Normally I would use Mailchimp for sending newsletters to a large list of subscribers, but we recently decided to include personalized content in those newsletters. Mailchimp allows you to add a maximum of 30 merge-tags to a subscriber profile, ideal for using as personalized content in a newsletter.
However 30 is a fairly low limit when you want to create personalized product offers in your newsletter. Putting html in those merge-tags is no option either since they are limited to 255 characters.
It became obvious that Mailchimp wasn't an option for this, but then there's Mandrill...
We know that Mandrill is specialized in transactional mails and allows you to customize each mail that you send from head to toe. No more merge-tags and no more template limitations.
But we are not actually sending transactional emails. It's still a newsletter, only with a large part personalized content in it. And it needs to be sent to a large number of subscribers.
Would Mandrill punish us for these activities? Would this be considered "bad practice"?
If not, why still bother with Mailchimp? Why not send everything with Mandrill?