Define your brand once, use it everywhere
7 value types · Global + personal scope · Auto-resolving dates · From $149/year flat
WordPress CRM Custom Values That Fill Themselves In
A system-wide placeholder library — company name, support email, logo URL, signatures, auto-resolving dates — defined once and dropped into emails, SMS, and workflows with {{custom_values.key}} syntax. Personal values override global per team member. Seven value types. Folder organization. JSON import and export. From $149 a year flat.
- 7 value types
- Global + personal scope
- Auto-resolving values
- Folder organization
- JSON import/export
- WordPress-native
{{cv.company_name}}{{cv.email_signature}}{{cv.current_year}}Hi {{contact.first_name}}, thanks for choosing
{{custom_values.company_name}} → AFCRM
Every Email Template Hardcodes Your Company Details Differently
Hardcoded values are the dirty secret of every WordPress site running campaigns. Your welcome email has your support email typed in directly. Your purchase confirmation has your company name typed in. Your password reset has your website URL. Your team's signature blocks each have their own version. Your transactional emails bury the copyright year somewhere in the footer.
Then something changes. You move to a new support email. You rebrand. You hire a new team member. The copyright year ticks over to January. Now you have 47 places to update by hand. Some get updated. Some don't. Some get updated wrong. A customer receives an email referencing your old company name. A receipt shows last year's copyright.
The "merge tag" features in most CRMs help with contact data — {{first_name}}, {{email}} — but they don't solve the global brand-data problem. You still hardcode your company name in every template. Your team still copy-pastes signatures. The dynamic year still needs manual updates every January.
Auto Form CRM solves this with a system-wide placeholder library.
Define your company name once as {{custom_values.company_name}}. Drop it into every template, campaign, workflow, and SMS. Update it in one place and every reference updates instantly. Personal scope gives each team member their own signature automatically. Dynamic values keep your copyright year, current date, and site URL updating themselves forever. From $149 a year flat.
Four Things Most CRMs Don't Ship for Brand Placeholders
A real management UI, not hardcoded variables
Most CRMs let you reference a company-name variable — but where the value comes from is hardcoded into system settings, not editable as a real library. Auto Form CRM ships a dedicated Custom Values page with full CRUD, folder organization, search, type badges, scope icons, live previews on every card, and copy-to-clipboard placeholder buttons.
Seven value types covering every real use case
Text for company names. HTML for branded signatures and banners. Number for prices and thresholds. URL for links with validation. Image for logos. Encrypted for secure storage. Dynamic for auto-resolving dates and site metadata. Each type has its own rendering — HTML emails get full markup, plain-text channels degrade gracefully.
Global and personal scope with automatic override
Define global values for company-wide defaults. Define personal values for individual team members. When a team member sends a campaign or workflow, their personal values automatically override the global default. One placeholder, eight team members, eight different rendered values — automatically.
Auto-resolving dynamic values
Eight built-in dynamic values resolve automatically at send time — current_year, current_date, current_month, current_time, current_datetime, site_name, site_url, admin_email. Drop the current year into your footer once. Every January it updates itself. No more "© 2024" emails sent in 2025.
Two Different Tools for Two Different Jobs
Custom Values and Custom Fields sound similar but solve different problems. Buyers regularly conflate them — the distinction is worth knowing before you build either one.
Custom Fields hold per-contact data
Custom Fields are extra columns on the contact record. Every contact has their own value. "License Tier" on John Smith might be "Enterprise" while on Sarah Lee it's "Professional." Use them for data that varies per contact — contract dates, account managers, referral sources, statuses.
Reference them with {{first_name}} style merge tags pulled from the contact record. The value changes per recipient.
Custom Values hold site-wide placeholders
Custom Values are placeholders defined once at the site or user level. Every recipient gets the same value (or the same value for that team member's sends). "Company Name" resolves to "AFCRM" for every email regardless of who's reading it.
Reference them with {{custom_values.key}} syntax. The value comes from your library, not from the contact record.
Use both together
"Hi {{contact.first_name}}, thanks for reaching out to {{custom_values.company_name}} support. We'll respond within {{custom_values.support_response_time}}."
The first name comes from the CRM record. The company name and response time come from your Custom Values library. Use Custom Fields when data is per-contact; use Custom Values when it's per-site or per-team-member.
Every Type of Placeholder Your Real Templates Actually Need
Most personalization features support text only. Custom Values supports seven distinct types, each with its own input UI, validation, and rendering behavior in sent messages.
Text
Company name, support address, mailing address, titles, product names. Plain text, escaped for safety. The foundation of brand-data placeholders.
HTML
Branded signatures, promotional banners, formatted disclaimers. Renders as full markup in HTML email; strips to readable text in SMS and plain-text channels.
Number
Prices, thresholds, response-time SLAs, contract minimums, free-shipping thresholds, discount amounts. Numeric input with validation.
URL
Website URL, support portal, knowledge base, social profiles. URL format validation on input prevents malformed links in your templates.
Image
Logos and brand graphics via Media Library or URL. Renders as a proper img tag in HTML email; resolves to the raw URL in plain-text channels.
Encrypted
Secure AES-256-CBC + HMAC storage for sensitive system values. Masked in the UI. Deliberately never rendered into outbound messages — secrets stay in your CRM.
Dynamic
Eight built-in keys that auto-resolve at send time — current_year, current_date, current_month, current_time, current_datetime, site_name, site_url, admin_email.
© 2024 → 2026, automatically
Drop a Dynamic value into a footer once and it resolves to current values every send. No stored value to update. No manual maintenance every January.
One Placeholder, Eight Team Members, Eight Different Rendered Values
The scope model is layered — global defaults for company-wide values, personal overrides per team member, automatic resolution at send time based on who owns the send.
Global scope — company-wide defaults
Global Custom Values are visible to every CRM user and apply to every message without a personal override. Company name, support email, master logo, default signature, standard disclaimer. Global values require WordPress administrator permission to create or edit — they're company-level data only site admins should change.
Personal scope — per-team-member overrides
Personal Custom Values belong to a specific user, visible only to them, and override matching global values for any message they send. Each team member defines their own signature, direct phone, bio, scheduling link, and social profiles. The global default stays as a fallback for owner-less sends like cron jobs and system messages.
Automatic override at send time
When a message goes out, the system determines who owns the send. Campaign sends use the campaign creator's personal values. Workflow sends use the workflow user's. Test sends use the current user's. Personal values fill in where they exist; global defaults fill in everywhere else.
{{custom_values.email_signature}}Who owns the send
Ali
Founder
Sarah
Customer Success
System
Transactional
Resolved signature
Best regards, Ali Ghasemirad — Founder, AFCRM
Drop the Syntax Anywhere. It Resolves at Send Time.
A placeholder is only useful if it works everywhere you write content. Auto Form CRM resolves {{custom_values.key}} across every outbound channel.
Email Templates
Drop placeholders into Text blocks, Subject Line, Preview Text, From Name, or any content field. Every campaign using the template inherits the syntax and resolves it at send time.
Email Campaigns
Override placeholders at the campaign level. Subject line, from name, and other campaign fields all accept {{custom_values.key}}. Resolution happens at the moment of send.
Workflow Send Email
Send Email and Send Campaign Email actions resolve placeholders the same way. The workflow’s owning user determines which personal values take precedence.
Workflow SMS actions
SMS through Twilio resolves Text, Dynamic, URL, and Number values. HTML values strip to plain text; Image values resolve to the raw URL.
Workflow text fields
Notification text, task descriptions, and other text-bearing workflow fields all support {{custom_values.key}} for personalization.
Transactional emails
Order confirmations, account notifications, password resets — anywhere the CRM sends automated mail. These resolve from the global library since they rarely have a user owner.
Fallback syntax for safety
Every reference can include an inline fallback with the {{custom_values.key|fallback:"Default Value"}} syntax. Use double quotes around the fallback. Missing values never cause an error — they fall back to the defined default or to empty, and the message ships normally.
Performance at scale
At send time, each user's Custom Values are fetched once per request and cached in memory. Sending a campaign to 10,000 recipients doesn't re-query the database for every recipient. The placeholder system stays fast even on high-volume sends.
Folders, Search, Import, Export
A handful of Custom Values are easy. Twenty or fifty need real organization. Auto Form CRM ships the management features that scale with your library.
Folder organization
Group related values — Company Information, Brand Assets, Team Signatures, Dynamic Values. Folders show counts on the page header for quick scanning.
Inline folder creation
When creating or editing a value, the Folder dropdown includes a "+ New" option. Define folders as you build your library — no separate management step.
Folder filter and search
A folder filter dropdown with an "All Folders" view, plus a search box that filters across keys, labels, and descriptions for fast lookup in large libraries.
Live preview on every card
Current Year shows "2026." URLs show the URL. Images show a thumbnail. Encrypted values show the masked ********* indicator. See the actual rendered value at a glance.
Copy-to-clipboard buttons
Every card has a one-click copy button for the placeholder code. Click and the full {{custom_values.your_key}} syntax is on your clipboard, ready to paste anywhere.
JSON export
Export your full library as a dated JSON file for backup, migration, or sharing across team installations. Encrypted values export with their values stripped for security.
JSON import
Import by pasting JSON into the import modal, with an optional "Overwrite existing" toggle. Import returns counts of imported, updated, and skipped values.
Six default seeds on install
Fresh installs seed six globals — company_name, company_email, company_website, current_year, current_date, current_month — so you have a working library from day one.
I Built This Because Hardcoded Company Names Are a Maintenance Nightmare
For years, every email template I built had my company name typed in directly. Every campaign had my support email hardcoded. Every footer had the copyright year — written out in actual digits. Every team member's signature was a separate template variant copy-pasted from one to the next.
Then I rebranded. The new company name needed to go into 47 templates. Some got updated immediately. Some I forgot about, and customers received emails referencing the old brand for weeks. When I moved my support email from Gmail to a Zendesk-routed address, the same thing happened — some templates got updated, some didn't, and tickets landed in the wrong inbox for a month.
Every January was a smaller version of the same disaster. The copyright year needed updating across every transactional template. I'd update most in the first week. Six months later I'd find a forgotten footer still showing the previous year. Brand-conscious customers noticed.
The merge tag features in every CRM I tried only solved part of the problem. {{first_name}} for contact data — fine. But {{company_name}} either didn't exist or was hardcoded to the WordPress site settings. {{support_email}} the same. {{current_year}} usually didn't exist at all, leaving me to hardcode it or update every January by hand.
So I built Custom Values the way they should have worked from the start. A real management UI with folders, search, type badges, copy buttons, live previews. Seven value types covering text, HTML, numbers, URLs, images, encrypted storage, and auto-resolving dynamic values. Global scope for company-wide defaults plus personal scope for per-team-member overrides — when Sarah sends a campaign, her signature appears; when I send one, mine does. Eight dynamic keys including current_year so my copyright lines update themselves forever. JSON import and export for moving brand libraries between sites. All resolving automatically at send time across email templates, campaigns, workflows, and SMS.
The math is the punchline. Most enterprise tools with this level of placeholder management — Snippets in HubSpot, Variables in Klaviyo, similar in ActiveCampaign — sit behind their Professional or Marketing Hub tiers. Auto Form CRM gives you the same depth at $149 a year flat, on your own WordPress server.
Ali
Founder of Auto Form CRM
How Auto Form CRM's WordPress Custom Values Stack Up
| Auto Form CRM | HubSpot Snippets | Klaviyo Variables | ActiveCampaign | FluentCRM | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Pricing | $149 / year flat | Starter+ tier | Per contact tier | Per contact tier | Per contact tier |
| Dedicated management UI | Limited | ||||
| Number of value types | 7 | Limited | Limited | Limited | Limited |
| Global + personal scope | Limited | Limited | Limited | Limited | |
| Auto-resolving dynamic values | 8 built-in | Limited | Limited | Limited | |
| Folder organization | Limited | Limited | Limited | ||
| JSON import/export | Limited | Limited | Limited | Limited | |
| Image value type | Limited | Limited | Limited | Limited | |
| Resolves in email + SMS + workflows | All channels | Email-focused | Email-focused | All channels | Email-focused |
| Your data, your server |
Auto Form CRM vs HubSpot Snippets
HubSpot’s Snippets feature is the closest comparable in the SaaS CRM space — short reusable text blocks for messages and notes, available from Starter upward with the most useful expansions at Professional ($890/mo for Marketing Hub). Auto Form CRM gives you comparable functionality plus seven distinct value types, global and personal scope with automatic override, and auto-resolving dynamic values — at $149 a year flat.
Auto Form CRM vs Klaviyo Variables
Klaviyo’s variables system supports profile properties and event data extensively. The catch is per-contact pricing — at 10,000 contacts you’re paying about $150/mo for the email tool that includes variables. Auto Form CRM gives you a similar variable system at $149 a year flat regardless of list size.
Auto Form CRM vs ActiveCampaign and FluentCRM
Both have personalization tags, but scope and management depth vary. The differentiation is the seven value types (including Image and Encrypted), the global/personal scope override architecture, the eight built-in dynamic keys, the folder organization, and JSON import/export — all on the same plugin at flat per-site pricing.
Auto Form CRM The bottom line
Enterprise-grade placeholder management at WordPress-plugin pricing. Define once, use everywhere, override per team member — without per-contact billing and without your brand library living in someone else’s cloud.
$149 a year flat. Define your brand once and update it everywhere from one place.
Seven value types, global and personal scope with automatic override, eight auto-resolving dynamic values, folder organization, JSON import/export, copy-to-clipboard placeholders, and live previews — all included, all on your own server, no per-contact scaling.
Built for Teams Tired of Hardcoded Brand Data
E-commerce stores running large template libraries
You have 30+ templates across welcome, transactional, promotional, and lifecycle. Hardcoding the company name and support email into each is a maintenance nightmare. Custom Values give you single-source-of-truth placeholders that update everywhere at once.
WordPress agencies managing brand templates
The brand kit — company name, support email, master logo, default signature, copyright text — defined once in Custom Values, used across every template. When the brand updates, every reference updates with it.
Teams with multiple senders
Your success, sales, and support teams each have their own signatures, phone numbers, and bios. Personal-scope Custom Values let every team member’s outbound messages carry their own values automatically — no template variants required.
SaaS founders running transactional emails
Order confirmations, account creations, password resets, billing notifications — all referencing your company name, support email, and product name. Custom Values centralize the brand data so the next rename doesn’t mean editing 20 templates by hand.
Service businesses sending branded client communications
Lawyers, accountants, consultants. Client communications need consistent branding — company name, mailing address, partner names, services offered. Custom Values handle the consistency automatically.
WordPress site owners doing template work themselves
You build your own templates and you’re tired of hardcoding the company name into every one. You want a real placeholder system that updates itself. Custom Values is the feature you wished every CRM had.
The Questions Buyers Actually Ask About WordPress CRM Custom Values
Custom Values Plug Into Every Outbound Channel
Custom Values are a foundation feature. Every outbound communication module in Auto Form CRM uses them.
Email Templates
Drop {{custom_values.key}} into Subject Line, Preview Text, From Name, Reply-To, Header, Footer, and any Text block content.
Email Campaigns
Campaigns inherit Custom Values from the template and resolve them at send time based on the campaign creator.
Workflow Automation
Send Email, Send Campaign Email, and SMS actions all resolve Custom Values. Notification text and task descriptions support the syntax too.
Custom Fields
Custom Fields hold per-contact data; Custom Values hold site- or team-wide placeholders. Use both together for complete personalization.
Contact Management
Mix Custom Values with contact merge tags ({{first_name}}, {{email}}) in the same template for full brand-plus-contact personalization.
Meeting Scheduling
Confirmation emails and reminders inherit Custom Values for consistent branding across your team’s meeting booking flow.
Live Chat
Canned reply text supports merge tag syntax for visitor name and email, and Custom Values for company name and support details.
Integrations
REST API access lets external integrations read and update the Custom Values library programmatically.
Dashboard
The Custom Values count appears in the system overview alongside your other CRM data totals.
Stop Hardcoding Your Company Name Into Every Template
One WordPress plugin price. Seven value types — Text, HTML, Number, URL, Image, Encrypted, Dynamic. Global and personal scope with automatic override. Eight auto-resolving dynamic values including current year, date, month, and site metadata. Folder organization. JSON import and export. Copy-to-clipboard placeholders. Live previews. Search and filter. Six seeded defaults on fresh install. Resolution across email templates, campaigns, workflows, and SMS. All included.
Install in minutes. Cancel anytime — though your Custom Values, your folder structure, and your placeholder library all stay in your WordPress database where they always did.
Read the DocsBuilt by Amora Digital (KVK 99536811) in the Netherlands. Made for WordPress. Designed by an operator who got tired of hand-updating the copyright year across 30 email templates every January.