Reporting on sales or service performance on a smaller scale using zip or postal codes is important for many organisations such as retail stores, real estate agencies and restaurant franchises. When faced with reams of data points in a spreadsheet, it can be difficult and time consuming to present this information in a way that will show the overall performance of your market while allowing everyone to understand and derive insight from it easily.
Postcode Heat Maps use colour to reveal different levels of intensity - for example, the number of customers and sales revenue within a certain postcode area. They are a great way to provide an overview of your market using an interactive map.
With eSpatial, you can quickly create powerful postal code heat maps that chart customer, sales and geographic data to highlight intensities within a specific postcode area.
Creating a Heat Map With Postal Codes
Manually sifting through your database to create a postcode map chart in an Excel or Google sheet can take hours, and it's even more difficult to visualise.
Instead eSpatial's mapping software enables effortless heat map generation, allowing you to zoom in on specific postcode areas for a highly targeted sales approach. Locate dense pockets of customers and every high-performing sales region, and examine them by their unique postal codes. With multiple colour options, it's easy to see where your efforts are best spent.
The mapping process is simple:
- First, upload your customer and sales information from virtually any data source.
- Next, use location data to draw the boundaries of your geographic heat map.
- From there, you can begin analysing the region for areas of high density.
- Once you have your points and boundaries selected, combine them to generate your Postcode Heat Map.
- Finally, you can view your heat map and what each colour represents. If you need to, you can always change the default colour range in the styling options.
Why Use Postcode Mapping Software?
As we mentioned above, many of the customers who use postcode mapping software work in retail, real estate or franchising. This is because Postcode Heat Maps allow them to get a more granular view of their sales or service performance than countries, states or counties would allow.
Here are a few ways you can use Postcode Heat Maps when analysing performance, identifying opportunities for expansion or planning targeted direct mail drops:
- Identify customer and sales rep clusters to gain an overview of the market landscape.
- Determine regional customer volume to enhance distribution logistics.
- Spot gaps and trends by neighbourhood to quickly investigate issues and intervene.
- Visualise areas of opportunity for potential expansion or marketing campaigns.
With Postcode Heat Maps, you get highly detailed views that provide actionable insights into the various regions you serve. But what does this look like in action?
Postcode Heat Maps in Action
Postcode Heat Maps are an incredible visualisation and planning tool, offering sales teams a transparent window into their operations. Below is an example of a Coffee Shop Supplier and how they use eSpatial Postcode Heat Maps to identify opportunities for new business:
-
Carry out a postal code heat map of current customers. You can see that, currently, this business only focuses on areas close to Liverpool City.
- Clear the regional heat map analysis.
- Use eSpatial’s Business Search tool to identify more coffee shop buildings in the surrounding areas.
-
Run another regional heat map analysis to identify areas with high density of coffee shops.
- Filter your data to the postcode area(s) with the highest densities.
- Export that list. This will serve as a clear list of postcodes and businesses that you can hand your sales team or marketing team to target.
Now that you have your postcode level information, you’re ready to become highly targeted and more effective in your sales and marketing. But there are still a large number of other applications of postcode heat mapping we haven’t touched on. If you want more ideas about how postcode mapping can be valuable for your business, take a look through our recent blogs.
Frequently Asked Questions
My Team is Constantly Wrestling With Postcode Data in Excel, and Trying to Manually Color-code It to Find Insights Takes Forever. How is a Heat Map Fundamentally Faster at Showing Me Where Our Real Opportunities Are?
A heat map is faster because it instantly visualizes your raw postcode data, revealing the patterns and concentrations you can't see in a spreadsheet. Instead of spending hours manipulating rows and columns, our tool transforms your data into a clear, color-coded map in minutes. This allows you to immediately spot high-value customer clusters, identify underserved areas, and make smarter, data-backed decisions about where to focus your sales and marketing efforts 95% faster than with manual methods.
I Have a List of Thousands of Postcodes for a New Direct Mail Campaign, but I Have No Idea Which Ones Are Most Valuable. How Can I Use a Heat Map to Target My Budget More Effectively?
You can use a heat map to instantly identify and prioritize the postcodes with the highest concentration of your ideal customers. Simply upload your customer data alongside your target postcode list. The heat map will visually highlight the "hotspots" where your best customers are clustered, allowing you to focus your marketing spend on the areas with the highest potential for return and avoid wasting budget on less promising postcodes.
We're Planning a Major Territory Realignment, and I Need to Understand How Our Customer Accounts Are Distributed Across Hundreds of Postcodes. How Can Your Tool Help Me See This Clearly so I Can Create Balanced Territories?
Our tool helps by plotting your customer accounts and sales data onto an interactive map, giving you an immediate visual understanding of account distribution and sales density by postcode. This clarity allows you to move beyond guesswork and draw new territory boundaries based on actual data. You can ensure each territory has an equitable distribution of high-value accounts, which helps prevent rep burnout and increases the likelihood of hitting sales quotas.
I Need to Show My Sales Team Where Our Biggest Gaps in the Market Are, but a Spreadsheet Just Shows a List of Postcodes We Aren't In. How Does a Heat Map Make This Analysis More Impactful?
A heat map makes the analysis more impactful by visually exposing the gaps and "white space" in your market right next to areas of high customer density. Instead of just seeing a list, your team can see a map showing a lucrative, high-performing territory right beside a neighboring postcode area with zero customers. This provides undeniable visual proof of where your biggest growth opportunities lie and helps focus expansion efforts effectively.
Our Data is Split Between Our CRM and Multiple Spreadsheets, Making It a Nightmare to Get a Single View of Performance. How Does eSpatial Handle Importing Data From Different Sources to Create One Heat Map?
eSpatial is designed to easily consolidate your data by allowing you to upload multiple datasets from various sources, including direct CRM integration and spreadsheet uploads, into a single map view. We understand that your data doesn't live in one place. Our platform simplifies the process, enabling you to layer, for example, your Salesforce data with a spreadsheet of new market postcodes to create a unified, comprehensive heat map that tells the whole story.
I've Tried Using the Map Feature in Our Bi Tool Before, and It Was Clunky and Didn't Give Me the Detail I Needed. How is a Dedicated Heat Mapping Tool Like eSpatial Any Different?
Unlike basic BI maps, eSpatial provides deeper, more specific spatial analysis tools designed for sales, marketing, and operations professionals. While BI tools are great for dashboards, they lack the specific functionality for actions like analyzing market penetration by postcode, identifying territory white space, or easily editing sales boundaries. eSpatial is built to do exactly that, turning your location data from a simple visualization into an actionable strategic asset.
I'm Not a Data Scientist, and I'm Worried That This Will Be Too Complicated for Me to Use or That I'll Need a Lot of Training. How Quickly Can Someone on My Team Get up and Running?
You can go from uploading your spreadsheet to seeing your first postcode heat map in under five minutes. Our platform was designed specifically for business users, not technical experts. The interface is intuitive and user-friendly, and we back it up with a world-class customer support team who are experts in helping people just like you solve their business challenges with maps.
My Boss Will See This as Just Another "nice-to-have" Analytics Tool. How Can I Justify the ROI of Postcode Heat Mapping to Prove It's a Must-have Investment?
You can justify the ROI by showing how it directly impacts revenue and efficiency, for instance, by identifying underserved markets to increase sales by up to 12% or by optimizing marketing campaigns to cut wasted spend. This isn't just about making prettier reports; it's about enabling smarter business decisions. By visualizing your data, you can build a clear business case showing how focusing on high-potential postcode areas improves sales productivity, increases marketing campaign effectiveness, and lowers customer acquisition costs for a clear and measurable return.