Despite the growing variety of channels and options out there for sharing information and news, email remains a popular way for businesses to reach out to interested parties and potential clients. There are countless ways to leverage email to attract and retain customers, from sending them special deals or coupons, to offering value through educational content and tips.

But how you present this information makes all the difference between people engaging with your company and them scrambling to add your email address to their spam list. To find out more about what organizations should know in order to best represent their brand, we asked a panel of Young Entrepreneur Council members to share their top email marketing tips. Here are their recommendations for making the most of this marketing channel.

1. Stay Compliant

One of the most important things you need to keep in mind when using email marketing is to stay compliant with the CAN-SPAM Act. The CAN-SPAM Act was created to protect consumers from getting unsolicited emails. There are a number of steps you need to take to stay compliant. First, you need to make sure you’re only sending emails to the people who have actively subscribed to your email list. Make sure you use some type of opt-in form on your website where users have the option of signing up for your email list. You also need to make it easy for them to unsubscribe from your email list. So, be sure to include a way for subscribers to opt-out easily in each email you send. Abiding by these requirements not only keeps you compliant, but it will keep users happy as well. – Stephanie Wells, Formidable Forms

2. Personalize Your Emails

Email has gotten a bad reputation lately and it’s becoming more and more challenging to get a person’s attention via email. Email open rates and click-through rates have consistently been decreasing over time. Remember when email open rates were 70 to 90%—those days are gone! But email is still an effective channel if businesses personalize their email versus just using a spray and pray method. As with anything, the more you put in, the more you get out. If a business is just sending out chintzy newsletters to a bunch of people on their email list—that’s not going to get the results. But if a business is taking the time to research, create content that’s personalized and send emails that are relevant, then an email strategy is much more effective. – Jean Ginzburg, JeanGinzburg.com

3. Be Concise And End Strong

As an entrepreneur who does a fair amount of email marketing, I’ve learned that being concise and brief are the keys to success. Breaking up long pieces of prose into short paragraphs and bullets help the reader scan the email and read and interpret the most important points without bogging them down with unimportant details. I generally like to keep marketing emails to 500 words or fewer and include “P.S.” at the end of the email, since most people only read the intro, middle and endings of emails. – Kristin Kimberly Marquet, Fem Founder

4. Don’t Forget Visuals

Email marketing shouldn’t just be a bunch of words. You need to add graphics, pictures and even embed a video! That’s what your audience wants to see! Make sure to make the visuals work for the small screen, however, as they might want to read emails from their mobile devices. – Serenity Gibbons, NAACP

5. Include A Single Ask

Your email should be simple enough for the reader to know exactly what it is that you want them to do. For example, the email could ask them to click on a link to a specific blog post or website where they can learn more about your products or services, or it could ask the reader to schedule a call with you using a calendar link, or the ask could be to get connected to the relevant person in the organization. The goal of your email is to prompt the reader to perform some follow-up action and you will generally see a higher conversion rate if you make it easy for them to do so. – Vishal Shah, Ledger & Tax

6. Keep Testing To See What Works Best

If people agreed to receive updates from you, it means that they like you or even consider doing business with you. That is why your email list is super valuable. To get the best results of your campaigns and reach as many prospects as possible, find out what emails they prefer to receive. A good idea would be to do a small A/B testing. Choose what variables you want to test (e.g. subject lines, CTAs, different ways of addressing—is it “Mrs. Parker” or “Elizabeth”?). You want to look for open rates and click-through rates. That would be your first step for better conversion. – Solomon Thimothy, OneIMS

7. Be Smart With The Subject Line

Make the subject line short and to the point. Shorter is better, and if the message is about an upcoming sale, delineate the specifics in the subject line. If it’s about something else, be specific once again. Bad subject lines are one of the main reasons why emails don’t get opened, so don’t be among that group. – Andrew Schrage, Money Crashers Personal Finance

8. Track Engagement

If you’re tracking engagement on your email marketing, you will typically be able to send the right amount of information to the people who are engaged the most. There’s nothing worse than signing up for a free coupon and getting 200 emails about different offers. Or on the other side, signing up to learn more about something and someone reaches out to you weeks later about it. Don’t send emails to anyone who has not opened an email in more than three months. You’re just begging to have email deliverability issues. – James Guldan, Vision Tech Team

9. Know The Value You’re Providing Your Subscribers

One of the most common mistakes entrepreneurs and marketers make when it comes to email is sending out content that is boring. Just because people signed up for your newsletter doesn’t mean that they are interested in the bugs you have fixed on your website or other technicalities. Have a new product launch? Lead with value on what problem this is going to solve and how it can help the customer, instead of blabbering about how you now have 1,000 SKUs and how excited you are. Ask yourself, “Is this an email I would be excited to receive as a customer or lead?” – Karl Kangur, Above House

10. Care About Your Connection

Before you spend hundreds on designs, shiny new tools and grand segmentation schemes, start small: Understand you’re reaching out to get to know someone and have them know about you. Make sure your outreach is genuine and focused on being helpful. It’s just like going to a networking event: Successful people don’t try to sell to people there, they interact and build a rapport. Offer help once you find out they have a problem that you can solve, but go into it with the mindset that you’re here to meet people, and focus on that. – Richard Fong, Bliss Drive