When companies new to Salesforce begin the onboarding process, they’re faced with an important decision. Salesforce admins must choose which email integration tool will best fit their company’s needs. In many cases, an admin limits their options to Salesforce’s native integrations, precluding ISV partner apps. Lightning for Outlook/Gmail, Salesforce Inbox, or Einstein Activity Capture may fit the needs of some, but there are other superior options on the market. This article will compare the independent application Match My Email to Lightning for Outlook/Gmail.
Diving into the Technical Aspects
The first difference to highlight is how Lightning is a plug-in and Match my Email is cloud based. What does this mean? A plug-in is an app based on client server architecture. This means that the application is an extension of an existing computer program that adds a new feature. In the case of Lightening (and Salesforce Inbox as well), the app “plugs-in” to email services and comes in the form of a side panel. Given the ever-changing architecture of email service providers, plug-ins play a game of cat and mouse, always trying to catch up with recent releases to ensure their application functions with the new architecture. Reliability suffers as a consequence.
Match My Email on the other hand is a cloud based product. In short, this means that our app can stand alone and does not live on top of a separate computer program. Rather, we connect to email services through secure API connections to communicate and transmit commands. From a technical perspective, the cloud offers more reliability, better security, and improved ease-of-use.
The Difference Between Manual versus Automated Salesforce Email Integration
Lightening is a manual email capture app. Using the side panel, users must click to record emails they’d like saved to Salesforce. Manual email capture adds menial tasks to sales reps responsibilities and takes away from actual selling. With manual email logging, managers will quickly realize that email data in Salesforce end up incomplete and much less useful. MME automatically captures emails in Salesforce without requiring manual intervention by your users. This means you don’t need to worry about your users forgetting to log emails, inconsistencies in data, or adding a few hours a week to your team spent logging emails. Our app will do the work for you.
Matching Complexities Between the Two Apps
Lightning for Outlook will only match emails to a single record (assuming your team remembers to log the conversation.) Match My Email will automatically match to every related record. This is not limited to the primary recipient, but includes CC’ed parties, accounts, cases, and opportunities associated with these parties.
Our customer base is comprised of SF users who have experimented with free plugin options for email integration in SFDC but found them lacking. For more information, find us on Salesforce’s AppExchange or visit our website.
