The feedback loop powering Emily Kramer’s 80,000-subscriber newsletter

Emily Kramer describes herself as someone who “markets marketing to marketers.” It’s a fitting line for the host of the Dear Marketers podcast and the creator of MKT1, an 80,000+ subscriber newsletter that ranks among Substack’s top 20 business publications.

Across both, her premise is simple: great content doesn’t start with picking topics. It starts with asking questions.

"I think people get stuck in the old way of doing content, which honestly didn't involve people as much. We got into this pattern of thinking that content was SEO blog posts." - Emily Kramer, Founder and CEO, MKT1

As a self-described team of 1.5 (herself and her podcast co-host), Emily uses Typeform to uncover what her audience is struggling with, without needing a dedicated research team. She then turns those real answers into relatable content. 

She’s grown her newsletter and podcast into something people genuinely trust, using Typeform to create a feedback loop that practically runs itself—and with 25% higher survey completion rates.

Challenge: The one-person content machine

The old marketing playbook goes a little something like this: 

1. Figure out (or guess) at what your audience wants.
2. Make the content you think they want.
3. Send it to them.

This is the playbook Emily spent a decade arguing against. Its methodology gets the audience-to-product relationship entirely backwards.

So she does things her own way, prioritizing continuous conversation with her audience over “tried-and-true” playbooks that don’t work for her.

Generic surveys didn’t fit that approach. They looked lackluster and felt bad to send, so she avoided them. “Traditional forms felt like crappy experiences,” says Emily, and “sending someone a Google form or old-school survey… there’s nothing premium about it.”

A “meh” experience is fine when you’re using SEO to pick topics to write or talk about. But when audience feedback is your content pipeline... not so much.

Emily needed feedback collection tools that reflected her brand, sparked engagement (not boredom), and helped her funnel the right questions to the right audience. All in service of her ambitious bi-weekly publishing cadence. To do that, she created a feedback infrastructure, truly powered by Typeform.    

Solution: The LinkedIn → Typeform → content series loop

Emily’s survey-to-newsletter content loop always starts with a LinkedIn poll.

When a poll question generates rich comments (big thoughts or big feelings), that’s a signal. “I’m realizing there's a lot more to ask here,” says Emily. “So that might lead me to say, ‘I'm going to do more research and send it out in the newsletter instead of just on LinkedIn.’"

Once she’s identified a hot-button topic, Emily builds a Typeform survey to help her get more nuanced responses from the already-primed audience. Those responses generate multiple newsletter stories.

In Emily’s feedback flow, a single survey with eight questions could theoretically yield nine pieces of content for the MKT1 newsletter: one full results roundup, plus one additional piece per question. 

Her content roadmap is "100% shaped” by these back-and-forths,says Emily. The results don’t just inform the newsletter, they become it. 

"My system: Throw a Typeform out to people, get some information, publish, rinse and repeat." - Emily Kramer, Founder and CEO, MKT1

Protecting the questions that matter most

Because Emily goes deep on topics of interest, her forms can run long. "You hate to see when people don't finish the form, and you're like, 'I missed all that potential goodness,'” says Emily.

So she developed a system to protect her most important survey questions from the dreaded drop-off—using the Partial Submit Point feature, which lets her see answers to questions up to that point (even if they didn’t complete the survey).

"If I have one killer question that I want everyone to answer, I'll put that up front, do a partial submit… then get the info I need." - Emily Kramer, Founder and CEO, MKT1

Conditional Logic to reach every segment 

As a “marketer whisperer,” Emily knows that to get the right results you need to ask the right questions of the right people. 

An in-house marketing lead doesn’t have the same concerns as a marketer at an agency. Founders have an entirely different set of priorities. Typeform’s conditional Logic and branching features allow Emily to ask audience-specific questions within a single form—a speed multiplier for a marketing team of one.  

Typeform questions, but make it a podcast 

This content flow was so successful, Emily decided to make a spin-off. Her podcast, Dear Marketers, is built entirely around audience questions collected through a Typeform. Her podcast listeners essentially co-create every episode through their answers.

The audience submits questions, Emily and her co-host pull from those questions, and then they answer them on air. That's the show.

Results: Content that lands because it came from the people reading it

MKT1’s Typeform completion rates run at least 25% higher than with other survey tools. For a newsletter that 80,000+ marketers rely on for their content strategy, every completed survey is another useful signal. Emily credits this level of engagement to the premium Typeform experience and the ability to apply Brand Kits across surveys. 

"Typeform feels like part of the brand experience. It feels like part of the MKT1 experience. It feels like a way to participate and communicate." - Emily Kramer, Founder and CEO, MKT1

Every piece Emily publishes traces back to a real question from a real person in her audience. No static roadmap. No “cross your fingers” topic guessing. A single survey shapes MKT1’s entire publishing cycle—and her audience feels it.

"A lot of the time I'll put something out and someone will say: 'How did you know this was the exact thing I was facing right now?'” 

The answer is that she asked. For a one-person content operation, that’s the whole model. Typeform is what makes it repeatable.

Want more ideas on building a feedback-to-content loop as a small team?

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