Merge tags are getting unified with custom fields this week. Testing will be complete early next week before the release to everyone this month. At that point, all you have to do is set the visibility as external and the custom field can be injected into any email. Before and after then, you can also click the "see available merge tags" button to the left of "download default templates" from this screen:
 

Hi @chrishaleua - I had a talk with our CSM this week as we developed a custom welcome email but I couldn’t use the merge tags available within the Project Overview to include things like the PM’s name. He told me there’s something on the roadmap that I should add my use case to but this is the only place I can find something similar. I hope it’s useful to include here.

In my case, if the merge tags that are available in creating something like the Project Overview content block are also available in the custom email, I can accomplish a lot more like personally introducing the project manager and maybe including a photo/bio block specific to the project manager in our highly formatted welcome email. We’ve changed the formatting to such an extent that I can’t use the project overview block in the email - well, I could do it in a hacky way but it would make the block not useful on the project overview page within the GUIDEcx UI.

We were able to sort this out for Larry so I am optimistic we could do this for @cmelancon as well. We definitely want you to be able to use both standard merge tags and custom merge tags in your custom email templates.

We are in the final stages of quality testing a unification of custom fields and merge tags. Once that is done in the next few days, you will easily be able to inject dynamic values like the project manager’s name (and any other custom field value).

I am a huge fan of custom email templates so I would love to do a quick call sometime to make sure you get unstuck. Please have your CSM book some time with us to take the next steps in late October.