Thankfully MarketingSherpa, a leading online marketing agency has come up with a survey report that more or less provides an authoritative answer to this question, both for B2C (business to consumer) and B2B (business to business) environment.

The survey titled MarketingSherpa’s Email Marketing Benchmark Survey revealed that 25% recipients in B2C segment open e-mail newsletter, 14% of the total recipients click on the link given inside it, and 4% of them act upon them.

The scene does not look much different in B2B setting as well. Newsletter open-rate in B2B setting is 23%, which is mere 2% less than that of B2C segment; newsletter clickthrough –rate is 11%, which is 3% less than that of B2C segment; and 3% of the total recipients in B2b market works upon it, which is mere 1% less than B2C segment. (See image).

If we compare the conversion rate of email newsletter with that of direct mailers, which is at best 1-2%, then we will see how effective the medium is.

2009 recorded a negative growth of 2%, which is unprecedented, to touch $209.6 billion mark. The travel sector saw a drop of 5% to $79.8 billion, while, growth rate of e-commerce retail (non-travel) remained flat to $129.8 billion. For retail e-commerce, the no-growth year of 2009 has been preceded by a year of single digit growth (6% in 2008), which was the lowest growth rate for the segment on record. On an average this sector had an annual growth of around 20%.

But the good news is that the US consumer has shown some confidence in e-commerce in last two months (November and December) of 2009, which gave the segment a respective year-on-year growth of 3% to $12 billion and 5% to $17 billion.

Facebook’s  user-base was evenly split between users who are younger and older than 35 years of age n 2009. 23% of Facebook users are between 24 and 34 which is an increase of 18.8% over December 2008. See image for complete demographic divisions.