Email is the most under-invested channel in destination marketing. It is first-party. It is measurable. It compounds. It does not require a platform to let you reach your audience. And for most DMOs, the email program is still a monthly newsletter that gets handed to whoever has capacity — usually an intern or a rotating marketing coordinator — with no strategy, no segmentation, and no connection to economic impact.

That is a problem. When Sojern’s 2026 State of Destination Marketing Report finds that paid social is now the most used digital channel at 88 percent adoption and display advertising has dropped from 75 percent to 45 percent in a single year, what it really tells you is that DMOs are still chasing paid reach instead of building owned audiences. Email is the owned audience. If you do not run it like infrastructure, you will watch every other channel get more expensive and less effective while your strongest asset stays underdeveloped.

Here is how to actually build a DMO email program that drives economic impact — not just open rates.

Start with the business outcome, not the campaign

The first mistake DMOs make with email is defining the program around the newsletter. The newsletter is a deliverable, not a strategy. Start one layer up.

Your email program should be tied to specific business outcomes. Three are most useful for a DMO.

The first is direct visitor influence — people who open an email, engage with content, and end up visiting. You need a data partnership with someone like Zartico, Arrivalist, or Sojern to connect email engagement to actual arrivals. Most DMOs skip this step. Do not.

The second is partner revenue — bookings, package sales, ticket purchases tied to your partners. That requires UTM discipline, partner click-throughs, and ideally a shared attribution framework with your DMO’s partners.

The third is stakeholder engagement and advocacy. A strong internal industry list — hotels, attractions, restaurants, local media, influencers — is one of the most underrated political and operational assets a DMO can own. You will thank yourself during your next funding fight.

Pick the outcomes. Build the lists to serve them.

Segment by behavior, not by form field

Most DMO email lists are segmented by ZIP code or by the checkbox someone ticked three years ago. That is not segmentation. That is filing.

Behavioral segmentation — built from site analytics, email engagement, and content interest — outperforms demographic segmentation on every meaningful metric. A visitor who clicked three hiking-trail content pieces in the last 60 days deserves a different email than someone who only ever opens your food-and-drink content. If you are on a platform like Mailchimp, Klaviyo, or HubSpot, you already have the tools to do this. Use them.

A practical starting point is four segments: active visitors (engaged in the last 60 days), lapsed subscribers (no engagement in 90+ days), drive-market audience, and your industry stakeholder list. Each gets a different cadence, a different content mix, and a different call to action.

Build an always-on content engine, not a monthly batch

A monthly DMO newsletter is a dying format. It is too slow to be relevant, too broad to be useful, and too expensive in creative effort for the measurable return.

Replace it with an always-on engine. That is a mix of automated sequences (welcome series, trip-planning sequence, seasonal re-engagement), behavior-triggered sends (abandoned trip planner, content downloads, map saves), and a lighter curated weekly or bi-weekly send pulled from the always-on content pipeline. You are not writing new content for every email — you are repackaging the content your team is already producing for different audiences, at the right moment in their decision journey.

Treat deliverability as a strategic asset

Your inbox placement rate is more important than your open rate. Most DMOs do not know what theirs is.

Authenticate your sending domain properly with SPF, DKIM, and DMARC. Run a monthly deliverability audit. Clean your list quarterly — lapsed subscribers who never re-engage are hurting your sender reputation. Tools like Litmus or Validity Everest are worth the spend for any DMO sending more than 50,000 emails a month.

Report on economic impact, not open rates

This is the shift that separates a real email program from a newsletter habit. Your monthly email report to your CEO and board should not lead with open rates. It should lead with attributed visitation, partner revenue generated, stakeholder engagement actions, and owned audience growth.

Open rates are a diagnostic. Economic impact is the outcome. If your dashboard still leads with open rates, you are using email as a brand exercise. Upgrade it.

What to do in the next 60 days

Audit your current list and identify your four core segments. Replace your monthly newsletter with at least one automated sequence. Add UTM tracking discipline to every partner link. Connect email engagement to visitor data through whichever platform you already use. And redesign your monthly reporting around economic impact metrics instead of open and click rates.

Email is not glamorous. It is infrastructure. Treat it that way, and it will carry more weight in your DMO’s strategy than any paid channel you currently run.

Photo by Acrelia on Unsplash