Good things come in small packages, they say. And this week's product update may be small, but it packs a serious punch. With one significant improvement to Workflows that lots of you have been clamouring for, and one very big announcement regarding HubSpot Academy and Inbound Marketing Certification, this week's post proves the rule.

It's a short and sweet update this week, but well worth checking out. Folks who love segementing lists every which way have even more reasons to smile this week, and the settings for your HubSpot Reports and Analytics are now totally going steady. Aw. Isn't that sweet.

Al Biedrzycki is an Inbound Marketing Consultant on the VAR team at HubSpot. He works with HubSpot's partner agencies to help them achieve success through their Inbound Marketing efforts. He enjoys teaching his clients the best practices of Inbound Marketing and is thrilled when they succeed.

Blog idea droughts are the worst.

Any marketer who creates content has almost certainly experienced one. Sometimes, inspiration comes naturally and the blog content practically writes itself—other times, an idea drought rears its ugly head. This is bad news because blogging for the sake of blogging doesn’t always inspire useful content. A lack of useful content is problematic also because the reason for creating it is the foundation for any marketer’s blogging strategy. If the foundation collapses, you’ll be hard pressed to see results. So how do you survive an idea drought?

George Thomas, the General Manager at Wild Boy Design, shares with us a tale of the business rut that he got into last year, and how INBOUND 2012 helped him climb back out. 

Andrew Capland is a Principal Inbound Marketing Consultant at HubSpot. He works with small to medium-sized businesses to help them achieve success through inbound marketing. This includes assisting them with campaign execution, as well as helping them restructure their marketing and sales teams to become more efficient with inbound techniques.

Calls-to-action (CTAs) are a vital piece of your inbound marketing strategy and you should be using them in all aspects of your marketing campaigns, including social media, email, blog posts, and website pages. Whether they take the form of anchor text links, images, or buttons, CTAs are what motivate and direct your visitors to take a desired action. They bridge the gap between anonymous website visitors and marketable leads. Are you making the most of them?

In order to deliver the best possible product experience to our customers, the HubSpot application needs to make the most of new capabilities that are only available in the latest versions of commonly used web browsers. Some new technologies, like HTML5 and CSS3, are only available with modern browser like Firefox and Chrome. For this reason, just like Google and others before us, we’re going to be limiting our web browser support to modern browsers like Firefox, Chrome, Safari, and Internet Explorer 9 and 10.

You probably know that HubSpot's Contacts database is flexible and feature-rich. But just how much do you know about Contacts? Let's take a look at some little known features of Contacts that can save you time and help you market more effectively than ever.

When it comes to email, small changes can make a big difference. Now enterprise-level customers will be able to test those changes through a new A/B Testing tool in HubSpot Email. The feature, which was a big request in customer forums, enables you to create two variations of an email to test with a small subset of your recipient list before sending the better-performing version to the remaining list.