Parenting advice portal and social community BabyCenter.com is offering to send users text message alerts with some of the most important advice of all: when their most fertile conception days are about to arrive.
The mobile alert service—called “Booty Caller” of course—is being sponsored initially on the Web site by First Response, the brand from Church and Dwight Co. that manufactures several lines of pregnancy and ovulation tests.
Users sign up for the service by entering their mobile phone number, opting in and providing some basic data on their personal menstrual cycles. Booty Caller then sends out three messages per cycle that let women know when they’re most likely to conceive and when that chance is about to disappear for another month. The service lasts for six months, but users can renew.
The messages also link to useful fertility content back at the BabyCenter mobile Web site. For example, the first monthly message reads, “Your fertile window starts in 1 week. Find out if your chances of getting pregnant are better in the morning.”
If the reader gets pregnant by the time the last of the three messages arrives, the text even specifies the date nine months from then when she will be most likely to give birth.
Simultaneous with the Booty Caller launch, BabyCenter also debuted Mama Cita, a Spanish-language mobile service for ovulation alerts.
“Booty Caller is the new and modern way for busy women everywhere to keep up with their fertility timing and options,”BabyCenter.com editor-in-chief Linda Murray said in a statement. “Mobile phones have become vital to busy moms everywhere.”
“First Response is committed to increasing a woman’s chances of getting pregnant by helping her remain as informed as possible as early as possible,” said first Response marketing vice president Stacey Feldman.
“When we heard about Booty Caller, we knew it was something we had to become involved in because of its ability to help our customers take some of the guesswork out of getting pregnant.”
According to statistics from Mediamark Research cited by BabyCenter, 19.3 million mothers now use text messaging, up 75% from the number doing so in 2007. Research firm @plan has found that 1.9 million moms subscribed to or received mobile alerts within the past month; @plan also found that moms who are registered BabyCenter users are almost 50% more likely to send or receive text messages than the online average.
BabyCenter.com already offers a popular e-mail and mobile advisory service, “your pregnancy, Week by Week,” that lets parents-to-be and their family members opt in to learn more about the weekly development of their new child before and just after the birth date.
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