It's no secret that the marketing landscape has drastically transformed in recent years. Yet, one thing that has remained constant is the importance of email outreach in outbound marketing strategies. From Fortune 500 companies to scrappy startups, sending sales emails on a regular basis is a reality, so a large amount of time, strategy and effort goes into the process of sending these emails, reports Inc.

Yet, there is a massive blocker standing in the way of reaching your target's inbox: spam filters. If you want to make sure all the hard work you put into drafting a sales email pays off, then use these 8 strategies to avoid being sent to spam.

1. Avoid Having an Excessive Amount of Links

Having an excessive amount of links in the body of your email is one of the biggest red flags that will set spam filters off. Because of this, be sure to only include links that are absolutely essential to your sales email, such as your call-to-action, examples of your work for previous clients or something similar.

2. Keep the Exclamation Points To a Minimum

Punctuation marks like exclamation points are commonly found in spammy sales emails that litter our spam folders. Because of this, filters have included this as an indicator when deciding whether or not something is spam or isn't. Within your email, keep your exclamation points to a minimum, and instead write in a conversational tone and quickly get to your point.

3. Hold Off On Using Obscure Fonts

Seemingly obscure fonts are another trigger that commonly set off spam filters. To combat this, stick to the default options your respective email provider gives to you. For example, on Gmail, Sans Serif is the default font. By using the fonts offered by your email provider, you'll be reassuring the spam filters that your email was drafted in Gmail instead of being created by a sketchy bot.

4. Compress Your Images

Sending dense, heavy files is another red flag for spam filters. Because of this, high resolution photos frequently get mistook for spam emails and are sent to the "graveyard" as a result. If you are sending images in the body of your email, be sure they are relevant to your sales message and are compressed. To do this, you can use a free tool like TinyPNG.com or CompressJPEG.com.

5. Don't Include Too Many Images

By keeping your text-to-image ratio at a reasonable level, you'll be be decreasing the chances your email gets caught by the spam filters. As a rule of thumb, only use images that are absolutely essential to the content of your email. If you can't, then it's best to stick to text.

6. Don't Use Salesy Words

Words like "urgent" and "promo" and "sale" are easy targets for spam filters to identify and mark as junk mail. If you're hosting a promotion that you truly think will add value to the prospects you're reaching out to via email, then use a tool like Thesaurus.com to find some suitable synonyms to get the point across.

7. Include Your Physical Address & An Unsubscribe Link

This tip is strictly for email marketing in terms of your newsletter, but still is important to note. Because of the CAN-SPAM Act, all senders must include a physical address as well as an unsubscribe link in all their emails. If you don't, not only will you be violating this law, but your emails will also be much more likely to never make it through the spam filters. Platforms like Mailchimp make this process easy by having both your address and an unsubscribe link as a piece in all their email templates.

8. Take a Look Through Your Own Spam Filter

Oftentimes, actual examples are the best teacher. When you get the chance, take a couple minutes to look through your spam folder. What patterns do you see? It's likely you'll see a lot of the things we mentioned in this article, messages from a "prince" in a faraway land looking to give you his trust fund, lots of emojis, words that replace numbers with letters and more. When drafting your own sales emails, avoid using even the slightest hint of these patterns.

Email outreach is still one of the most commonly used forms of sales in the business world today. If you want to make sure your sales emails outsmart the tricky spam filters and reach your target's inbox, start by following the best practices laid out in this article. Best of luck.