With nearly half of all American adults (46%) owning smartphones — a jump Pew Research says is up from 35% last May — the mobile retailing market is only poised to grow. The retail conundrum: how to use mobile capabilities to bring consumers back in-store.

Lori Schafer, executive retail adviser at SAS Institute and author of Branded! How Retailers Engage Consumers with Social Media & Mobility, says mobile commerce must do more than promote sales and discounts.

“If retailers have customers in their stores on a mobile device, they need to give them an incentive to stay,” says Schafer. “They need to use the device to promote exclusives, great service, and generally make the consumer feel like a valued part of their program. There are a whole lot of ways to do this rather than cutting price.”

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SkuLoop’s Michelle Crames, founder and CEO, helps stores create their own personalized, digital promotions. She described a program created for Ricki’s, a 140-chain store in Canada.

“We offered $10 off $50 in regularly priced merchandise,” Crames explains. “Customers could redeem the coupon online or in-store. We saw 70% of redemptions took place in-store. And we drove a 75% lift in the average in-store transaction value because when consumers went to a store, Ricki’s could upsell. Also, shoppers tweeted or posted to Facebook about the coupon and where they were shopping.”

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“David is a renaissance retail technologist and I’m thrilled to have him join our team,” said Michelle Crames, CEO of SkuLoop. “As we continue to develop effective, real-time software solutions for retailers, David’s expertise will have a tremendous impact on taking SkuLoop to the next level.”

During his more than 20-year tenure in the retail technology industry, David has held various senior positions in sales and business development. Prior to Quantum Retail, Landreth held senior positions with Profit Logic, Blue Martini and SAS.

SkuLoop’s social media software solutions have been extremely effective for retail clients – driving a week’s worth of sales in one hour, resulting in a 69% redemption rate in stores and producing 70% higher average order size in stores. SkuLoop’s digital promotions suite helps link online, mobile, and in-store activities together – measuring the impact of online activity to offline purchases, and link retailers customer data profiles to online Facebook open graph data.

“SkuLoop’s suite of solutions are on the leading edge – they offer retailers of all sizes social media and mobile tools that have the potential to generate measurable results – both online and offline – quickly,” said Landreth. “It’s an exciting time for SkuLoop and I’m energized about joining them at this stage.”