Built on the platform
Lightning + SLDS, inside the existing Loyalty Management data model. No bespoke UI framework.
© UX Case Study · Promotion Calendar · Loyalty Cloud · Salesforce
LoyaltyPromotionCalendar
A unified promotions calendar that lets teams plan, schedule, and visualize loyalty campaigns, spot coverage gaps and overlaps, turning scattered campaigns into a clear coordinated view.
The Problem
Promotions lived in lists, not on a timeline
Loyalty teams were running dozens of overlapping promotions with no way to see them together over time.
Every promotion was a record with a start and end date, but planning happened in spreadsheets and side conversations. Managers could not tell, at a glance, where two offers collided, where a market had no coverage, or how a season actually looked. The result was accidental overlaps, quiet gaps, and last-minute firefighting.
Design question
How might we give loyalty teams a single, time-based view to plan and coordinate every promotion, so they can catch gaps and overlaps before launch, not after?
Constraints & guardrails
One source of truth
Visualize existing promotion records; any edit must write back safely to live data.
Built to scale
A program can hold hundreds of promotions across markets and tiers, so the view must stay legible and fast.
Persona
Loyalty Program Admin
Primary user
John Smith
Loyalty Program Admin
“I want to tailor a targeted promotions strategy, so I can acquire customers, grow their engagement and Lifetime Value, and retain their business.”
Jobs to be done
Visualize promotions to identify coverage and gaps based on customizable views.
Take in-screen actions on promotions such as create/edit, performance scorecard review, and comparisons.
Integrate easily through upload/download features to keep the visualization accurate and up to date.
Pain points
What promotions are running when, to maximise coverage and identify overlaps?
Which promotions should be extended, created, or discontinued?
How can promotions from other systems be visualized and collaborated on by all stakeholders in one place?
Summary
Scope of the Project
Design the Loyalty Promotion Calendar: a single, centralized Gantt-style view of every promotion and event in a loyalty program, with enough action built into the view that admins can create, extend, or curtail a promotion without leaving it. Scope covered from jobs-to-be-done and feature prioritization through secondary research on four existing Salesforce and competitor calendars, to a build-versus-reuse recommendation.
Centralized visualization
Calendar-based Gantt view of promotions and events, grouped and filtered by product, geography, and customer segment, with weekly, monthly, yearly, and custom date ranges. Multiple preconfigured views, hierarchical aggregation, and Gantt bar color by status or product category.
Overlap and gap detection
Over-run display surfaces promotions and events scheduled on top of each other, so collisions and white space are visible in the view rather than discovered after launch.
In-calendar actions
Create a promotion in one click from the view, and edit an existing one to extend or curtail its end date. The data model supports multiple promotion and event types.
Performance and integration
Simple performance indicators per promotion (ROI, budget, percent completion to goal), plus email, export, and import through Excel, CSV, and links so promotions built in other systems appear on the same timeline.
Research and Analysis
Three of the four job clusters looked like problems other Salesforce teams had already solved, so before committing to a build I benchmarked every calendar we could borrow from against the same jobs-to-be-done and the same functional checklist.
TPM Promotion Calendar
Retail constructs already modeled on the TPM Promotion object: promotions, ROI, products, customer segments, geographies. Create in the calendar view, open the account plan through P&L, and filter by custom date, partner, product, category, promotion phase, and type.
FSL Dispatcher Console
Configurable on any Core object, likely needing code. Custom calendar views, Y-axis grouping across any two objects, attributes on the resource, category filtering, and resource phase. Hover detail was slated for 244.
Scheduler
Resource against week-of-month, with appointment slots and shifts separated by color, the same two-object grouping, attributes on hover, filtering, and a confirmed or not-confirmed phase.
Dynamics 365 Marketing
The competitor benchmark for functional parity: Gantt view, group by, full time dimensions, over-run display, import and export, and hover detail with key metrics.
| Functionality | TPM | FSL | Scheduler | Dynamics |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Calendar-based Gantt view | Yes | Yes | No | Yes |
| Change Group By view | Yes | Yes | No | Yes |
| Weekly, monthly, yearly, custom ranges | Yes | Yes | Daily, weekly only | Yes |
| Over-run display for overlaps | Yes | No | Yes | Yes |
| Email, export, import | Import only | No | No | Yes |
| Gantt bar color | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Hover to detail with key metrics | Yes | No | Yes | Yes |
| Add and edit on the calendar view | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Overlay against last year | No | No | No | No |
| Collaboration | No | No | No | No |
The finding that shaped the roadmap
Not one product, internal or competitor, supported year-over-year overlay or stakeholder collaboration. Both moved to 244 as roadmap work rather than capability we could borrow.
Three options, weighed
Early Versions
From rough timelines to a shipped calendar
Four rounds of iteration, each narrowing how much of a program a single timeline could carry before it stopped being readable. Because the view leans so heavily on colour and iconography to carry status, every round was vetted with the Accessibility team, so that nothing in the calendar depends on colour alone.
Final Version
Promotion
Calendar
- Header with description, horizon selector, and New.
- Filter and Group By selectors.
- Simple description and progress tracking, carried by color.
- Clicking a running promotion opens a card with its details: dates, transaction journal type and reward, current liability and remaining balance, objective, and owner, with a link through to the full record.
Moving the horizon
Date
Date
Picker
- Jump the horizon to any date without leaving the calendar.
- Month and year steppers for moving across a long planning window.
- Today returns to the current horizon in one click.
Changing the horizon
Timeline
Timeline
Zooms
- The Timeline View selector offers week, month, quarter, half-year, and year.
- The year zoom spreads January through December, so seasonal coverage reads at a glance.
- The week zoom drops to Sunday through Saturday, close enough to plan a single week.
- The same records are rescaled rather than refiltered, so nothing leaves the view.
Regrouping the timeline
Promotions by
Promotions by
different Groupings
- Every promotion starts on one flat timeline, with View By set to All Promotions.
- Opening View By offers product and category, region, fulfillment action, and promotion type.
- Selecting Promotions by Region regroups the same records into region groups, each with its own count.
- Coverage and gaps can then be read per market rather than across the whole program.
Narrowing the view
Filters
- The filter icon opens a panel beside the timeline, so the calendar never leaves the screen.
- Filter on event and event type, promotion type, fulfillment action, campaign, and region.
- Selections appear as removable chips, and Reset clears the whole set in one action.
- Applying them narrows the timeline to the matching promotions, here APAC and EMEA only.
Planning around the calendar
Events
- Events sit in a band above the timeline, so promotions can be planned around retail moments.
- The band expands to every event in the horizon, here NTO Anniversary, Army Day, Youth Festival, Alaska Week, and Kindness Week.
- Each event also shades its own column down the full grid, so an overlap with a promotion is visible in place.
- Hovering a shaded column names the events falling on those dates, including where several coincide.
Behind the Design
Design decisions worth calling out
01
Reuse over building a fourth calendar
TPM already covered almost every function on the checklist, so reuse beat a fourth build. The release went to the two gaps no product had.
02
One timeline, regrouped on demand
One flat timeline that View By regroups, rather than a saved view per stakeholder. Hundreds of promotions stay legible, and coverage reads per market.
03
Nothing carried by colour alone
Colour carries status, overlap, and events, so every round was vetted with the Accessibility team. Bars also carry labels, groups carry counts, and hover names the event.
Outcome
Promotion Calendar
-
0 → 1
designed the product from conceptualization all the way through to GA
-
3 Calendars
already in Salesforce, audited feature by feature, so reuse beat building a fourth
-
0 Duplicate
offers, because the calendar surfaces promotions already running before a new one is built
-
350+ Brands
with notable early adopters in 2023 including IHG, Mecca, and Marriott Bonvoy