RetailNext, which specialises in retail analytics for bricks-and-mortar stores, has acquired Pikato, a Chicago-based company which offers a cloud-based mobile engagement solutions for retailers.

Pikato’s platform delivers targeted marketing campaigns in thousands of standalone stores and 160 shopping malls, covering a customer population of 47.6m total individual users, and 5.7m unique monthly users. Its customers include Sears, Kmart and Kohl’s.

The new RetailNext solution, incorporating Pikato’s platform, is being marketed under the brand name of ‘Targeted Marketing & Engagement’. According to RetailNext, it delivers three major capabilities.

The first is to enable retail marketers to 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.

Secondly, the company says, offers delivered to shoppers will increase in relevance and effectiveness as the system employs machine learning and rules to incorporate and analyze hundreds of data points, now including in-store shopper behaviour data.

Finally, the combined solution enables retail marketers to manage one-to-one personalized engagements across all retail communication channels, including SMS, point-of-sale, email, in-store wi-fi and beacons.

“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.”