Picture this. You’ve just decided to finally build a proper funnel for your online course. You’ve got the offer. You’ve got a growing email list, maybe 10,000 subscribers, some social traction, testimonials you’re proud of. And then someone tells you: “Run a webinar.” Someone else says: “Do a challenge.” A third person says: “You need a summit.” And now you’re more confused than you were before you started asking.

I’ve been building funnels for online education companies for over a decade. I was CMO at Mindvalley, where I helped grow the business from $25M to $75M in annual revenue. Since then, my team at Scale for Impact has built 114 webinars, run challenges that generated $200,000 in 7 days, taken Tony Robbins’ coaching certification ROAS from 100% to 388%, and produced summits with 500,000 attendees. Three of these funnels alone made my clients over $10 million in 2023. So when you ask which gets you the cheapest leads I have a real answer. Not a theory. A number.

But here’s the thing. “Cheapest leads” isn’t actually the right question. The right question is: which funnel matches who you are, what you’re selling, and where you are right now? Because the cheapest leads that never buy anything are the most expensive leads you’ll ever get. A $2 lead that never opens an email is worse than a $15 lead that buys a $5,000 program six months later.

What follows is a clear, honest comparison of all three formats the real mechanics, the real benchmarks, and a three-question framework to figure out which one you should actually be running.

Three Funnels, Three Very Different Promises

Let me start with functional definitions not the textbook kind.

A webinar is one person teaching for 60 to 90 minutes, with a sales pitch at the end. The promise to the registrant is: “Come learn something valuable, live, with me.” The conversion happens in the room, while the energy is still high. It’s a direct, efficient, high-intensity format.

A challenge is you guiding your audience through a specific transformation over 3 to 5 days. The promise is: “Do this with me, and you’ll get a real, tangible result by Friday.” The sale comes at the end of the week, almost as a natural next step rather than a pitch. It’s the closest thing to a free trial your course will ever have.

A summit is something different entirely. It’s essentially 20 webinars happening at the same time with speakers you invite in, organized around one specific topic. The promise is: “Come meet the best minds in the world on exactly your problem. Free. All in one place.”

That last offer is why summits win the cost-per-lead comparison almost every time. Think about it from the registrant’s perspective. They’re not signing up for one person teaching one thing. They’re getting access to 20, 30, sometimes 40 of the best voices in their field at no cost. That’s a near-unfair value proposition. And near-unfair value propositions get cheap clicks.

The Lead Cost Reality Check

When I talk about “cheapest leads,” I mean cost per email address. Not cost per sale. That distinction matters enormously, and we’ll come back to it.

Here’s the general pattern I’ve seen across the funnels I’ve run: summits produce the cheapest opt-ins. The offer is too good. When you can tell someone “you’re going to hear from 25 world-class experts on exactly your problem, this week, for free” people click. CPL on a well-structured summit regularly comes in significantly below challenges and well below webinars.

Webinars tend to have the highest CPL but also the fastest time-to-cash. The funnel is shorter: register, show up, buy. When it works, it works fast. You know within 72 hours whether your pitch landed.

Challenges sit in the middle. Lead cost is moderate. But the quality of the relationship built over 5 days doing homework together, showing up live, sharing wins in the community runs deeper than what you build in a single 90-minute webinar. The leads are warmer, even if they cost a bit more to acquire.

So the right frame isn’t just “which is cheapest per lead.” It’s “which is cheapest per dollar of revenue generated.” And on that metric, the picture depends entirely on your specific situation. For the actual CPL targets, opt-in rate benchmarks, and VIP conversion figures across all three formats, the numbers are laid out in Virtual Summit Benchmarks: Opt-In Rates, CPL, and VIP Conversion Targets.

The Webinar Funnel: Built for High-Energy Closers

I’ve built 114 webinars. I’ve seen the full range 2% conversion to 12%. Here’s what they all have in common: they require a presenter who can hold the room.

The webinar funnel works because it’s direct. You deliver real value for 30 to 35 minutes, you bridge to your offer, you sell. The four-part structure intro, content, transition, offer is designed to build trust fast and convert while the energy is still in the room. Every part has a job. The intro dismantles objections before the audience even raises them. The content delivers a paradigm shift. The transition earns permission to sell. The offer closes.

The metrics that tell you exactly where it’s breaking down: landing page conversion should be above 40% below that, the copy isn’t convincing people to show up. Show-up rate for a live webinar should be around 25%. Stay rate meaning people still watching when you pitch should be at least 70%. And conversion on the offer itself sits between 3% and 10%, depending on price point and how warm the audience is.

I ran this model with Robin Madanes Training, which delivers Tony Robbins’ coaching certification methodology. When Scale for Impact joined in 2022, the cost per booked call was $340. We rebuilt the ad angles from Tony’s existing footage library, restructured the nurture sequence, and shifted the key performance indicator from raw leads to booked calls. Cost per booked call dropped to $146. ROAS moved from 100% to 388%.

That’s the webinar funnel at its best. But here’s the honest part: webinars demand genuine energy from the presenter. If selling live makes you tense up, if the thought of pitching to 500 people in real time sounds like a nightmare your audience will feel that. And tension doesn’t convert. This is probably not your first funnel if you genuinely hate the camera.

The Challenge Funnel: Built for Relationship-Builders

The challenge funnel is my personal favorite for a specific type of creator: someone who doesn’t love selling, but loves teaching.

Here’s the dynamic. Over 5 days, you give your audience real results. Not theory actual outcomes they can feel. Each day builds on the last. The community forms in the Facebook group or on live calls. People post wins. They cheer each other on. And by day five, when you present your offer, it doesn’t feel like a pitch. It feels like the obvious next step.

The mechanism is different from a webinar. In a webinar, you’re persuading. In a challenge, you’re demonstrating. You’re letting people experience your methodology from the inside. The product sells itself because people have already tasted it.

We ran a 7-day challenge for Diletta Maravini’s My Life Design Academy in January 2021 one hour of live content per day, built around a seven-level wellbeing methodology. The brand spokesperson had been a monk. There was barely a pitch. Almost 30,000 people joined. Over 1,080 converted to paid membership immediately. Around $150,000 in revenue in the first week. 30,000 people meditating together twice the population of my entire hometown in Italy, all live, simultaneously. That’s the kind of impact that reminds you why you got into marketing in the first place.

The challenge also gives you something a webinar can’t: the VIP qualifier. Offer a $27 VIP upgrade immediately after registration before the challenge even starts and the people who say yes are telling you something important about themselves. We ran this for Alyssa Nobriga, and 45% of all $10,000 coaching certification sales came from the 10% who had taken the $27 VIP. The $27 isn’t about $27. It’s about finding your most committed buyers before you ever pitch them.

The Summit Funnel: Borrowed Authority at Scale

Now let’s talk about why summits get the cheapest leads and where most people completely blow it.

The offer is almost unfair. When you invite someone to “a free event with 25 of the world’s best experts on exactly the thing you’re struggling with right now” you’re not just offering one piece of value. You’re offering a compression of months of research. A shortcut. People will exchange their email address for a shortcut every time.

But here’s what most people get wrong. They build summits like events. They design an agenda page. They record 40 interviews. They launch. They get cheap signups. And then nothing. The email list sits there and nobody buys. A summit without a monetization architecture isn’t a funnel. It’s an expensive conference with a registration page.

A real summit funnel has three things working together: the lead generation engine (your list, speaker affiliates, and paid ads ideally split roughly equally), the VIP upgrade built around overwhelm, and the back-end offer your summit is designed to feed.

The overwhelm piece is key. When someone signs up and realizes they have a day job and can only watch 4 hours of a 30-speaker event they feel the gap between what they want to consume and what they actually can. That gap is where the VIP sells itself. Not manipulation. The upgrade genuinely solves a real constraint: time. Recordings, transcripts, notes on-demand, forever. The upgrade is the logical solution to a problem the free experience creates naturally.

I worked with Mark Walsh on a summit for Embodiment Unlimited that brought in 500,000 attendees. We ran a summit with Terry Real, a relational therapist whose clients include Bruce Springsteen and Hugh Jackman that one generated over 70,000 attendees and made Terry a New York Times bestseller. The summit format works at scale when the topic is sharp, the speakers have audiences, and the monetization is built into the architecture from day one.

For the complete build topic validation, speaker recruitment, traffic mix, VIP structure, back-end offer sequencing the full breakdown is in How to Run a Successful Virtual Summit Funnel: The Complete Playbook.

The Three-Question Framework: Which Funnel Is Right for You?

Here’s the decision framework I use with every new client. Three questions. Your honest answers tell you which funnel to build first.

Question 1: What’s your natural energy as a presenter?

Are you high-energy, genuinely comfortable selling live, energized by having 500 people in a room with you? Webinar.

Do you love teaching and prefer to let results speak for themselves but direct pitching makes you tighten up? Challenge.

Are you more of a connector someone who’s been in the space long enough to bring the best voices together, and whose credibility comes from who you know as much as what you know? Summit.

This isn’t about what you can do. It’s about where you’re naturally at your best. The funnel you run with genuine energy will always outperform the one you run with reluctance.

Question 2: How big is your existing audience right now?

Under 5,000 email subscribers? Challenges and webinars are your real options. Summits can still work, but you’ll need strong affiliate partners or a real ad budget to compensate for the missing owned traffic.

5,000 to 20,000? All three work. Summits start to become genuinely powerful because you have enough of a platform to attract speakers who see the collaboration as worthwhile.

20,000 and above? Summits can run on the full 1/3 model your own list, speaker audiences, and paid ads working together as a sustainable traffic engine.

Question 3: Do you have a proven back-end offer?

If yes any of the three can work. The funnel feeds the offer, and a proven offer means you know what you’re converting toward.

If not the challenge is safest. The challenge IS the experience of your methodology. People buy because they’ve already tasted the transformation. There’s less dependency on a polished offer you’re still figuring out.

Before you commit to building anything, run the actual math on what your results need to look like. The Summit Funnel ROI Calculator: Know Your Numbers Before You Build is built exactly for this so you’re not guessing what success looks like before you’ve spent a single dollar.

The Honest One-Line Summary

Webinar: Fastest to revenue, highest skill requirement, best when you can sell live with genuine conviction.

Challenge: Best relationship-builder, highest quality buyers, best when your product IS the transformation experience you’re offering for free.

Summit: Cheapest leads, most complex to build, best when you have connections, ad budget, and a proven back-end offer to monetize into.

None of these is the “best” funnel. The best funnel is the one that matches who you are right now, with the audience you have right now, selling the offer you have right now. I’ve watched the wrong funnel in the hands of the right creator outperform the “optimal” funnel in the hands of someone who hated running it. Energy matters. Conviction matters.

First you nail it, then you scale it. That principle applies here too. Pick the funnel you can run with full conviction. Nail it. Get the numbers working. Then expand.

Now you have the comparison. The only thing left is the decision.