees the ₹50 come off at checkout because the auto-apply coupon matched, and pays ₹648 by UPI. The order lands in your dashboard with the festival date on it and the staff app rings. None of that needed a developer or a designer.
When no festival is running, the same slot can carry a standing message such as the first-order offer, which is where the banner and the coupon work together best; that pairing is covered in auto-apply coupons for first orders. The banner feature sits alongside the menu, coupons, scheduled orders and campaigns on the features page.
Put your next special at the top of the page
Upload a banner, add the dish, and let the store page sell it to everyone who opens it. Every plan starts with a 7-day free trial, then ₹10 per order and no commission.
Start your free 7-day trialThe rupee maths of a festival banner
Take the Diwali thali at ₹349 with a food and packaging cost of ₹150. Suppose that over the ten days, 120 customers who open the store page order it, and 40 of those orders are pairs that cross the ₹599 coupon threshold.
- Revenue: 160 thalis at ₹349 is ₹55,840.
- Coupon cost: 40 orders at ₹50 is ₹2,000.
- Tezzu per-order fee: 120 orders at ₹10 is ₹1,200.
- Food and packaging: 160 at ₹150 is ₹24,000.
- Left before delivery and staff: ₹28,640.
The banner itself cost nothing. The campaign that sent people to the page cost whatever you spent from the campaign wallet, which for a few hundred messages is a small fraction of the ₹2,000 you spent on the coupon. These are illustrative numbers to show how the pieces add up; your own volumes will come from your dashboard after the first festival you run this way.
Measuring whether the banner worked
You will not get a click count on a banner, and you do not need one. The dashboard shows orders and revenue for the dates the banner ran, and each order shows whether the coupon applied. Compare the ten festival days with the ten before them. If the special sold and the overall order count rose, the banner and campaign did their job; if the special sold but the count stayed flat, customers swapped their usual order for the special, which tells you to price the next one higher.
Keep a note of each banner's dates and results in the same place you plan the next one. After a year you have your own calendar of what sells, built from your own orders rather than anyone's advice.
Frequently asked questions
What should a restaurant promo banner say?
The dish, the price and at most one condition: "Diwali Thali ₹349, pre-order for the 20th". If the banner needs a second line to explain the offer, the offer is too complicated for a banner. Use a real photo of the dish and large plain text, and change the banner when the occasion ends.
How do I make a banner for my online menu without a designer?
Photograph the dish in daylight on a plain plate, open any free phone design app, add the dish name and price in large plain type on the emptier part of the photo, and export it as a wide landscape image. Ten minutes is enough. Upload it to your store page from your ordering dashboard.
Can I run a banner and a coupon together?
Yes, and it is the best use of both. The banner announces the offer to everyone who opens the store page; an auto-apply coupon delivers it at checkout without a code. Set the coupon's minimum order and end date to match the banner, and take both down together when the festival ends.
How often should I change the store page banner?
Whenever there is something to say and never for its own sake. Five or six changes a year, tied to festivals, seasons and a standing new-customer offer in between, is plenty. A banner that never changes becomes invisible to regulars, and one that changes weekly is more work than it returns.