Every Follow Up Boss Texting Bracket Tag Explained ([scheduled], [now], [delete] and More)

Quick answer: bracket tags are the one-word commands — [now], [scheduled], [1h], [9am], [delete] — that note-based Follow Up Boss texting tools read from Action Plan notes to decide when each text goes out. Texting Betty, Lead Engage, and Street Text each speak their own dialect of it, and the dialects are not interchangeable. SendMate reads all three, so switching tools doesn't mean rewriting your Action Plans.

How Bracket Tags Work

The note-based Follow Up Boss texting tools share one mechanic: your Action Plan drops a note onto the contact — your message plus a command in square brackets — and the texting tool watches for those notes and sends accordingly. The tag is the instruction; the rest of the note is the text your lead receives, in your words.

Two ground rules apply across Texting Betty, Lead Engage, and Street Text:

• One tag per note. A text now plus another at 9am tomorrow is two notes, each with its own tag.
• Each tool reads only its own vocabulary. The core tags overlap, but delay spellings, cancel tags, and business-hours behavior differ by tool — which matters the day you switch.

The Full Tag Glossary

Tag	What it does	Who reads it
[now]	Send immediately — Lead Engage holds it to business hours	Texting Betty, Lead Engage, Street Text
[scheduled]	Send within the business-hours window	Texting Betty, Lead Engage, Street Text
SMS (no brackets, all caps)	Send immediately, 24/7, bypassing business hours	Lead Engage
[1h], [5min]	Delay by hours or minutes	Texting Betty
[1hr], [15min]	Delay by hours or minutes	Lead Engage
[2h], [15m], [30s]	Delay by hours, minutes, or seconds	Street Text
[9am], [10:30am]	Send at a specific clock time	Texting Betty, Lead Engage, Street Text
[16:15]	Specific time, 24-hour format	Street Text
[delete]	Cancel the contact's pending texts	Texting Betty, Street Text
[remove], [cancel], [stop]	Cancel variants	Street Text
{curly braces}	Alternate syntax for the same commands	Street Text

[now] — Send Immediately (Mostly)

All three tools read [now] but disagree about what "now" means. Texting Betty and Street Text fire it the moment they pick up the note, regardless of business hours — both vendors' docs say to use it with caution. Lead Engage's [now] sends immediately only during business hours; outside them, it holds to the next business morning.

[scheduled] — Send Within Business Hours

The workhorse tag, and one all three tools share. A [scheduled] note tells the tool "send this during the normal texting window, not the moment the note drops" — so an Action Plan step that fires at 11pm waits for a reasonable hour. In Lead Engage, [scheduled] and [now] behave identically.

Lead Engage also reads one command the others don't: an unbracketed SMS, all caps, at the start of a note — an immediate, around-the-clock send that bypasses business hours, which Lead Engage's docs reserve for the first touch to a brand-new lead.

[1h], [1hr], [15m] — Relative Delays

All three tools accept delay tags — how Action Plan authors space out a day's touches without hardcoding clock times — but each dialect spells them differently — the clearest example of why the vocabularies don't transfer:

• Texting Betty: [1h] hours, [5min] minutes — its manual confirms there's no [1hr] form.
• Lead Engage: [1hr] hours, [15min] minutes.
• Street Text: single letters — [2h], [15m], even [30s] seconds — bounded at 1–12 hours, 1–60 minutes.

[9am], [10:30am], [16:15] — Specific Times

When timing is part of the message — "your appointment is this morning" — all three tools take clock-time tags, with or without minutes: [9am] and [10:30am] both work. Street Text additionally accepts 24-hour format, so [16:15] is a valid way to write 4:15pm.

[delete] — Cancel Pending Texts

The safety valve. A note tagged [delete] cancels the contact's pending texts — the standard move when a lead replies or books and the queued follow-up no longer applies. Texting Betty and Street Text both read it; Street Text goes further with eight accepted cancel variants, including [remove], [cancel], and [stop]. Lead Engage's published command reference lists no cancel tag at all.

{Curly Braces} — Street Text's Alternate Syntax

Street Text also accepts its commands in curly braces — {scheduled}, {2h}, {12:00} — documented so its commands don't collide with other integrations reading the same notes. Texting Betty's published tag manual doesn't mention curly braces, and Lead Engage's documentation only shows square brackets.

SendMate Reads All of the Above

SendMate doesn't invent a fourth dialect. On migration, SendMate reads the Texting Betty, Lead Engage, and Street Text vocabularies exactly as they sit in your Follow Up Boss Action Plan notes — [now] and [scheduled], every dialect's delay spellings, the specific-time tags, Street Text's cancel family, square brackets and curly braces alike. Older Lead Engage plans sometimes still contain a legacy [DND] note; SendMate honors it by marking the contact do-not-text. Your Action Plans, triggers, and templates stay exactly as they are; you review the messages, you set the schedule, and the texts send from your own Follow Up Boss number.

Worth knowing up front: your send window is always the outer boundary, for every tag. [now] notes jump to the front of the queue but still respect the window — first out the moment it opens. Absolute-time tags like [9am] fire within the window rather than at the exact minute, and a delay that would land after the window closes holds to the next window.

The full switching walkthrough — what changes and what doesn't — is in Do You Have to Rebuild Your Follow Up Boss Action Plans to Switch Texting Tools?, and each tool has a dedicated migration guide: Texting Betty, Lead Engage, and Street Text.

The Agent Legend Exception

Agent Legend is the one major Follow Up Boss texting tool this glossary can't cover — because there's nothing to look up. Agent Legend runs its own SMS pipeline and doesn't drop bracket-tagged notes into Follow Up Boss at all, so there's no tag vocabulary to migrate. Switching from Agent Legend to SendMate means rebuilding your sequences — and SendMate ships a ready-made Action Plan template library so that rebuild is fast. Details are in the Agent Legend migration guide.

Frequently Asked Questions

What do bracket tags like [scheduled] and [now] do in Follow Up Boss? They're one-word commands that note-based texting tools read from Follow Up Boss Action Plan notes, telling the tool when to send — [scheduled] waits for the business-hours window, [1h] delays an hour, [9am] targets a specific time, [now] sends immediately (within business hours on Lead Engage), and [delete] cancels pending texts in Texting Betty and Street Text. One tag per note.

Are Texting Betty, Lead Engage, and Street Text tags interchangeable? No. The dialects overlap but don't transfer cleanly — Texting Betty writes delays as [1h] and [5min], Lead Engage as [1hr] and [15min], Street Text as [2h], [15m], and [30s]; Street Text has a whole cancel-tag family; Lead Engage's command reference lists none. SendMate reads all three vocabularies, so your notes stay as they are.

Does SendMate support all of these bracket tags? Yes. SendMate reads all three vocabularies exactly as they sit in your Follow Up Boss Action Plan notes, in square brackets or curly braces. Your send window is always the outer boundary: [now] notes go out first when the window opens, [9am]-style tags fire within the window rather than at the exact minute, and delays that would land after closing hold to the next window.

Do curly-brace tags like {scheduled} work the same as [scheduled]? In Street Text, yes — its docs list {2h}, {scheduled}, and {12:00} as equivalents of the bracket forms. Texting Betty's published manual doesn't mention curly braces, and Lead Engage's documentation only shows square brackets. SendMate reads both syntaxes, so whichever style your notes use keeps working without edits.

Can SendMate read Agent Legend's tags? There are no tags to read. Agent Legend runs its own SMS pipeline and doesn't drop bracket-tagged notes into Follow Up Boss, so there's no note vocabulary to migrate. Switching from Agent Legend means rebuilding your sequences — SendMate ships a ready-made Action Plan template library to make that rebuild fast.

The Bottom Line

Bracket tags are the grammar of note-based Follow Up Boss texting, and each tool speaks its own dialect — delay spellings, cancel tags, and business-hours behavior all differ between tools. SendMate reads all three, so the vocabulary you've already written keeps working when you switch — from your own number, on the schedule you set. For the wider landscape, see the Follow Up Boss texting comparison or the overview of what to expect when switching.