💡 TL;DR
Heriot-Watt swapped out heavy print and static PDFs for a personalised, digital guide in Vepple to make their Offer Holder Days more connected and student-friendly, and their key RUK audience attendance increased 79% year-on-year.
The Challenge
Recruiting fee-paying Rest of the UK (RUK) students is fiercely competitive for Scottish universities. It’s a massive logistical ask, often requiring prospective students to travel hundreds of miles for a single in-person event.
For Heriot-Watt, they were up against a complex campus layout, a rigid website and a mountain of untrackable print materials.
Every Offer Holder Day triggered the same stressful cycle:
- Last-minute approval loops
- Expensive, print runs that become out of date as soon as they’re printed, and can’t reflect last minute changes
- Event information becoming outdated the moment it is published
To top it off, prospective students struggled to picture what their visit would actually look like. Without that vital digital connection beforehand, many were put off travelling entirely, while others arrived feeling confused or overwhelmed.
The marketing team needed an agile way to manage event content, bringing departments together around a single source of truth while giving students the confidence to step onto campus.
What Heriot-Watt did
For their 2026 Offer Holder Days, Heriot-Watt’s marketing and recruitment teams decided to rethink the experience from the ground up.
Instead of relying on untrackable, costly direct mail and paper booklets, they moved their pre-event content strategy onto Vepple using the On-Campus Events module.
Heriot-Watt designed personalised digital journeys with tailored, subject-level content, while segmenting journeys specifically for Scottish students, versus those from elsewhere in the UK.
Students weren’t bombarded with generic info, they only saw what was relevant to them. This allowed the team to shout about crucial RUK accommodation guarantees and funding incentives, without frustrating local Scottish applicants by showing them perks they weren’t eligible for.
The team at Heriot-Watt connected these Vepple hubs to their CRM workflow, sending personalised links to offer holders 10 days before the big day. While students booked formal sessions through standard Gecko forms, Vepple acted as the narrative-driven companion. It added the vital context, parental advice, and interactive course discovery that flat forms simply couldn’t host.
The Impact
By replacing printed postcards, static PDFs, and heavy booklets with a mobile-first digital companion, Heriot-Watt saw a massive shift in engagement, attendance, and conversion.
Event engagement
- Heriot-Watt’s Vepple saw views per session increase by 173% during events than during the university’s non-event activity, highlighting the powerful role events played at a pivotal moment in their decision-making journey.
- Mobile usage peaked at 88% on the 6th March 2026 Offer Holder Day, compared to an overall average of 48%. Prospective students weren’t just looking at Vepple at home. They were using it live on campus, on their phones, as an active digital companion, successfully replacing the need for printed guides and keeping prospects engaged in real time.
Recruitment outcomes
- RUK attendance increased by 79% year-on-year
- RUK accepts overall up 43% year-on-year
The robotics rescue: a post-event follow-up success story
The flexibility of the platform also allowed the team to respond instantly to individual student needs.
Following one Offer Holder Day, a prospective student left disappointed because they missed seeing the university’s robotics facilities. Instead of waiting weeks for website updates, the team built a bespoke robotics Guided Tour in a few hours. They pulled in existing content from the university’s digital channels to make the experience feel rich and complete.
The personalised follow-up landed in the applicant’s inbox within days. Within a couple of days, the student accepted their offer.
“It’s great to have the freedom and flexibility to build out bespoke 360s with content. The impact of having access to a fully built out content hub which is super engaging and interactive has been invaluable.” — Sam Porter, Content and Social Media Manager
Advice to other universities
“Vepple has really helped us modernise our approach. Without the event hub, we’d still be relying on inaccessible digital PDFs, which go against all web best-practice, and sending our printed postcards with minimal tracking capabilities.” — Amy Bracewell, Marketing Manager
The bottom line
Heriot-Watt proved that replacing printed event materials with a personalised digital companion can do far more than modernise an event experience.
By giving prospective students a content-rich experience before, during, and after their visit, the university built a seamless, highly connected recruitment journey. At the same time, it gave internal teams the freedom to work faster, collaborate better, and react instantly to student needs.
Vepple can:
- Improve engagement
- Align internal teams
- Increase attendance
- Drive conversion
- Support reactive, real-time communications
As student recruitment becomes increasingly competitive and your team is asked to do more with less, this level of agility isn’t just a nice-to-have. It’s the differentiator that helps forward-thinking universities stand out, protect their budgets, and hit their enrolment targets.
