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Outreach

Handling Replies

How Kit detects prospect replies, classifies sentiment, and helps you respond — including AI-drafted responses.

Why It Matters

Replies are the goal of every outreach campaign. When a prospect responds, the speed and quality of your follow-up determines whether interest converts into a meeting or fades away. Kit surfaces replies immediately, classifies their sentiment, and can even draft a response for you.

How Reply Detection Works

Kit polls your IMAP inbox every 5 minutes. When a new message arrives, Kit matches it to an outreach conversation using two signals:

  • In-Reply-To header — The email standard for threading. Kit checks whether the incoming message references a Message-ID from a sent outreach email.
  • Sender verification — Kit confirms the sender’s email matches a prospect in an active campaign.

Both signals must match for Kit to associate the reply with a prospect. Unmatched emails are ignored.

Reply Inbox

Navigate to Outreach > Replies to see all detected replies. The inbox supports two filters:

  • All — Every reply across all campaigns
  • Needs Attention — Replies that haven’t been actioned yet (excludes auto-classified bounces and out-of-office messages)

Replies are sorted by priority: positive and interested replies surface first, followed by negative, then OOO and bounce.

Sentiment Classification

Kit’s AI automatically classifies each reply into one of five sentiments:

Sentiment Meaning Example
Positive Prospect is interested and wants to continue the conversation “This sounds great, let’s set up a call.”
Interested Prospect wants more information before committing “Can you tell me more about pricing?”
Negative Prospect is not interested or asks to stop “Not a fit for us right now.”
OOO Out-of-office auto-reply “I’m out of the office until March 20.”
Bounce Delivery failure notification (DSN) “This mailbox is full.” / “User unknown.”

Sentiment classification drives the priority sort in your reply inbox. Positive and interested replies appear first so you can respond quickly.

Triage Actions

From the reply inbox, you can take these actions on each reply:

Action What It Does
Reply Open the response editor to write and send a reply
Dismiss Archive the reply — it moves out of the “Needs Attention” filter
Opt Out Mark the prospect as opted out and add them to your suppression list
Undo Dismiss Restore a dismissed reply back to “Needs Attention”

AI-Drafted Responses

When auto-response is enabled in a campaign’s AI directives, Kit’s AI drafts a suggested response for each reply. The draft includes a recommended action and reasoning.

Suggested actions the AI may recommend:

Suggested Action When It’s Used
Reply with details Prospect asked for more information about your product
Schedule meeting Prospect expressed interest in a call or demo
Send case study Prospect wants proof points or references
Acknowledge and close Prospect declined politely — no further action needed
Follow up later Prospect is OOO or timing isn’t right

AI-drafted responses still require your approval before sending. You can edit the draft, write your own response, or dismiss the suggestion entirely.

To enable auto-response, set Auto-response to on in the campaign’s AI directives and optionally provide Response instructions to guide the AI’s tone and approach.

Conversation Threading

Each prospect’s page shows the full conversation thread — your outreach emails, their replies, and any responses you’ve sent. Navigate to a prospect from the campaign’s prospects tab to see the complete history.

Quick Checklist

  • Verify IMAP is configured and polling (check Outreach > Settings)
  • Review replies in Outreach > Replies
  • Triage each reply: respond, dismiss, or opt out
  • Enable auto-response on campaigns where you want AI-drafted replies
  • Check the prospect page for full conversation context before responding

Next Steps

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