RetailNext Acquires Pikato to Transform Targeted Marketing and Shopper Engagement

SAN JOSE, Calif., Oct. 13, 2015 /PRNewswire/ -- RetailNext Inc., the worldwide expert and leader in retail analytics for brick-and-mortar stores, today announced it has acquired Pikato, a Chicago-based company whose cloud-based software transforms retail mobile marketing channels into personal, one-to-one interactions between retailers and shoppers.

The acquisition immediately extends RetailNext's comprehensive analytics platform to encompass Pikato's market-leading solution for mobile shopper engagement, boasting the deployment of targeted marketing solutions in thousands of standalone stores and 160 shopping malls, and engaging a total customer population of 47.6 million individual users, including 5.7 million unique monthly users. Within those marketing deployments, retailers regularly experience an eight-fold increase in coupon redemption rate, doubling basket size and delivering a 10 percent increase in profit margin.  

"The acquisition of Pikato and its suite of software solutions for retailers complements RetailNext's best-in-class analytics platform and adds to the value proposition delivered to our customers and their shoppers," said Alexei Agratchev, co-founder and chief executive officer of RetailNext. "RetailNext delivers trillions of data points from over three billion anonymous shopper visits annually, and with the addition of Pikato, those data points now empower the delivery of relevant, personalized communications and promotions to shoppers as they shop."

The new RetailNext solution, marketed as Targeted Marketing & Engagement™, transforms the way CMOs and retail marketers drive engagement, loyalty and sales via mobile and other personalized interactions by delivering three major capabilities:

• Retail marketers can now plan and execute targeted, mobile interactions with ease and at scale. The solution is deployed and activated in weeks with no disruption to the business, channel vendors or IT environment.
• Offers delivered to shoppers will increase in relevance and effectiveness as the system employs advanced machine learning and rules to incorporate and analyze hundreds of data points, now including in-store shopper behavior data.
• Retail marketers can finally manage 1:1 personalized engagements across all retailer communication channels, including SMS, Point-of-Sale, email, in-store Wi-Fi, beacons and more, effectively making RetailNext the single targeted marketing and engagement platform retailers need.

Pikato's mobile engagement solution has a proven track record in producing an exponential increase in redemption rates of mobile coupons by more effectively executing on personalized, mobile marketing recommendations delivered across multiple touchpoints. "Combined with RetailNext's deep in-store and shopper insights, we expect the engagement solution to expand and better support the needs of omnichannel retailers and shoppers," added Agratchev.

"Pikato revolutionized retail by creating a mobile personal concierge to drive personalized engagement, allowing some of the world's biggest retail brands such as Sears, Kmart and Kohl's to successfully connect with shoppers and drive sales," said Jesus Sanchez, co-founder and formerly chief executive officer of Pikato and now head of targeted marketing & engagement at RetailNext. "Seamlessly integrated with the comprehensive RetailNext analytics platform, the solution is now even more differentiated by triggering relevant, targeted communications from in-store and out-of-store data about shoppers, their shopping journeys and shopping behaviors."

"RetailNext continues its commitment to build a broad ecosystem of products and services, all empowering retailers to better connect with and serve today's shopper," added Kindra Tatarsky, head of corporate development at RetailNext. "On the heels of its major funding announcement earlier this year, this acquisition adds to the explosive year-over-year growth RetailNext has experienced through its aggressive R & D commitment and organic global sales growth. As more partner companies are brought into the ecosystem, we expect to further entrench RetailNext as the industry standard in-store analytics platform."

The RetailNext acquisition of Pikato is subject to customary conditions of closing, and will be accounted for as a purchase transaction. The transaction is expected to close by the end of the quarter.

About RetailNext  The first technology platform to bring e-commerce style shopper analytics to brick-and-mortar stores and malls, RetailNext's hardware-agnostic SaaS platform enables retailers to develop actionable insights on data collected from a wide variety of shopper-centric data streams. More than 200 retailers and brands worldwide have adopted RetailNext solutions to glean the insights necessary to improve customer experience, increase same-store sales, reduce theft and eliminate unnecessary costs.

RetailNext measures the behavior of more than three billion shoppers per year by collecting data from over 100,000 sensors in retail stores and analyzing trillions of data points annually. Headquartered in San Jose, Calif., RetailNext is a growing global brand operating in 50 countries. For more information, please visit www.retailnext.net.

RetailNext Inc. and RetailNext are trademarks of RetailNext Inc. in the United States.

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SOURCE RetailNext