Over the years, many have augured the death of email, most recently foretelling that social media would make email obsolete.

Nevertheless, for marketers, email marketing remains invaluable, even indispensable.

For example, nearly 9 in 10 marketers say email is their primary channel for lead generation, according to Forrester Research.

Moreover, more than half of email marketers say they use email for (in decreasing order of popularity) lead generation and nurturing, enhancing and building brand, driving sales, and strengthening thought leadership. (That's according to B2B Marketing's Email Benchmarking Report from February.)

Among B2B marketers, only 4% say email is "not very important, the same study found.

For additional details on those stats and others, including email's role in marketing automation, see the following infographic from Eloqua's Modern Marketer initiative.