The news of Burberry CEO Angela Ahrendts’ move to head up retail efforts for Apple on October 15 shone new light on just how significant the fashion stalwart’s innovative efforts in online marketing have been.

Since 2009, the 157-year-old brand has walked the runway straight to digital stardom, ranking number one in 2011 and 2012 in LuxuryLab’s Digital IQ Index for Fashion, which evaluates the digital competence of 64 brands based on their site, digital marketing, social media and mobile initiatives. It was also classified in the Genius category, alongside Ralph Lauren, Kate Spade and Tory Burch (which tied for third in the rankings), as well as Gucci, Coach and Louis Vuitton.

###Striking a Pose in Social Media, E-commerce and Mobile Integration

What Ahrendts and her team have accomplished made Apple sit up and take notice, and can serve as a social media case study not only for fashion retailers, but for any company looking to engage an audience online in order to grow its sales. Here’s a look at how Burberry dominated online marketing in the fashion sector.

Engaging an Audience through Social Media Promotions

Burberry realized in 2009 that social media engagement needed to play a key role in its marketing efforts and allocated resources accordingly. Its first major digital campaign, the Art of the Trench, invited Burberry’s loyal following of trench coat enthusiasts to post their selfies to a campaign site that leveraged social media sharing and partnerships with major fashion bloggers. The campaign allowed viewers to vote and comment on their favourite images, share them with friends, and to click through from the user-generated content directly to an e-commerce site to purchase items that caught their eye. The campaign drove growth of Burberry’s Facebook fanbase to more than one million (in 2009), and today it sits at a whopping 16 million.

Linking Social Media Promotions to E-commerce Site

Burberry’s success with the Art of the Trench campaign and its ability to leverage Facebook fans led to a growth in e-commerce sales of 50 per cent year over year. In 2012, Burberry saw e-commerce growth of 50 percent in Europe and 30 percent in the U.S., according to LuxuryLab’s Digital IQ Index, deemed significant in part because one in five brands in its fashion ranking do not sell online in the U.S., less than half have e-commerce capabilities in the U.K and only one-third have e-commerce sites for Western Europe. And Burberry has taken e-commerce a step further, modelling its Regent Street store in London after its website, with the in-store directory mirroring the site’s taxonomy.

Mobile Integration

As more and more people search for — and purchase — fashion on their mobile devices (according to LuxuryLab, 22 percent of searches for fashion brands originated from mobile devices in 2012, and conversions from iPads are twice the rate of conversions from PCs and 20 times those from smartphones), integrating online promotions with mobile is crucial, and Burberry has once again been ahead of the pack.

Burberry launched its mobile site in 2011 and didn’t stop there. It has also outfitted in-store salespeople with iPads, and has created a physical manifestation of its online environment where customers can engage with the products both online and in-person, customize their apparel and try on RFID-tagged items in front of a mirror that projects them onto video. It’s a true melding of online and real-life worlds and has resulted in an 18-percent uptick in sales in the first quarter of 2013, attributed largely in part to its innovative marketing strategies.

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