American List Exchange Association

Reducing Fulfillment Costs

Because ALEXA™ maintains List Rental Files for its members, it is in a position to easily facilitate both list exchange and list rental activity, as well as the accounting and bookkeeping for these activities. ALEXA's technology platform was designed with one goal, to fulfill list orders. This technology coupled with high volume exchange activity puts ALEXA™ in a place to fulfill orders in an extremely efficient and low cost manner.

Improving Performance

One of the chief benefits of Co-op databases is their ability to use "global" RFM data to enhance lists and improve performance. ALEXA™ members can also take advantage of "global" RFM data during list selects. These enhancements, combined with the customer affinity already present in traditional list exchanges, create a powerful set of attributes that will expand the number of names that may be taken on exchange. Considering the fact that exchanging names is extremely inexpensive, this approach further reduces acquisition costs and simultaneously improves performance.

Providing True Prospect Names

One of the hidden costs associated with renting names is paying for names that are believed to be prospects but in fact may already be customers of the list recipient. Let's examine a typical scenario where a cataloger rents 25,000 names from another cataloger and after the merge/purge finds that 5,000 of these names dropped to his/her house file.

In this scenario, the cataloger paid for 5,000 names that it already owned. ALEXA™ members can prevent this situation from happening because ALEXA™ is in a position to suppress existing customer names when fulfilling orders. Continuing with the above example, all 25,000 names provided to the recipient will be true prospects.

Charter

ALEXA™, American List Exchange Association, was founded with one simple mission in mind, lowering list acquisition costs. Traditionally, list rental costs may exceed $120 per thousand. In recent years Cooperative Databases (Co-ops) have come into the picture and have reduced these costs to be as low as $45-$70 per thousand. In addition, Co-ops have introduced a variety of modeling techniques that have improved list performance, thus making their offer even more attractive. These advances have enticed catalogers to use an increasing number of Co-op names and rely less on traditional list exchanges. In fact, the percentage of acquisition names sourced from Co-ops has increased from 30% in 2000 to over 45% in 2005.

While this all seems positive for catalogers, ALEXA™ believes there is still a significant opportunity to further reduce list acquisition costs. The basic premise behind ALEXA™ is to create a clearing house for list exchange and list rental activity. This concept offers the members of ALEXA™ a series of economic benefits that result in both reduced acquisition costs and improved list performance.

Technology

In addition to cost savings and improved acquisition performance, ALEXA™ members will benefit from state of the art tactical resources available via partnership with I-Centrix, a leading service bureau in the catalog vertical. Through this partnership ALEXA™ offers two web-based technologies specifically developed for the catalog market, I-Deliver™ and I-Select™.

I-Deliver™ is a web-based delivery tool that provides the user with the ability to monitor the status of each list order. It is designed to simplify communication between all parties involved in placing orders. With the click of a button one can view pending orders, find out if a particular order has been shipped, or even track down the location of an order shipped via FedEx® or UPS™.

I-Select™ is a web-based segmentation tool that enables the user to obtain counts or fulfill their own orders if they so desire. The application boasts an intuitive and user friendly interface and generates reports in Microsoft® Excel. If the user chooses to utilize this service and fulfill their own orders, they will receive an additional reduction in their fulfillment costs.

Current Members

ALEXA™ membership is comprised exclusively of catalogers. Although ALEXA™ can provide general list fulfillment services, catalogers that wish to enhance performance on their list exchanges find membership in ALEXA™ to be particularly beneficial. Please visit our FAQ page to find out more about other catalogers that have already chosen ALEXA™.

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