DMOs aren’t worshipping the click anymore – not solely anyway.
If you work on the meetings and conventions side of tourism, you know the planner journey rarely looks clean.
It zigs. Zags.
Gets hijacked by boards and committees and internal conversations you’ll never hear about.
And email metrics can’t tidy all that up.
Truth is, clicks are losing some of their signal value. Planners act without clicking. Bots click without acting. AI reads your content faster than a human does. And your dashboard might keep smiling like everything is fine.
DMOs are starting to read the room. The smartest ones know the real action isn’t just happening with clicks. It’s happening off the page, too.
Clicks Are Great…ish
Planners are absorbing your content quietly.
Instead of clicking, they skim, think, Google later and bring your message into the next conversation with their team. They store mental notes about venues, sustainability leadership or district walkability. You influenced them, and your metrics shrug like nothing happened.
Take an email you send out to create visibility of your sales team attending an upcoming show. If it’s not appointment-based, there’s no reason for attending planners to click. BUT… You’ve informed them of your attendance and booth number. Now, they know where to find you. It’s something we’ve seen over the years of tracking open rates for our clients’ pre-show emails: higher-than-average open rates, lower-than-average CTRs.
Post-show emails can create a similar reaction. While we’ve seen these tend to have higher CTRs than pre-show sends, we’ve also heard from planners that they’re not at the top of their must-open list. BUT… They say they still appreciate seeing that they’ve received a follow-up message from the destination organization. A little message after attending a show can go a long way.
Their IT departments are a little too helpful.
Corporate and medical planners, for example, might live behind link-scanning systems. These systems might click everything first to check for safety. Helpful for them, confusing for you.
The decision makers in their world are multiplying.
Your email gets forwarded to people you never knew existed. Those people then browse your site, run cost comparisons or look at venue partners. Yet your report proudly displays zero clicks.
The Problem With Measuring a Zigzag Like It’s a Straight Line
DMO sales and marketing teams risk making decisions based on ghost signals.
- You chase creative that earns clicks, not creative that earns progress.
- You underestimate content that quietly builds confidence.
- You misread planner readiness.
And that leaves your reporting feeling thinner than it should. Meetings marketing is complex. Your measurement (or at least the conversations around it) should match it.
So What Are Smart DMOs Actually Tracking?
1. Inbox visibility
If you show up where planners actually look, you are already winning. DMOs monitor inbox placement, deliverability and sender reputation. When your emails reliably land in the right spot, planners keep you in their mental rotation without ever touching a CTA.
2. Destination momentum
This is where the real story unfolds. DMOs can look for rises in direct traffic, increases in branded search, like “LA regions” or “Atlanta convention hotels,” and partner venue traffic that lifts right after a send. If your email sparks movement anywhere in the ecosystem, it is doing its job.
3. People-to-people signals
Replies count. Forwards count. Meeting requests count. A planner saying, “Loved your resource on sustainability ideas,” absolutely counts. These are the metrics that survive firewalls, AI tools and creative clicking robots.
4. Pipeline movement
Email’s real value shows up in how planners behave with your sales team. Faster replies. More curious questions. References to your latest update. More openness to a site visit. Greater willingness to share event specifics. When the business starts moving, email deserves a nod.
What Your Sales Team Can Tell You
And a little reflection and evaluation from your sales team can surface the qualitative wins that dashboards don’t always capture. Self-aware, context-driven questions can reveal insights about the broader sales journey, like:
- How many new leads came in after a recent send?
- How many RFPs were generated?
- What meetings, calls or booked business could be tied back to the email list?
- Did clients show up to the conversation knowing something new about the destination?
- Did a prospect book a meeting they might not have considered before?
These simple check-ins help connect email performance to real-world movement — and tell a fuller story behind the metrics.
This Is What Happens When You Write for Planners, Not Dashboards
Once you acknowledge how planners actually make decisions, the whole tone of your email strategy shifts. You stop chasing metrics alone and start building content that really supports the destination story. You start thinking about trust, recall and readiness, instead of one link click. You start measuring what moves the mission, instead of what moves a number on a screen.
Your email marketing gets calmer.
Your reporting gets clearer.
Your sales team gets happier (a favorite of ours).
And you finally get to see the real influence your content has in the room where planners are weighing their options.
The Takeaway for DMOs
Email still hits hard. Clicks are still great. There’s just a bigger story to consider.
When you measure what planners actually do, your strategy becomes sharper, and your destination becomes harder to overlook.
