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When a company has multiple brands it's tempting to extend email permission from one sister brand to another to grow your lists more quickly. But it's almost always a false assumption that all of the customers of one of your brands are or are likely to become customers of one of your other brands. It's also a false assumption that consumers understand the relationship between sister brands--or that they care when it comes to allowing more email into their already crowded inboxes.

Sharing permission across brands risks:

• Sender reputation and deliverability damage through increased spam complaints;
• More unsubscribes;
• Brand damage from irritated subscribers;
• Lower engagement due to subscribers tuning out because of irrelevancy of sister brand emails; and
• Negative press and social media buzz, as Provide Commerce experienced with this article about how they spam RedEnvelope subscribers with emails from sister brand ProFlowers.

It's important to note that these are ALL risks regardless of whether permission sharing is written into your privacy policy or not, since the vast majority of consumers never read privacy policies or legalese.

While you only invite trouble by abusing permission grants, that's not to say that there aren't many ways to positively expose subscribers of one brand to a sister brand. This 23-page report explores several tactics used by major online retailers, nearly a quarter of which have cross-promoted one or more sister brands over the past couple of years.