EAST GREENBUSH, N.Y.--ALEXA™, the American List Exchange Association, today announced that it now has more than 100 prominent catalogs participating as members, while growing its total file size to 32,000,000 names.

Created to enhance list exchange and list rental activity and improve the health of lists in general, ALEXA offers members economic benefits that result in both reduced acquisition costs and improved list performance, at no cost to join. Catalogers can access a 40%-increased available universe of productive lists, gaining very productive names at a fraction of the usual cost.

Catalogers using ALEXA are seeing substantial increases in mailing performance, especially when an ALEXA recency is applied to older recency segments of lists. Mailers are successfully applying 3 or 6 month ALEXA recencies to 7-12 month, 13-24 month, and 25-36 month segments of lists, and in many cases are experiencing 30% to 55% performance lifts.

“We will be leveraging ALEXA to mail successfully into out-of-category lists as well as deeper into older recencies on our tried and true lists,” said Eric Johnson, marketing manager of The Orvis Company. “ALEXA could very well help offset some of the incremental costs that have come our way this year by generating names that work on a P&L basis, despite these additional costs.”

In addition to cost savings and improved acquisition performance, ALEXA members benefit from state-of-the art technologies specifically developed for the catalog market: I-Deliver™ is a web-based delivery tool that provides users with the ability to monitor the status of each list order. Another “soon to be released” program is a web-based segmentation tool that enables list managers and list brokers to obtain counts or fulfill orders if they so desire. This program will also allow mailers to run counts and fulfill selections on their files for their own internal use.

“With most rental file counts being down this year, we are looking to ALEXA to supply us with productive names to make up for the shortfall that we are seeing with our traditional list selections,” said Bob Webb, senior vice president of marketing, Potpourri Group.

ALEXA also offers mailers the ability to omit the mailer’s house file from names selected, helping members avoid the hidden cost of paying for prospect names that may already be customers. This has been a very popular feature and is being actively used by ALEXA members to reduce the percentage of house file names received on an acquisition order by as much as 35%.

List exchange and list rental activity has diminished to about 50% of the acquisition activity; ALEXA will strengthen and substantially increase the amount of names taken on exchange and rental which will reduce costs for mailers while increasing their list rental income. List managers and list brokers will benefit from this increased activity, and the health of the industry in general should improve dramatically with this enhanced approach to the acquisition of names.

“When I started as a circulation manager in this business 28 years ago I thought it was crazy that only 2% of the names that we mailed responded,” said Mike Hayden, president of ALEXA. “Over the last 28 years response rates have gotten even worse. It is a dream come true to be able to work with ALEXA members and some of the best minds in the industry to reverse this trend. I look at ALEXA as being the mailer’s database, where we all work together towards the common goal of improving performance while reducing acquisition costs. Currently there are many very powerful uses for ALEXA to improve house file and acquisition performance. ALEXA grows stronger every day as we add to our membership and learn from the testing of our members.”

ALEXA™ Marketing LLC, the American List Exchange Association, was founded in 2006 with one simple mission in mind -- lowering list acquisition costs. Since that time ALEXA has enjoyed continual growth, attracting top-name catalogs as members and offering them mailing solutions that cost-efficiently increase response. ALEXA members benefit from state of the art list technology available via partnership with I-Centrix, a leading service bureau in the catalog industry. Visit ALEXA at www.exchangelists.com.